Pandemics and POTUS

It’s the start of an eventful century.

 Barely two decades into the century, sweeping changes have taken place in technology and connectivity. Asian heft is on the rise. The world has witnessed many wars and a global upsurge of nationalism. And then, a pandemic rages through the world, affecting people across continents. Even the most powerful man in the world is not spared.

Sounds familiar? It is strange that it does, for the year I am talking about is 1918.

The Great War is about to come to an end. The US President Woodrow Wilson’s famous “Fourteen Points” speech convinced Germany to put an end to the War and come to the negotiating table, raising hopes of an enduring peace, and a Treaty without punitive clauses.

Germany’s traditional rival, France was baying for blood… but it was widely thought that Wilson would prevail over France’s Clemenceau and broker a fair Treaty.

The Fourteen Points were widely circulated and this cartoon of Wilson (from Punch) moving with a sense of purpose, exuding firmness and capability, captures how he managed to infuse hope for a just peace, projecting the image of the American warrior arriving in Paris to settle the knotty problems of the warring Europeans.

And so, the Fourteen Points became the basis of Armistice in 1918.

But then came the twist in the tale…

Woodrow Wilson came down with the then-raging pandemic, the Spanish Flu. He was never the same again. He was left physically weak and disoriented. He was no longer the man of purpose that Punch so hopefully portrayed. He lost the ability to argue with Clemenceau and he gave in to the French demands, resulting in a Treaty that sought to punish and humiliate, rather than set the tone for a new, peaceful world order.

The heavy reparations, the insertion of a clause on War Guilt, French occupation of German territory… and the sense of betrayal and outrage that the Germans were left with… the consequent rise of National Socialism…these are only too well-documented.

And we all know how badly it ended.

History throws up villains and we rush, often rightly so, to be outraged by their actions and seek to ensure that villainy of that sort doesn’t rear its head again. But those villains are the product of the circumstances that came together to create them. We may choose to believe that no circumstances extenuate what followed, in this case. But we must not forget those circumstances either.

We fixate on and are appalled by the hideousness of the actions of the villains produced by history, and not so much on the events that led to the rise of such a persona. If only we could learn more from the milieu of history than from personalities of history, we may achieve more success in ensuring that kind of history doesn’t repeat itself.

Would there have been no WW2 if Woodrow Wilson had not been affected by the ‘flu? Would there have been a just and enduring peace? Would the League of Nations have been an institution to reckon with rather than the toothless one it turned out to be?

Hard to say.

But a compelling counter factual to consider.