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The main culprit of this epic failure was president Woodrow Wilson, who had so disastrously architected the League. Interestingly, Wilson largely shared Zangwill’s liberal values, which in fact undergirded the American president’s desire to present the Treaty of Versailles and the League as a “readjustment of those great injustices which underlie the whole structure of European and Asiatic society.” The system of bilateral agreements between individual (European) states had failed, but now, under the League’s guidance, states and sovereigns with their imperialistic ambitions were no longer to rule the world, but instead the new ruler was “the power of the united moral forces of the world, and in the Covenant of the League of Nations the moral forces of the world are mobilized.” Even if such universalistic language would have certainly appealed to Zangwill, he shared with several other commentators the opinion that Wilson had nonetheless shown himself not just incompetent, but also arrogant, sporting a sense of “papal infallibility”. Instead of acknowledging his own defeat in the negotiation process, Wilson had “triumphantly waved scraps of paper from which the Fourteen Points have been practically erased.”