Today, the United States and Canada honor the anniversary of the Armistice signed by the Allies and the Germans in 1918, ending World War I, the most destructive war then yet seen.
It might be worthwhile, then, to look back and remember how one leader decided to honor the nation's dead: not with jingoism but with a declaration of principles, the Fourteen Points (some still sound good, like "national armaments will be reduced to the lowest point consistent with domestic safety"), and a noble, if ill-fated, attempt to craft a functioning method of world governance and conflict resolution, the League of Nations.
It's long been fashionable to regard Wilson as the archetypally unrealistic peacenik. But after a long century drenched in the blood of hundreds of millions of war dead, one wonders what might have been different if he'd succeeded. Certainly the idea that nations can usually find better ways of resolving their differences other than the mass murder of one another's citizens is an idea whose time has come.
