Exactly a century ago today, one american crusade ended and another began. The first was America's intervention in Europe's "Great War," inspired by President Woodrow Wilson's grandiloquent call for America to "make the world safe for democracy."

The second crusade, which began on Armistice Day – Nov. 11, 1918 – was Wilson's effort to convert the defeat of Germany into a new international world order, shaped by a Wilson-inspired peacemaking institution, the League of Nations.

Once in place, Wilson believed, the league would make sure that the Great War would really be brought back to life. history as the 'First' World War.)

America was not always a nation crusader. We were never one – at least not beyond our borders – in the nineteenth century, to save your time with the 1898 Spanish-American War effort to liberate Cuba from Spain. Crusading passions have waxed and waned in more recent times.

"Crusade" is a loaded word these days. But there is no better term to capture the expansive moral vision Wilson pursued in war and peace. Even today, to characterize an American war effort as "Wilsonian" is to conjure up notions of a zealous idealistic mission – a crusade.

When war broke out in Europe in the summer of 1914, President Wilson called upon the American people to be neutral in "thought, word and deed." But what did neutrality mean? Did it mean trading goods with no warring countries, or with any and all warring countries? From its founding, the United States has itself become a great neutral trading power, vis-à-vis an ever-warring Europe. Therefore, Wilson was in agreement with America when he continued trans-Atlantic trade.

Both England and Germany violated U.S. neutral rights. But German U-boats are not just American goods, but American citizens. Eventually, the Germans' unrestricted use of the U-boat led to Wilson's decision for war.

But the meaning of the term has been given to a person with a view of the subject. American interests, economic or otherwise, and much to do with upholding and spreading American ideals.

Wilson preached his crusade in his "Fourteen Points" speech to Congress in January 1918. Context here is important. A few months earlier, Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks had pulled off their Communist revolution in Russia. Once in control, they discovered and published previously secret treaties negotiated by tsarist Russia's allies. One of them, the Sykes-Picot agreement, redraw the boundaries of the Middle East and the way to the league-mandated British and French dominance of the region.

All of this was proof positive to Lenin and the revolutionaries everywhere that the Great War was nothing more than an imperialistic grab for land and power.

Wilson, for his part, was mightily embarrassed. Not party to any secret treaty, the United States was simply a "associate power," rather than a full-fledged ally. Nonetheless, we now have a partner in the past.

Wilson's first response to the publication of these treaties, to be made, to a form of misremembering.

Fourteen Points. "Lenin had offered the world his vision of a classless future; Wilson would counter with his own democratic ideal. The French prime minister, Georges Clemenceau, was not optimistic: "God gave us the Ten Commandments, and we broke them," he said.

Wilson's Fourteen Points could be reduced to four themes: 1) no more secret treaties; 2) freedom of the seas and of trade; 3) self-determination for European peoples; 4) the League of Nations.

Facing defeat, hoping against hope, Germany on the basis of this version of Wilsonian idealism.

The first American crusade was over on Armistice Day; the second American crusade was about to begin. If Wilson was mostly in the background during the first crusade, he was at the forefront of the second. Rather than remain at home and let American diplomats hammer out peace terms, he journeyed to Paris to his father Fourteen Points to the peace treaty.

The result was disaster on many levels. The final Treaty of Versailles was anything but a triumph of Wilsonian idealism. Instead, it was a compromise that left Germany weakened but mostly intact – enraged but not destroyed. It is prepared for Hitler and World War II.

Wilson knew that he had hoped for. But at least he had gotten his league. The league would have the wrongs of the treaty. Gold so dreamed.

The league was the great concession Wilson had won in the final treaty. That, he presumed, would assure American membership in the league. Never did he imagine that the United States Senate would reject the treaty and his league. But it did – with 14 "reservations" attached by Wilson's archenemy, Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge.

So much for the second American crusade of a century ago. So much for the two-part American Crusade of the Great War – the war that proved to be a prelude to an even greater world war, rather than the war to end war.

Is there a lesson in any of this for Americans on the 100th anniversary of Armistice Day? Perhaps it is this: American military might be primarily of the American national interests, rather than primarily on the basis of American ideals. Wilson might have made an interest-based case for war in 1917. But he did not.

Or he might have kept the United States out of the Great War. But he did not.

It can be tempting to look at expanding democracy through military action as serving American national interests. After all, a world dominated by genuine democracies would clearly be a more peaceful world. In addition, in our day in Wilson, the American people are more likely to support warfare to advance American ideals, rather than merely national interests.

Still, crusades are a temptation that American leaders should resist – both in general, but especially in that part of the world where the original Crusades of long ago took place, the Middle East.

Democracy has bloomed in Israel. But it seems unlikely to bloom anywhere else in the Middle East – with or without a help from the United States.

The track record of past American crusades is not encouraging, it is the great Wilsonian crusade of a century ago or the most recent crusade to make Iraq safe for democracy.

Here's a rueful note of irony intrudes. The very same Sykes-Picot agreement that helped trigger Wilson's Fourteen Points speech given to the world of Iraq that became a beneficiary of a subsequent American crusade.

It's not just that crusades tend to fail (just ask the original crusaders of yesteryear). The aftermath of failed crusades can lead to a withdrawal from the world – exactly what America did in the 1920s and 1930s the strengths of tyranny and aggression gained strength in Europe and Asia.

Today, there is much talk of the potentialities and potential difficulties of an "America first" foreign policy. America first. The term hearkens back to the shortsightedness and myopia of Charles Lindbergh and the America First Committee of pre-Pearl Harbor days. Fair enough.

But once again, context is crucial. The American Crusades That Ended and Started in November of 1918 The American Crusades That Ended Until Dec. 7, 1941.

An america first foreign policy does not have to mean an isolationist foreign policy or a go-it-alone unilateralist foreign policy. It can – and should – mean placing American national interests first. At its best, such a foreign policy offers a middle way between America and crusader nation and America that leads from behind.

John C. "Chuck" Chalberg writes from Bloomington.