Material for the final exam (2021) for Introduction to International Relations (IIRs). INCLUDES a
DIRECT COPY of Yale Law School Lillian Goldman Law Library’s “President Woodrow Wilson’s
Fourteen Points” from “The Avalon Project” (Total: 2 pages).
1
“President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points” by The Avalon
Project - Direct Copy
8 January 1918: President Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points
THE HIGH CONTRACTING PARTIES
It will be our wish and purpose that the processes of peace, when they are begun, shall be
absolutely open and that they shall involve and permit henceforth no secret understandings of any kind.
The day of conquest and aggrandizement is gone by; so is also the day of secret covenants entered into in
the interest of particular governments and likely at some unlooked-for moment to upset the peace of the
world. It is this happy fact, now clear to the view of every public man whose thoughts do not still linger in
an age that is dead and gone, which makes it possible for every nation whose purposes are consistent with
justice and the peace of the world to avow nor or at any other time the objects it has in view.
We entered this war because violations of right had occurred which touched us to the quick and
made the life of our own people impossible unless they were corrected and the world secure once for all
against their recurrence. What we demand in this war, therefore, is nothing peculiar to ourselves. It is that
the world be made fit and safe to live in; and particularly that it be made safe for every peace-loving nation
which, like our own, wishes to live its own life, determine its own institutions, be assured of justice and
fair dealing by the other peoples of the world as against force and selfish aggression. All the peoples of the
world are in effect partners in this interest, and for our own part we see very clearly that unless justice be
done to others it will not be done to us. The programme of the world's peace, therefore, is our programme;
and that programme, the only possible programme, as we see it, is this:
I. Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international
understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view.
II. Absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas, outside territorial waters, alike in peace and in war,
except as the seas may be closed in whole or in part by international action for the enforcement of
international covenants.
III. The removal, so far as possible, of all economic barriers and the establishment of an equality of
trade conditions among all the nations consenting to the peace and associating themselves for its
maintenance.
IV. Adequate guarantees given and taken that national armaments will be reduced to the lowest point
consistent with domestic safety.
V. A free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a
strict observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests
of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government
whose title is to be determined.
VI. The evacuation of all Russian territory and such a settlement of all questions affecting Russia as
will secure the best and freest cooperation of the other nations of the world in obtaining for her an
unhampered and unembarrassed opportunity for the independent determination of her own
political development and national policy and assure her of a sincere welcome into the society of
free nations under institutions of her own choosing; and, more than a welcome, assistance also of
every kind that she may need and may herself desire. The treatment accorded Russia by her sister
nations in the months to come will be the acid test of their good will, of their comprehension of
