Margaret MacMillan: The Flawed Wilsonian Dream
[Margaret MacMillan, a professor of history and provost of Trinity College in the University of Toronto, is the author of “Women of the Raj” and “Paris 1919.” Her most recent book is “Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World.”]
Today’s presidential candidates are understandably cautious when it comes to foreign policy, especially about stepping into the minefields of Iraq. But in their remarks, it is possible to discern an assumption about the rightness of American leadership in world affairs – a notion that is the legacy of Woodrow Wilson.
In January of 2006, when Hillary Clinton spoke at an event to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, she warned, “We cannot lead the rest of the world if we do not have a vision of where we are headed and if we do not summon our leadership, not just based on our military strength, but on the strength of our values and our ideals as well.”
Barack Obama accepts that mission, too, as well as the Wilsonian view that the United States is more secure in a prosperous and peaceful world. But he is more aware of the dangers of such thinking. Quoted in a profile in this week’s New Yorker, he says: “The same idealism can express itself in a sense that we can remake the world any way we want by flipping a switch, because we’re technologically superior or we’re wealthier or we’re morally superior. And when our idealism spills into that kind of naïveté and an unwillingness to acknowledge history and the weight of other cultures, then we get ourselves into trouble, as we did in Vietnam.”
Since Wilson was president, the United States has positioned itself as the keeper of the world’s conscience and as the model for other nations to emulate. Over the years foreigners like me have both shared that view and resented it, because what looks like leadership from Washington can feel like bullying elsewhere....
Wilson still arouses strong reactions around the world. In the United States, he is widely regarded as one of the great foreign policy presidents, a visionary who bore the gift of a better, fairer world to the Europeans, who reacted with jeers and contempt. Even American statesmen who fall on the realist end of the spectrum admire Wilson’s vision and his attempt to build a new international order. President Richard Nixon hung Wilson’s portrait on the wall of the Cabinet Room. George W. Bush sounds positively Wilsonian when he talks of spreading democracy worldwide and encouraging free trade among nations as ways to promote stability.
The view among Europeans is quite different. There Wilson is often seen as a meddlesome and self-righteous pedant, even, in John Maynard Keynes’s word, “a booby.” His idea of building an international system based on a League of Nations and collective security has been attacked over the decades as unworkable or, worse, a cover for American hegemony. Europeans on the right have tended to see Wilsonianism as dangerously naïve; peace is kept rather by being strong yourself and working for a balance of power. Lenin and left-wing Europeans since him, in contrast, have argued that the League of Nations was simply a society of imperialists who would do their best to keep the oppressed of the world under control....
A French diplomat of Wilson’s time believed that if the president had lived in a different, less democratic era he would have been a tyrant “because he does not seem to have the slightest conception that he can ever be wrong.” There have been times when that assertion could apply to the United States itself. Wilson’s influence has done much good, but, as Obama warns, it can lead American presidents and their administrations to see the world as they would like it to be and not as it is.
Read entire article at NYT
Today’s presidential candidates are understandably cautious when it comes to foreign policy, especially about stepping into the minefields of Iraq. But in their remarks, it is possible to discern an assumption about the rightness of American leadership in world affairs – a notion that is the legacy of Woodrow Wilson.
In January of 2006, when Hillary Clinton spoke at an event to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, she warned, “We cannot lead the rest of the world if we do not have a vision of where we are headed and if we do not summon our leadership, not just based on our military strength, but on the strength of our values and our ideals as well.”
Barack Obama accepts that mission, too, as well as the Wilsonian view that the United States is more secure in a prosperous and peaceful world. But he is more aware of the dangers of such thinking. Quoted in a profile in this week’s New Yorker, he says: “The same idealism can express itself in a sense that we can remake the world any way we want by flipping a switch, because we’re technologically superior or we’re wealthier or we’re morally superior. And when our idealism spills into that kind of naïveté and an unwillingness to acknowledge history and the weight of other cultures, then we get ourselves into trouble, as we did in Vietnam.”
Since Wilson was president, the United States has positioned itself as the keeper of the world’s conscience and as the model for other nations to emulate. Over the years foreigners like me have both shared that view and resented it, because what looks like leadership from Washington can feel like bullying elsewhere....
Wilson still arouses strong reactions around the world. In the United States, he is widely regarded as one of the great foreign policy presidents, a visionary who bore the gift of a better, fairer world to the Europeans, who reacted with jeers and contempt. Even American statesmen who fall on the realist end of the spectrum admire Wilson’s vision and his attempt to build a new international order. President Richard Nixon hung Wilson’s portrait on the wall of the Cabinet Room. George W. Bush sounds positively Wilsonian when he talks of spreading democracy worldwide and encouraging free trade among nations as ways to promote stability.
The view among Europeans is quite different. There Wilson is often seen as a meddlesome and self-righteous pedant, even, in John Maynard Keynes’s word, “a booby.” His idea of building an international system based on a League of Nations and collective security has been attacked over the decades as unworkable or, worse, a cover for American hegemony. Europeans on the right have tended to see Wilsonianism as dangerously naïve; peace is kept rather by being strong yourself and working for a balance of power. Lenin and left-wing Europeans since him, in contrast, have argued that the League of Nations was simply a society of imperialists who would do their best to keep the oppressed of the world under control....
A French diplomat of Wilson’s time believed that if the president had lived in a different, less democratic era he would have been a tyrant “because he does not seem to have the slightest conception that he can ever be wrong.” There have been times when that assertion could apply to the United States itself. Wilson’s influence has done much good, but, as Obama warns, it can lead American presidents and their administrations to see the world as they would like it to be and not as it is.