In March, 1920, the 19^th Amendment made its rounds for ratification among the states, the Senate voted whether to ratify the Treaty of Versailles and join the League of Nations, and Germany fell into in a Soviet-style workers’ revolt. These were heady times for the United States and the world, not unlike today. The old world fell apart and a new world rose in its place.

On Friday, March 19, 1920, Wilson suffered the greatest defeat of his presidency. He fell 7 votes short of ratification of the Treaty of Versailles and the Covenant of the League of Nations in the United States Senate. While Wilson campaigned exhaustively for the passage of the Treaty and the League’s Covenant, Republican Senator from Massachusetts Henry Cabot Lodge waged his own campaign against it. In the second and final attempt to ratify the Treaty, 23 Democrats joined Lodge. The senators had reservations over Article X of the League of Nations Covenant, which required signatory members to defend any treaty nation at the urging of the League. Many senators believed that Article X was unconstitutional, because the United States Constitution gave only Congress the right to declare war.

Lodge chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and from that pulpit declared the League a “mongrel banner” and opposed US engagements abroad. Lodge argued that ratification of the League’s Covenant without exclusion of Article X would transfer Congress’s authority over war to the Executive Branch. He offered a resolution excepting Article X from ratification, but Wilson refused to consider anything but full ratification. Having been felled by a stroke in September 1919, Wilson did not have the strength and energy to oppose Lodge’s resolution in the Senate and to defend the League’s Covenant to the American public. America’s failure to join the League of Nations set in motion a cataclysmic series of events that would shape not only the geography of the modern Middle East, but America’s relationship with it for the next century.

Wilson’s stroke also prevented him from responding to repeated demands by the Europeans for his views on the enforcement of the Treaty and the League of Nations Mandates in the Middle East. Enforcement of the Treaty was made more urgent in March 1920 as German workers lead a Soviet-style revolt, toppling the German government. France and Britain feared that a communist government in Germany would make alliance with the USSR, which would give Germany a stronger position to oppose paying war reparations to the Entente. When the U.S. Senate refused to ratify the Treaty and the League a second time, the Europeans determined they could wait no longer.

In order to win his League of Nations, Wilson tied the enforcement of the Treaty of Versailles to the convening of the League of Nations. In other words, in order to obtain the reparations they won against Germany in the Treaty, the Allies would have to convene the League. It was a fateful and unintended consequence of tying the two treaties together, which Wilson surely intended he would be deeply involved with. France and Britain convened the League of Nations without Wilson’s involvement and enforced the Treaty against Germany in March 1920. Later that same month, the League would authorize the mandates in the Middle East agreed to between France and Britain during the War. Based on the outlines made in the so-called Sykes-Picot Agreement, France was granted mandatory control of the territory of Lebanon and Syria, and England was granted mandatory control of the territory of Palestine, including the Transjordan, and Mesopotamia (Iraq).  (Part 3.)

The First Arab Spring is described in historic detail in The Peddler by Stephen Louis Moses.