Principles of International Politics

Bruce Mesquita

[US].. emerged as the most powerful nation in the world [after WWI]. Wilson’s Fourteen Points called for a major transformation in international politics. In an effort to prevent a future Great War, the victors built on Wilson’s ideas to create the League of Nations to maintain peace through collective security. The United States, however, seeking to return to a policy of isolation, did not join the League, which ensured that this international body lacked the teeth necessary to play a major peacekeeping role.

One of the tenets [of the] Fourteen Points was that people should be free to choose their own government, thereby helping seal the terminal fate of monarchy and advancing Wilson’s objective of making the world safe for democracy. Unfortunately, Wilson did not endorse the idea that self-determination should necessarily carry over right away to colonial areas. One of those dejected by that failure of the Treaty of Versailles was a young man named Ho Chi Minh, who later emerged as the leader of North Vietnam. He led the Vietnamese wars against the French and then the Americans in Indochina and Vietnam throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and into the 1970s, in part for that right of self-determination. Regrettably, in the process he imposed communist rule in Vietnam with its attendant dictatorship and oppression of the very principle of self-determination that he had at one time advocated. To this day, the Vietnamese people do not have the right to freely elect their own government.