Woodrow Wilson addresses Congress asking for entry into World War I, April 2, 1917

Congress Photo Library

The idea of ​​America making the world safe for democracy is now a little over a hundred years old. Yesterday as today, Russia is at the heart of the controversy.

The United States joined the Great War in April 1917, after a long struggle led by President Woodrow Wilson to keep the nation “neutral in thought and deed”. In fact, Wilson ran and was re-elected in 1916 with the slogan “He kept us out of the war!” But a few months later, when Germany declared the resumption of its brutal and unrestricted submarine warfare, the pressure for America to take sides became insurmountable.

Yet there was an event, misunderstood, that finally allowed the idealistic president to call Congress into extraordinary session to demand a declaration of war against Germany, and that event took place in Russia. On March 15, 1917, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated in the face of military defections and army mutinies, political unrest, bread riots and labor strikes mainly in the Russian capital of Petrograd (now Saint Petersburg), caused by deprivation and loss. of a war that Russia helped start in August 1914.

President Wilson’s low-key Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, had pressured Wilson for months to respond to Germany’s sea war by backing the Allies, which included Britain, France and the United States. Russia. And that was the problem – Wilson’s lofty idea of ​​waging war for more than trade disputes or territorial gains constantly ran into a conundrum. How could the Americans turn the war into a war to make the world safe for democracy when one of the Allies understood autocratic Russia?

For more than three hundred years, the Romanov tsars ruled Russia, greatly expanding the empire. But as with any hereditary roll of the dice, the family had become increasingly weakened and corrupt. After the early successes of the war, the Russian war machine faltered and the country’s backward economy began to crumble. During the truly merciless winter of 1916-17, the Russian people wanted bread and peace — and revolution.

Secretary of State Lansing saw his openness to convince a hesitant Wilson that the sudden demise of the Russian leader and his replacement by a provisional government that resembled a democracy, led by a nobleman and social reformer, Prince Georgy Lvoff, as as Prime Minister, was the opening for the United States to enter the war. Lansing spoke on March 20, 1917, five days after the Tsar’s resignation.

Wilson invited ten men to join him at the White House at 2:30 p.m. on Tuesday. Later that day, Lansing wrote a lengthy memorandum setting out his recollections of a Cabinet meeting which he called “the most important and, therefore, the most historic of those held since I became Secretary of the Cabinet.” ‘State”. A few days earlier, German submarines had sunk three American merchant ships without warning, drowning at least 15. The president asked everyone to express their opinion on the question of the war.

Wilson was cool and detached despite the huge stakes at stake. “Coolness is a marked characteristic of the president,” Lansing observed. “Nothing disturbs the calmness of his manner or his address. It has a sobering effect on all who sit with him in council. The excitement would seem quite out of place at the Cabinet table under the presidency of Woodrow Wilson.

When it came time for Lansing to speak, he focused on events in Russia. “I said that the revolution in Russia, which appeared to be successful, had removed the only objection to asserting that the European war was a war between democracy and absolutism,” Lansing wrote. Lansing believed that “the only hope for a permanent peace among all nations depended on the establishment of democratic institutions throughout the world” and that “no peace league would be of any value if a powerful autocracy was among them. member, and that no peace league would be necessary if all nations were democratic.

Equally important, Lansing believed that recognition of Russian democracy could “encourage the democratic movement in Germany”, eventually leading to the overthrow of the German Kaiser.

The president was evasive, leaving everyone unsure of what he would do if he called a special session of Congress.

But Lansing’s campaign to wage war on democracy has remained with the president. Two days later, the United States became the first nation to recognize the provisional government in Russia.

And when Wilson addressed Congress on April 2, he wholeheartedly supported the idea that war was necessary to protect democracy. “The world must be made safe for democracy,” he said. Events in Russia supported his decision to take a stand. “Does not every American feel,” he asked, “that assurance has been added to our hope for the future peace of the world by the wonderful and encouraging things that have happened these last weeks in Russia?” He argued that the true Russian character had always been “in fact democratic at heart”. The autocracy “which crowned the apex of its political structure”, he argued, was not “in fact Russian in origin, character or purpose”.

In the same way, he told the German people that the United States had nothing against him; it was their leadership that had poisoned the people and brought about the destructive war that was ruining Germany and indeed all of Europe. “It was not on their impulse that their government acted in entering this war,” Wilson said of the German people. “It was a war decided as wars were decided in ancient and unhappy times when peoples were nowhere consulted by their rulers and wars were provoked and fought in the interests of dynasties or small groups of ambitious accustomed to using their fellows as pawns and tools.

In the chaos of war, Russian democracy quickly failed. By the fall of 1917, the Bolsheviks had seized power, returning Russia to an authoritarian form of government.

Woodrow Wilson’s reputation has recently come under harsh and justified criticism for his deplorable ideas about race. He separated the federal government after reforms were instituted by his predecessors. He organized a special screening of the despicable and racist film “Birth of a Nation” at the White House. He was an unreconstructed Southern fanatic.

But his ideas on foreign policy remain as vital as ever. Democracies are inherently more stable than autocracies or totalitarian regimes. It is essential, as we have seen with NATO, that the world’s democracies unite to fight authoritarian regimes that threaten and wage war without the informed consent of their citizens.

Obviously there is fair criticism to be made of the American wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, but the anarchy of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the crimes against humanity and the threat of nuclear war demonstrate a century after Woodrow Wilson was Commander-in-Chief that his views on democracy, self-determination and consent of the governed represent the only lasting solutions for governments that will ultimately guarantee a peaceful world.