Robert W. Tucker - Woodrow Wilson and the Great War

Following is a reprint of my recent Review of Robert W. Tucker's Woodrow Wilson and the Great War: Reconsidering America's Neutrality, 1914-1917

The Irony of American Neutrality

American foreign policy at the time of the First World War is largely overshadowed by the events of the century that followed it. The Second World War, the Cold War, Vietnam, and the collapse of the Soviet Union capture the attention of historians. Yet, important threads of U.S. policy for the century that has just past, as well as the one that we are now beginning, are rooted in the policies of Woodrow Wilson's administration. Wilson's vision of what the world should be has persisted in American foreign policy. The changes brought about in international law during his administration have continuing implications in international affairs. Robert W. Tucker's Woodrow Wilson and the Great War is a vital study for those interested in the changes in U.S. policy and the international system during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

Tucker has written a solid scholarly book examining the neutrality policy of the Wilson administration from 1914 to 1917. That policy, conceived by the president, stimulated unintended change in the international system. Tucker writes, "it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the law of neutrality--or rather Woodrow Wilson's version of this law--constituted almost the whole of his foreign policy toward the war during the fateful years 1914-17" (p. x). The Great War brought substantial changes to the policy of neutrality as it had been practiced since the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Wilson's failure to enforce American neutrality rights equally between the Allied and the Central powers hastened those changes. Tucker explains that failure from the vantage point of the president and his advisors.

Even though this period is important to historians of American foreign relations, this subject has been largely overlooked. Apart from John W. Coogan's The End of Neutrality, published in 1981, few historians in the last generation have spent much, if any, time on the subject. Tucker has corrected this oversight. It is a timely study for historians given the state of the current international system. The growing multipolarity of the present world invites comparisons to the international system as it existed at the beginning of the twentieth century. The persistence of the thread of Wilson's idealism in American foreign policy makes understanding this period of added importance. . . .

Full Text can be found on H-SHGAPE Reviews

The Review is re-posted from H-SHGAPE Reviews.
Citation: Malcolm Magee. Review of Tucker, Robert W., Woodrow Wilson and the Great War: Reconsidering America's Neutrality, 1914-1917. H-SHGAPE, H-Net Reviews. November, 2008.