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Woodrow Wilson and the Great War: Reconsidering America's Neutrality, 1914-1917. By Robert W. Tucker. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007. xviii, 246 pp. $39.50, ISBN 978-0-8139-2629-2.)
In this brief book Robert W. Tucker turns from post-World War II American foreign policy to examine American neutrality in the first years of World War I. He argues that that Woodrow Wilson gradually abandoned a failing neutrality policy and concluded that by entering the war, the United States could foster a "new diplomacy" at the postwar peace conference (p. xi). His goal was an international community of likeminded democratic states in which the United States could participate without giving up its traditional independence of action.
Tucker describes his study as "a modest corrective to the current understanding of Wilson" (p. ix). In fact, it offers a sharp challenge to traditional admiration of Wilson's struggle for neutrality. Tucker clearly believes Wilson's neutrality policy was...