Tucker, Robert W. Woodrow Wilson and the Great War: Reconsidering America's Neutrality, 1914-1917.

• Author: Cheezum, Eric A.
• Position: Book review

Tucker, Robert W. Woodrow Wilson and the Great War: Reconsidering America's Neutrality, 1914-1917. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2007. 272 pages. Cloth, $39.50.

Robert W. "Fucker's Woodrow Wilson and the Great War." Reconsidering America's Neutrality, 1914-1917 is a self-professed "modest corrective" to a historiography of Wilsonianism that, the author contends, has marginalized the United States' experience of World War I before its formal entry into the conflict (p. ix). Tucker does not attempt a complete treatment of the period, but instead focuses on particular episodes in the Atlantic that he considers especially emblematic of the country's foreign policy, and, of uppermost importance in this study, on President Woodrow Wilson's personal understanding and formulation of that policy. In so doing, Tucker argues that neutrality as it was practiced by the United States was profoundly flawed from the outset, because it confused isolationism, the desire to remain aloof from European affairs, with the more specific legal category of neutrality. Due to Wilson's tendency to act as a one-man band in matters of foreign policy, this outlook led to the pursuit of a foreign policy that was essentially unneutral, and which led inevitably to intervention--precisely the outcome Wilson feared the most.

Wilson's neutrality has undergone much reevaluation since his times, but most have seen in it an inevitability of war, with Wilson depicted either as pro-ally, or as struggling against forces beyond his control to keep the United States out of World War I. For Tucker, however, "fidelity to neutrality" is a red herring (p. 77). In his estimation, while it is true that Wilson was neither herded into war, nor pro-ally, those categories have little to do with the actual policy established by the White House between 1914 and 1917. Rather, Wilson was "at liberty to follow any one of several quite different courses" in his response to the belligerents (p. 79). Both Britain and Germany violated international law, the British with their blockade of Germany and Germany with its designation of a submarine war zone around the British Isles. Yet, by February 1915 Wilson had chosen to establish a neutrality policy that favored the Allies and virtually guaranteed war with Germany. In Tucker's estimation, the one thing that Wilson wanted above all else was to preserve American isolation and stay out of World War I. Why, then, did Wilson pursue a...