Fourteen Points

The Fourteen Points was a statement of principles for a just and lasting peace, set out by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson in a speech to a joint session of Congress on 8 January 1918, roughly ten months before the armistice that ended the fighting of the First World War. The points called for open diplomacy in place of secret treaties, freedom of the seas, the removal of international trade barriers, arms reduction, an impartial adjustment of colonial claims, and the restoration or adjustment of the borders of several European nations along lines of self-determination, culminating in a fourteenth point calling for the creation of a "general association of nations" to guarantee the political independence and territorial integrity of states, an idea that became the League of Nations. Wilson's main Allied colleagues, including Britain's David Lloyd George and France's Georges Clemenceau, were skeptical of the full program's practicality, and the eventual Treaty of Versailles incorporated only some of Wilson's points, but the speech shaped the language of self-determination and collective security that dominated much of twentieth-century international diplomacy.