David M. Kennedy: What Would Wilson Do?
...[A]s the 20th century dawned, the United States was no longer so easy to ignore. It had grown to be the most populous country in the Western world, save Russia. It was the leading producer of wheat, coal, iron, steel, and electricity. It would soon command the world’s largest pool of investment capital. The Spanish-American War in 1898 and the subsequent annexation of Puerto Rico and the Philippine Islands dramatically announced that the United States had acquired the means to project its power well beyond its home continent.
That America now wielded immense potential strength to work its will in the world was evident. But when, if ever, and how, if at all, would that potential be realized? And what, exactly, was America’s will? Those questions excited an intense discussion in the 20th century’s opening decades, one with resonant echoes in our own time.
Anti-imperialists like Mark Twain advocated a return to isolationism. Unapologetic realists like Theodore Roosevelt urged the country to start behaving like a conventional great power, pursuing worldwide interests commensurate with its capacities. But Woodrow Wilson, whose ideas would eventually triumph, did not want his country to become just another great power.
The ideals of the Founders illuminated Wilson’s entire diplomatic program. His proposals, he said, constituted “no breach in either our traditions or our policy as a nation, but a fulfillment, rather, of all that we have professed or striven for.” When in 1919 he presented to the Senate the Versailles treaty, which included the Covenant of his beloved League of Nations, he declared: “It was of this that we dreamed at our birth.” But like John Quincy Adams, Wilson understood the difference between ideological aspiration and historical possibility. Like Adams, he fitted his ideals to the circumstances he confronted.
Perhaps the most famous distillation of Wilson’s thinking is to be found in his war address of April 2, 1917, when he said, “The world must be made safe for democracy.” That maxim, and the entire scheme of “Wilsonianism” that it is thought to represent, have often been derided as hopelessly idealistic. The realist George F. Kennan excoriated Wilson for “the colossal conceit of thinking that you could suddenly make international life over into what you believed to be your own image.”
That is a formidable criticism, but it is as misdirected at Wilson as it would have been at the Founders. Properly understood, Wilson’s simple declarative sentence—“The world must be made safe for democracy”—constituted a realistic as well as an idealistic lodestar for American foreign policy. It guided American diplomacy in the season of its greatest success, the half century following World War II. Wilson, maligned as a dewy-eyed idealist, should instead be celebrated as the original architect of America’s most realistic—and successful—foreign policies.
More clearly than his critics, Wilson recognized that the world now bristled with dangers that no single state could contain, even as it shimmered with prospects that could be seized only by states acting together—that it presented threats incubated by emerging technologies, and opportunities generated by the gathering momentum of the Industrial Revolution. Making such a world safe for democracy required more than the comforting counsels of isolation, and more than taking the inherited international order as a given and conducting the business of great-power diplomacy as usual. It required, rather, active engagement with other states to muzzle the dogs of war, suppress weapons of mass destruction, and improve both standards of living and international comity through economic liberalization. Most urgently, it required new institutions that would import into the international arena at least a modicum of the trust, habits of reciprocity, and rule of law that obtained in well-ordered national polities. These were ambitious goals, but they were also realizable, as time would tell.
At the heart of Wilson’s program lay the League of Nations. Yet for all the league’s apparent novelty, in Wilson’s view it honored a Westphalian objective: “affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.” The league is best understood not as a revolutionary menace to the Westphalian system, but as an evolutionary adaptation of venerable practices to modern circumstances. Respect for sovereignty was its essence. Only “fully self-governing”—that is, sovereign—states, dominions, or colonies were eligible for membership. Most actions required unanimous consent. Lacking an armed force, the league depended on its member states, especially the great powers, for enforcement of its provisions.
Nor did Wilson propose a wholesale cession of American sovereignty to the new body. He was offering a kind of grand bargain: the United States would abjure its historic isolationism and agree to play an engaged international role—but only if the rules of the international system were altered in accordance with American goals, putting the world on a pathway to more international cooperation and better international behavior.
The ironic result is well known. Wilsonianism was stillborn at the end of World War I, with consequences that spawned the Great Depression and the Second World War. But when the United States emerged from that latter struggle, the story was dramatically different. Understanding the singular blend of idealism and realism that crystallized in that pivotal moment is essential to comprehending the success of the international post–World War II order—and the danger of forgetting its relevance to the 21st century....
On the occasion of the first gathering of the United Nations, in San Francisco on April 25, 1945, President Harry S. Truman used words that could have been Wilson’s—or Paine’s: “The responsibility of great states is to serve and not to dominate the peoples of the world.” And although the United States undeniably continued to pursue what Wilson once scorned as its own “aggrandizement and material benefit” (considerations never absent from American foreign policy, nor should they be), what is most remarkable is the way Washington created what the Norwegian scholar Geir Lundestad has called an “empire by invitation.”...
The Americans of that era helped to erect an array of multilateral institutions, including the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (or World Bank), and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which would later evolve into the World Trade Organization. Membership in those institutions was generally open to all, excepting nations in the Communist bloc. Participating states ceded only marginal elements of their sovereignty. The United Nations in particular, held in check by the veto power of each permanent member of the Security Council, could not plausibly be described as a supranational world government. But taken together, these innovative institutions brought a measure of law and reciprocity to international politics....
Most of those multilateral structures are now more than 50 years old. Many, probably all, need substantial reform. And even this impressive matrix of institutions may be ill-suited to the tasks of extinguishing radical Islamist terrorism and adapting to climate change. But international institutions well matched to the dawning century can rise only from the foundations of mutual trust that a half century of multilateral life cemented—and that the policies of the past several years have shaken.
Here is where the full meaning of Wilson’s call, “The world must be made safe for democracy,” becomes clear and compelling. Wilson tempered his diplomatic ideals with a pragmatic comprehension of the modern world, of its possibilities and its dangers. He respected the pride and the prerogatives of other peoples. He shrewdly calculated the reach as well as the limits of American power. Perhaps most important, he was attentive to what kind of foreign policy, resting on principles of moral legitimacy, the American public would embrace.
Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman took the lessons. They asked only that the world be made safe for democracy, not that the world be made democratic. They understood the complexities of human cussedness and the constraints on even America’s formidable power. They would surely have hesitated to wage a preemptive war against Iraq that grossly overestimated America’s capacity to achieve its goals.
The damage done by this distortion of the Wilsonian legacy has yet to be fully calculated. Future historians will take its measure not only in the worldwide surge of anti-American sentiment, but also in the erosion of confidence in the multinational institutions—including NATO, the UN, the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO—that the United States itself had so painstakingly nurtured across decades....