The post Woodrow Wilson’s Great Folly of John Schindler on his blog is a very different way of looking at what happened post WWI that I hadn't really considered as a person of Polish heritage. For me, the breakup of empires at the end of the war, specifically the breakup of the Hapsburg Empire was always supposed to be a "good thing", for it meant that Poland became it's own country again. Yet it wasn't that good, because WWII happened, the expansion of Soviet influence happened, so much death and destruction happened when the land powers of the early 20th century fell apart. His summary of what Europe could have been like is therefore though-provoking. It’s clear, with a century of hindsight, what a Europe without Wilson and his Fourteen Points would look like. A compromise peace would have allowed the Germans to quickly crush Russia’s nascent Bolshevik thugocracy like a bug, as they planned to do. Without the Bolshevik threat, European politics would have ...