Wilson's War: How Woodrow Wilson's Great Blunder Led to Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and World War II [Hardcover]

Jim Powell (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1400082366 | ISBN-13: 978-1400082360 | Publication Date: March 29, 2005 | Edition: 1st

The fateful blunder that radically altered the course of the twentieth century—and led to some of the most murderous dictators in history

President Woodrow Wilson famously rallied the United States to enter World War I by saying the nation had a duty to make “the world safe for democracy.” But as historian Jim Powell demonstrates in this shocking reappraisal, Wilson actually made a horrible blunder by committing the United States to fight. Far from making the world safe for democracy, America’s entry into the war opened the door to murderous tyrants and Communist rulers. No other president has had a hand—however unintentional—in so much destruction. That’s why, Powell declares, “Wilson surely ranks as the worst president in American history.”

Wilson’s War reveals the horrifying consequences of our twenty-eighth president’s fateful decision to enter the fray in Europe. It led to millions of additional casualties in a war that had ground to a stalemate. And even more disturbing were the long-term consequences—consequences that played out well after Wilson’s death. Powell convincingly demonstrates that America’s armed forces enabled the Allies to win a decisive victory they would not otherwise have won—thus enabling them to impose the draconian surrender terms on Germany that paved the way for Adolf Hitler’s rise to power.

Powell also shows how Wilson’s naiveté and poor strategy allowed the Bolsheviks to seize power in Russia. Given a boost by Woodrow Wilson, Lenin embarked on a reign of terror that continued under Joseph Stalin. The result of Wilson’s blunder was seventy years of Soviet Communism, during which time the Communist government murdered some sixty million people.

Just as Powell’s FDR’s Folly exploded the myths about Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, Wilson’s War destroys the conventional image of Woodrow Wilson as a great “progressive” who showed how the United States can do good by intervening in the affairs of other nations. Jim Powell delivers a stunning reminder that we should focus less on a president’s high-minded ideals and good intentions than on the consequences of his actions.

A selection of the Conservative Book Club and American Compass

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The Holocaust, the gulags, the Cold War and a death toll exceeding 61,911,000 can all be laid at Wilson's doorstep, contends this sophomoric work in isolationist historiography. Powell, a Cato Institute fellow and author of FDR's Folly, argues that Wilson's intervention in WWI enabled the Allies to defeat Germany and impose a punitive peace settlement that made Germans bitter and antidemocratic, facilitated Hitler's rise, etc. Extending—indeed, almost parodying—Niall Ferguson's contrarian arguments from The Pity of War, he insists that a victorious German Empire would have subsided under its own weight, with Hitler and Stalin remaining unknown malcontents. Powell rehashes his arguments at inordinate length to associate Wilson's policies with subsequent Nazi and Soviet atrocities. When not flaying Wilson, Powell rides Cato's hobbyhorse of libertarian doctrine, sprinkling his chronicle of totalitarian horrors with prim sermons on free trade and laissez-faire economics; the Bolsheviks are thus scolded for their opposition to "consumers freely voting with their money, deciding which quantities, qualities, brands, styles, colors, prices, and so on that they preferred." Powell scores some points criticizing the flimsiness of Wilson's pretexts for intervention. But in using the unforeseen consequences of Wilson's actions as a brief for isolationism, he ends up blaming the 20th-century time line on one man. The result is a tendentious and heavy-handed distortion of history. (Apr.)
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Review

“That government intervention can have unintended consequences is nowhere more true than in foreign policy. Wilson’s War brings the lesson home in a way Americans today can ill afford to ignore. Read this absorbing and critically important book.” —Thomas E. Woods Jr., author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History

“Jim Powell makes a persuasive case against Woodrow Wilson. But I disagree with Jim. During the latter part of his second term Wilson was nearly comatose, thereby making him the perfect progressive interventionist politician, in my opinion.” —P. J. O’Rourke, author of Peace Kills and Parliament of Whores

“Wilson’s War makes a compelling case that Woodrow Wilson was America’s worst president and an unmitigated disaster for the world. In a learned exposition of the Law of Unintended Consequences, Jim Powell shows how U.S. intervention into World War I strengthened the hand of Soviet Communism and led directly to the rise of Hitler and World War II. Wilson’s War exposes how America’s court historians have misled the public for generations.” —Thomas J. DiLorenzo, author of The Real Lincoln and How Capitalism Saved America

“Wilson’s War is a highly controversial interpretation of twentieth-century political history, which asserts that its worst evils—Communism and Nazism—were unintended consequences of President Wilson’s decision to enter World War I on the Allied side.” —Richard Pipes, Baird Professor of History, Emeritus, Harvard University

Praise for FDR's Folly and The Triumph of Liberty

“Thoroughly documented, relying on an impressive variety of popular and academic literature, both contemporary and historical.” —Milton Friedman, Nobel Laureate

“I found Jim Powell’s book fascinating. I think he has written an important story, one that definitely needs telling.” —Thomas Fleming, author of The New Dealers’ War and Liberty!

