"President Woodrow Wilson's blueprint for a new world order was National Self-Determination.

"That is to say that peoples should determine their own form of government and that the people should be sovereign and that, out of the ashes of the old order imperial powers, there should emerge new, self-governing nations.

"Wilson may have thought that the war had been fought for national self-determination and democracy. The French thought that it had been fought for the security of France. The Italians thought it had been fought for the expansion of Italy. The British thought it had been fought for the preservation of the British Empire. And no way was Wilson interested in any of those things."