As we enter the last 20 years of the 20th century, we may well ponder whether the next two decades will once more witness a world plunging into war, perhaps the final holocaust of a planet whose centuries of conflict make history seem but a record of mankind's massacres, misfortunes, and crimes. Certainly we Americans might well ponder where the course of warfare in this century has taken us. We entered World War I to "make the world safe for democracy" and emerged with what one eyewitness to the Versailles treaty castigated as "the peace which passeth all understanding." Hardly more than two decades later, we went into World War II by way of Pearl Harbor and by 1945 stood supreme on the global stage—or so it seemed at the time. But the Pax Americana, if there ever was such a thing, was short-lived indeed. Just 20 years after the lights went on again all over the world, we found ourselves in the tunnel called Vietnam and spent another decade searching fruitlessly for the light at the end. Thus wars and rumors of wars have marked and marred the milestones of the American odyssey through this century, and it is perhaps fitting to reflect upon the first and the latest—the Great War and Vietnam—as we approach the century's end.

America's intervention in World War I is the subject of John Milton Cooper's essay. A professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Mr. Cooper is no stranger to the American involvement in the First World War. His latest work, a biography of Walter Hines Page, American ambassador to London in WWI, appeared two years ago. His VQR essay was originally given as a lecture in the LBJ Library's World War I Lecture Series,