The Fourteen Points is probably the most important document/speech to come out of the First World War. President Wilson really did think that he had a plan that would make it so that nations no longer went to war with each other. As if war was a disease and he had the cure.

Most of the points are about trying to get the nations of Europe to stop fighting with each other so darn much, but points number one and two directly relate to the Zimmermann Telegram.

In point one, Wilson demands "Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view." Take that, all you coded message-senders trying to make alliances in secret.

Point two makes it clear that there is to be "Absolute freedom of navigation on the seas," which of course translates to "Germany needs to knock it off with all that unrestricted submarine warfare stuff if we're ever going to have some peace and quiet around here." And we all know that unrestricted submarine warfare was the raison d'être of the Zimmermann Telegram.

Wilson may come across as an arrogant, bossy old coot in his Fourteen Points. But hey, God did the same thing in just ten points, right? Some of the Fourteen Points were implemented after the war and others were ignored. To Wilson's credit, the points of his that the world dismissed were some of the causes of World War II.