H ISTORY A N D C U LT U R E HI STO RY AND CULTURE
Badlands Violence in Eastern Europe again mocks the highflown, unworkable dream of the Versailles Treaty: firm borders in a lasting “world order,” and a world forever at peace.
By Bruce S. Thornton
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n 1919, the Versailles Treaty established in international law and global institutions two ideals that have framed Western foreign policy ever since. The first is the elevation of national self-determination and democratic government as the default goods for all the world’s
peoples. The other is the notion that supranational institutions, international laws, and multinational treaties and covenants are the best means for peacefully settling international disputes and conflicts. Russia’s violent, unprovoked invasion of Ukraine is merely the latest example of a century’s worth of repudiation of these ideals that still shape modern foreign policy—a challenge that, if we’re lucky, may lead to a longneeded revision of this ideal of a “rules-based international order” and its dubious foundational assumptions. President Woodrow Wilson articulated these ideals in his Fourteen Points and speeches during World War I. In 1918, he told Congress, “National aspirations must be accepted; peoples may now be dominated only by their own consent.” This principle perforce was opposed to colonial empires, as Wilson made clear in the Fourteen Points: “The day of conquest and aggrandizement
Bruce S. Thornton is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, a member of Hoover’s Working Group on the Role of Military History in Contemporary Conflict, and a professor of classics and humanities at California State University, Fresno. H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2022
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