Fourteen Points

Wilson presented the Fourteen Points to a joint session of Congress, drawing on the work of a group of experts known as the Inquiry. The programme called for open diplomacy, freedom of the seas, free trade, arms reduction and an impartial adjustment of colonial claims, the evacuation of Russia, Belgium and France, and, in its final point, a general association of nations, which became the League of Nations. The address was also meant to answer the Bolsheviks and weaken Germany's will to fight.

The thirteenth point promised an independent Polish state on territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations, with free and secure access to the sea. It was the first commitment of its kind by a great power to the Polish cause. In October 1918 Germany and Austria-Hungary asked Wilson for an armistice on the basis of the Fourteen Points, which then served as the starting point of the Paris peace talks.