Fourteen Points: What's Up With the Closing Lines?

    Fourteen Points: What's Up With the Closing Lines?

      For such arrangements and covenants we are willing to fight and to continue to fight until they are achieved; but only because we wish the right to prevail and desire a just and stable peace such as can be secured only by removing the chief provocations to war, which this programme does remove. (Conclusion.1)

      Wilson's call for a "just and stable peace" could be called an instance of historical irony—but the kind that makes you cry, rather than laugh. The peace proved to be neither just nor stable. Germany was treated harshly by the Allies, and another world war broke out within two decades, in 1939.

      Wilson's goal of "removing the chief provocations to war" through disarmament and international unity would be filed under "cool ideas." You tried, WW. You really did.