Us president crosses the atlantic

Additional Essay for SAIS-M.A. Application Antonio Timoner Salvá US PRESIDENT CROSSES THE ATLANTIC As the George Washington reached Brest on December 13, 1919 with Woodrow Wilson on board, vastcrowds awaited excited and hopeful. Just 13 months earlier the end of the Great War had terminated an age of stale politics and diplomacy after a bloody and exhausting conflict. People around the world hadpinned all their hopes for better future on the Fourteen Points the US President was bringing to Europe (in fact, addressing the whole world). This innovative doctrine was not expected just torestore peace, but to build up a prosperous world in which war would never be possible anymore. A pioneering institution was created for this purpose: the League of Nations, a new sort of diplomacy based onthe abandonment of secret pacts and the use of open negotiations to prevent war. Decisions should be made globally and unanimously for first time in History. Unfortunately the ill-fated outcome ofthe Treaty of Versailles and the dominating bad will and skepticism ruined this fresh way of performing international relations. The League perished and in 1939, WWII broke out devastating even harder aworld that failed again to avert such destructive conflict. In 1941, with the world at war, the Fourteen Points doctrine revived again in the blueprint for a new world order: the Atlantic Charter.Once more a US President set sail into the ocean to settle the foundations of a post-war order based on similar essential principles but going even further: a “wider and permanent system of generalsecurity” for the enforced disarmament of aggressor nations, evolving into the creation of the UN Security Council, which, unlike the League of Nations, extended its role beyond a well-meaning forum sinceit foresaw the realistic use of force when needed, albeit within the boundaries of international consent through voting. In some sense, it was the final triumph of open negotiations over secret...