“Jim Powell is a man of great energy, determination, obstinacy, and courage, and all these qualities have gone into his work.” —Paul Johnson, author of A History of the American People and Modern Times

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Crown Forum; 1st edition (March 29, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400082366
• ISBN-13: 978-1400082360
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #666,257 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

47 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The Road to Hell is Paved . . . ., August 4, 2005

By 

Bruce L. Bromberg - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Wilson's War: How Woodrow Wilson's Great Blunder Led to Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and World War II (Hardcover)

Mr. Powell's essential point is that Wilson's intervention in World War I, intended to lead to a stable and peaceful world, had in fact the opposite effect. It enabled France and Britain to achieve a decisive military victory over Germany and
Austria; then, at Versailles, the idealism that had led Wilson to intervene, coupled with his naivete, allowed his allies to impose upon Germany an humiliating and punitive treaty. The effects in Germany were economic chaos and social and political unrest, which Hitler exploited to gain power, and thus led to World War II. All this is familiar enought to anyone acquianted with the period; one need only to have read A.J.P. Taylor's "Origins of the Second World War", and a book like Charles Mee's "The End of Order". Mr. Powell, however, focuses upon how Wilson's personality, and particularly his idealism, contributed to his misguided intervention and its disasterous consequences. By doing so he adds much interesting detail to the story.

The main point this book makes that to me, at least, is new is the effect of the western allies' pressure on Kerensky's government to stay in the war. Mr. Powell argues that Kerensky's efforts to do so made it impossible for him to consolidate his power; the Bolsheviks were thus enabled to overthrow him, leading to the atrocities of the Soviet regime and ultimately the Cold War. One may wonder what Kerensky's chances were in any case, but he certainly could not afford unnecessary complications; and while Britain and France would in any case have tried to keep Russia fighting on the Eastern Front, without the hope offerred by the United States' intervention their efforts might have been less successful.

I should add that Mr. Powell is out to make a point: That idealism directed toward running other peoples' affairs is an unsound basis for foreign policy, and we ought to learn from Wilson's ill example to avoid it. Thus the book is politics, not history; it is nevertheless both entertaining and worthwhile
to read.

55 of 61 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars This is all Wilson's fault, June 28, 2005

By 

Andrew S. Rogers (Stamford, Connecticut) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Wilson's War: How Woodrow Wilson's Great Blunder Led to Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and World War II (Hardcover)

This is a good day I think for reviewing the legacy of Woodrow Wilson, since it's the ninety-first anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the eighty-sixth of the signing of the treaty of Versailles. "Wilson's War" is an excellent tool for sparking such a review. It's not a perfect book -- though not for the reasons many negative reviewers give. But as a presentation of the case against one of the two or three worst and most destructive presidents of the twentieth century, it's a pretty good start.

Like FDR's Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression, Jim Powell's book about another president of inflated reputation, "Wilson's War" doesn't break a lot of new ground. What both books do, however, is the very important work of assembling facts and making connections that many historians and opinion leaders are all too interested in glossing over or explaining away.

Jim Powell is hardly the first person make these arguments. Personally, I had already come to largely the same conclusion Powell does from reading Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn's Leftism Revisited: From De Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot, Thomas Fleming's essential The Illusion Of Victory: America In World War I (Basic Books, 2003), and various histories of the rise of the National Socialists. Combine that with other books about the rise of the International Socialists, like Robert Service's Lenin: A Biography and Robert Conquest's histories of the USSR (both authors are quoted extensively in "Wilson's War"), and it gets pretty hard credibly to accuse Powell of flying off by himself someplace.

Where this book left me dissatisfied was in its balance in presenting causes and consequences. Powell does vital work in spelling out the horrors attendant to the red revolutions of 1917 and 1933. But I wish he had gone into still more depth presenting Wilson's dangerous combination of self-righteousness and ignorance, and how the messianic (in his own mind) Wilson was swung like a lariat by cleverer politicians both manipulating and being driven by nationalistic passions. It's easy to dismiss Powell by saying he hangs his argument on too slender a thread. Personally, I would have encouraged Powell to reduce the second half of the book by about fifty percent, and to double the length of the argument in the first half.

But that question of causes and consequences notwithstanding, "Wilson's War" makes an important argument. By questioning the premises on which American foreign policy has been based for the last four or five score years (certainly, Walter Hines Page telling Sir Edward Grey in 1913 that the US "will be here for two hundred years and it can continue to shoot men [in Mexico] until they learn to vote and to rule themselves" is an impressively twenty-first century view of American statesmanship), Powell guaranteed himself a rough reception from establishment historians and reviewers. But as I never tire of quoting K-L saying, the judgment of historians and the judgment of history are two very different things. The horrors of the twentieth century may not *all* have been Woodrow Wilson's fault, but Jim Powell has reminded us of just how much of it he does have to answer for.

73 of 86 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Antidote to President Worship, April 11, 2005

By 

Clyde N. Wilson - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Wilson's War: How Woodrow Wilson's Great Blunder Led to Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and World War II (Hardcover)

This is a feisty revisionist look at one of America's most sacred cows---President Woodrow Wilson and his international crusading---its sources and its results. The distinguished historian John Lukacs said that Wilson was the most important man of the 20th century because his style and content have provided the main theme of U.S. history and much of world history ever since. This book is a good cure for the common American malady of President-worship and is very enlightening for those of us who are dubious about foreign adventurism in the name of "democracy."