Nearly a year before the peace talks took place in Paris, President Woodrow Wilson presented a plan on January 8th, 1918 for lasting peace to the United States Congress. His intention was to draft a document that would be the basis for peace from that day forward, a plan that was comprised of “the “Fourteen Points” that he believed justified the enormous military struggle as being fought for a moral cause” . The basic ideas of his plan were ideas to make the entire world both “safe to live in” and offer each “peace-loving nation” the opportunity to “determine its own institutions, be assured …show more content…
For instance, in 1918, European powers were focused on the business of creating vast European empires. Large alliances were secretly being built and nationalism was strong. Wilson’s plan for peace listed, as a primary tenet, that governments would be transparent and that they would have “no secret understandings of any kind.” Furthermore, Wilson encouraged political leaders to draft “open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in public view” . Europe used the power of their alliances to further colonize lands and peoples that were to week to resist. President Wilson viewed the goal of World War I to be the end “absolutism and militarism,” horrible practices that denied people liberty. His “Fourteen Points” stated that these would only be eliminated “by creating democratic governments and a “general association of nations” that would guarantee the “political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.” . The revealed “contents of secret wartime treaties found in the archives of the Russian foreign ministry” also caused President Wilson to address the issue of war for the sake of “achiev[ing] territorial gains” because European countries were racing to colonize any lands they