Woodrow Wilson’s “New Diplomacy”

Abstract

is an old story that Woodrow Wilson came to office expecting to deal mainly with domestic There is his well-known remark to a friend during his presidential inauguration in March 1913: It would be an irony of fate if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign affairs. The remark has often been taken as a candid, if unguarded, confession of inadequacy in the field of diplomacy. If so, it seems quite out of character for so self-confident a man. More likely, as the distinguished historian Arthur Link once observed, Wilson simply recognizing the obvious fact of his primary concern with domestic issues and his superior training for leadership in solving them.1 The expectation of the president-elect did not appear unreasonable at that time. There were, it is true, the issues posed by the Mexican Revolution that the outgoing Taft administration had left to its successor. Even here, however, it was not unreasonable at the outset to see these issues yielding to measures traditionally employed in dealing with political instability south of the border. Elsewhere in the hemisphere, events requiring a response from Washington did not appear to hold out an element of novelty or to necessitate special attention. In Asia, novel developments were evidently in the making; but there our interests were still quite modest. Toward Europe, a policy of detachment from what George Washington had characterized as the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics remained firmly in place. That this most hallowed of American diplomatic traditions would be challenged within a brief period by the outbreak of a general European war occurred only to a handful of observers. In the event, Wilson's expectation was not fulfilled. In the course of his tenure in office, Wilson was confronted with a range of diplomatic issues, the novelty and complexity of which were without precedent in the nation s history. How prepared was he to deal with these issues? Considered from the vantage point of his academic training and teaching experience, the answer must be that he was not well prepared. Wilson's training had not emphasized the disciplines conventionally regarded as necessary for the diplomatist. Nor did his teaching experience compensate for his lack of academic preparation. This experience was by and large limited to the fields of American history and politics, and what we would term today political development. Occasionally, Wilson taught courses in comparative government. He once gave lectures in interna-