Between the Armistice and the Treaty of Sèvres in August of 1920, there was a vigorous debate in the Istanbul press on how best to secure the future of the Ottoman domains. Two organizations led this effort and each were determined to maintain the Ottoman Empire through American and British financial aid and expertise respectively: the Wilsonian Principles Society and the Society of the Friends of England Association. These organizations emerged at the precise moment when the press flourished between Ottoman wartime and Allied occupation censorship regimes. While many of the supporters of these societies were liberals and former members of the of the pre-war Freedom and Accord Party, others would quickly become the mouthpieces of the nationalist regime in Ankara. Historians have treated the Wilsonian Principles Society and the Friends of England Association as a coherent political bloc that agitated for American or British intervention in order to secure a Turkish national state or in some cases a Turkish lead Pan-Islamic state. These studies by and large have assumed that the state fought for by partisans of each society was a Turkish national state, rather than the continuation of the Ottoman Empire. But a close examination of the press shows more diversity of opinion and a far greater inclination to remake the empire rather than make the state—a point that Mustafa Kemal fixated upon in his critique of the Istanbul press during the Armistice. This paper examines the mandate question as well as varying understandings of “Wilson principles” in the Istanbul press from October 1918 through the aftermath of the Treaty of Sevres in August 1920. It looks at proposals for reorganizing the Ottoman Empire as well as how intellectuals understood the meaning of the mandates systems under the League of Nations. Well before the Supreme Allied Council publicly announced that the German colonies and Ottoman Arab provinces would become League mandates in late January of 1919, Ottoman intellectuals had debated the merits and dangers of American or European administrative and financial oversight in the Ottoman Empire. Some writers viewed the mandate idea as nothing more than a cover for the formal extension of European empire into the Middle East. Whereas other publicists understood the mandate idea as an internationally guaranteed state development project. I show that Ottoman intellectuals embraced “Wilsonian principles” as a pragmatic tool to maintain the empire, rather than make the Turkish state national.