"The world’s peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty."
– Woodrow Wilson, 1918
I only came to grasp the weight of these words much later in life. In the late 1980s, I was studying chemistry in Moscow. At the time, such quotations weren’t accessible — not in books, not in lectures, and certainly not in public discourse. Wilson’s name was bound, in Hungarian memory, to the Treaty of Trianon — and for many, that alone was reason enough to condemn him. But the ideals he stood for — collective security, cooperation between nations — held far deeper meaning than we were allowed to acknowledge.
In November 1989, we learned about the fall of the Berlin Wall from a dorm room in Moscow. A small group of us — Hungarian, German, Czech, Russian, and Polish students — had crammed into the room, huddled around a hard-to-get Latvija color television and a radio. Some cried, others stared in silence. I couldn’t sleep that night. I wandered the streets, sensing that although Moscow’s surface remained unchanged, something fundamental had cracked open beneath it. The world was shifting.
Wilson didn’t merely propose a new global order in 1919 — he articulated an ethical principle: that peace can never be the concern of just one nation. Behind the creation of the League of Nations stood a simple but revolutionary recognition: the weak must not be left to fend for themselves, because wars always begin where the world stops paying attention.
Yet America turned its back on this vision. The Senate refused to join. Isolationism triumphed. And we know what followed — two decades later, the world was at war again. Millions perished. Wilson, the visionary, was cast aside — too early, perhaps, for his time.
Now, in 2025, I feel the same tension rising again. The United States is once more withdrawing from global leadership. China and Russia are forging a new authoritarian axis. Europe is caught in its own internal frictions. The international order is fraying. History may not repeat itself — but it often rhymes. In 1931, the League failed to stop Japan’s invasion of Manchuria. In 2014, the UN was powerless to halt the annexation of Crimea. Revisionist powers always act when the world looks away.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, I returned to Russia often. I saw how power adapts, how memory is weaponized, how uncertainty breeds new forms of control. The League of Nations failed not because its vision was flawed — but because no one truly upheld it. No shared will, no shared responsibility. And once again, we face the same vacuum — one that others are more than willing to fill.
The threats we face today — climate crisis, pandemics, digital authoritarianism — know no borders. The League tried only to prevent war. But we now understand peace must be protected with more than treaties. With data. With dialogue. With solidarity. In Cold War Hungary, a generation lived under the shadow of nuclear fear. Today, a new generation lives under the fear of chaos — of a world adrift, leaderless.
Wilson was not wrong. Perhaps he was too early. But it wasn’t his failure that doomed us — it was the decision of others to believe nothing else was possible. In truth, freedom is never free. Peace is never permanent. Cooperation is never easy. But as someone who has lived through a collapsing world order, I can say this with certainty:
There is no other way.
Today marks the anniversary of the day in 1919 when the League of Nations was formally born at the Paris Peace Conference. It was Wilson’s dream — now, it is our memory. But dreams don’t die. They wait. The question is whether we still recognize them when they return.
The world can be free — but only together.
This is not a slogan. It is the bare truth, spoken quietly in the dark by those who remember what walls, borders, and velvet revolutions once meant.