At the beginning of this century, Russia sponsored pan-slavic agitation in the region. Archduke Francis Ferdinand was the main opponent of the creation of a Greater Serbia. His murder on June 28, 1914 in Sarajevo had been encouraged by Russia and engineered by Serbia. The only member of the Council of Ministers of the Dual Monarchy who was opposed to a war of retaliation against Serbia was the Hungarian Premier, Count Stephen Tisza. When he was voted down, Hungary occupied Serbia and by 1915 would have considered the war over, if Russia did not have scores to settle with the Ottoman empire, France with Germany, Italy with Austria, and so forth. Therefore the war went on.

During the war, the Czech allies of Serbia, Eduard Benes and Thomas Masaryk, transformed themselves from consultants of the allies into architects of allied policy for Central Europe. They organized a deceitful propaganda campaign for the dismemberment of Hungary and in their efforts succeeded in obtaining the support of two criminally ignorant French politicians, Georges Clémenceau and Raymond Pointcaré.

President Wilson refused to cooperate in this conspiracy. He wanted Europe's new borders to correspond with her ethnographic boundaries and he wanted the principle of self-determination to prevail, but his views were disregarded. On January 24, 1919, he protested the illegal Serb and Romanian occupation of parts of Hungary and on March 31, 1919, he called the proposed dismemberment of Hungary absurd, but his objections were overruled by the French. As a result, the United States Congress refused to approve the Treaty of Trianon, but this product of Neronian insanity, this plan, unjust in substance and tragic in consequence, was implemented anyway.