Via Power Line, that is a tweet from His Paxness from back in the days when he was still allowed to post on Twatter.

It’s a brilliant quip. In order to understand why, it is worth taking a brief detour through the Progressive Era and the resulting horrors of WWI and WWII.

President Woodrow Wilson was elected in 1912 on a highly progressive Democratic Party platform with a strong mandate to transform the country – and in case you are wondering, yes, that sounds familiar because even though history rarely repeats itself, it often rhymes instead. During his Presidency, he rammed through some of the worst abuses upon States’ rights and Constitutional limits on power ever seen – the “Progressive Amendments” all occurred under his watch, and resulted in:

• The Creature from Jekyll Island (the Federal Reserve) with the passage of the Federal Reserve Act;
• The implementation of a legally binding income tax and the many attendant horrors of the IRS with the passage of the 16th Amendment;
• The removal of the old system of State-level appointments of Senators to the US Congress with the passage of the 17th Amendment;
• The prohibition of the manufacturing or sale of alcohol with the 18th Amendment – one of the absolute worst abuses of power by the Federal government ever recorded; and
• The implementation of universal suffrage with the 19th Amendment;

His Presidency is directly responsible for the explosive growth of Federal government power over the lives of ordinary citizens. Many of the worst abuses recorded by the government against the American people can be laid right at his feet.

But, if his domestic policy was shortsighted, stupid, reckless, and extremely dangerous to personal and political freedom, his foreign policy was, if anything, even worse.

It was President Wilson’s Fourteen Points that brought the wrecking ball of progressive political ideology into the realm of foreign affairs, and did away once and for all with the sagely wisdom of the Monroe Doctrine. No longer would the United States of America vigourously defend its own “sphere of influence” and leave the rest of the world the hell alone, as had been standard practice for decades after President Monroe’s explication of the famous idea.

Instead, the United States of America would use its considerable military might and power to intervene directly in the matters of the European powers – exhausted as they were after four years of horrific and brutal warfare during the Great War.

It was because of President Wilson’s decisions and ideology that the Treaty of Versailles satisfied nobody to any significant degree – and rubbed the Germans so badly the wrong way that they immediately denounced it and did everything that they could to defy its terms wherever possible.

And, after all, why wouldn’t the Germans have felt hard done by?

The Treaty of Versailles was such a disastrously stupid amalgamation of bad ideas that its effects are still being felt even today. Germany lost vast tracts of territory where the native peoples felt themselves to be Germans and wanted to be part of Germany – most notably, Alsace-Lorraine, which had been contested between France and Germany for centuries but had for about half a century been under German control, and the ceding of the German city of Danzig to the Poles, who promptly renamed it Gdansk.

Tens of thousands of previously German citizens, who felt themselves in their very bones to be German and had the lineage to prove it, were disenfranchised at a stroke and subjected to the rule of other peoples who they did not like and with whom they did not agree.

The Treaty was so bad, in fact, that another architect of the mess that is the modern age, John Maynard Keynes, wrote perhaps his greatest and most sensible work of economics, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, in which he predicted that the exceptionally foolish territorial concessions and reparations forced upon Germany would result in a new crisis in the near future.

He was – surprisingly and for a change – quite right. The economic depression that followed in much of Continental Europe in the early 1920s, which included truly staggering hyperinflation in Germany, Austria, and Hungary, resulted in currencies which lost all meaning and value at whiplash-inducing speed and wiped out the savings of millions of people. The German people, already angry from a peace settlement that they felt was forced upon them – for they had never been truly defeated at the end of the Great War, but merely agreed to an Armistice to stop the fighting – saw the greed and mendacity of the politicians and bankers as the direct cause of their miseries.

Just 15 years after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles – over the vehement objections of the German delegation –  a new Chancellor came to power, and shortly thereafter used the Reichstag Fire as a convenient excuse to declare a state of emergency, unite the offices of the President and Chancellor of the German Republic, and effectively turned himself into a dictator.

His name was Adolf Hitler. And he came to power with less than 35% of the overall vote in the previous elections of 1932.

Would Hitler have come to power without the cack-handed idealism and interventions of Woodrow Wilson?

An honest appraisal of the evidence indicates that the answer is: “NO”.

The fact is that interventions in the realm of foreign politics have serious and long-lasting consequences, which are never readily apparent at the time. World War One was never truly or fully resolved, by any of the powers involved – and, indeed, there were points where the Germans looked like they might be able to use their superior tactics and strategies to force a settlement upon the British and French.

It was only with American intervention, agitated for and spearheaded by President Wilson, that the tide turned against the Krauts – but even then, the Germans were never truly defeated.

And for all of the horrors and miseries of World War One, the follow-up was much, much worse.

All politicians, but especially American Presidents, should heed the lessons posed by the Wilson Presidency. Going abroad in search of demons to destroy is a monumentally stupid idea even at the best of times. Unfortunately, this is a lesson that the last five Presidents, including to some extent even the God-Emperor, have all failed to heed.

Thankfully, the God-Emperor has made it clear that he regards foreign interventionism and military adventurism as at best a distraction and at worst an extreme drain on resources of a nation that can afford neither. This is all to the good. But it will not take much for him to slip up in this regard and make the same mistakes that the Bush-Clinton-Obama axis made for so many years, and commit American troops to some damned fool foreign quagmire with no readily apparent solution.

The final lesson of Wilson’s Administration is simple: when dealing with foreign enemies, crush them completely, force them to their knees until they beg to surrender, and then declare victory and go home. No messing about, no long-term occupations, no nation-building, no grand strategic attempts to remake the world in America’s image.

Just “crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women”, so to speak.

President Wilson failed to heed any of this wisdom – and his failure saddled the world with the deadliest century the world has ever seen. Any time cop that goes back in time and undoes his legacy is a true hero, not a villain.