In recent years, Woodrow Wilson has returned to feature prominently in the public discourse on the role the United States in the world. For students US foreign relations, this is hardly a surprising development. Wilson was responsible for articulating a vision the US role in the world-usually described as internationalism-that has remained, despite well-known flaws and scores critics over the years, dominant in shaping American rhetoric and self-image, if not always policies, vis-a-vis the rest the world. Competing foreign policy postures, such as isolationism or interest realism, have surely been influential in particular eras and contexts. But they have failed to match the ideological and popular appeal liberal internationalism, which has echoed so compellingly the most basic ideas many Americans hold about who they are, what their country is about, and what it should stand for in the world. And not only Americans. Just now it is hard to imagine, but should not be forgotten, that for much history since the American Revolution the example the United States and its ideals have served as inspiration to countless movements-in Latin America, Europe, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere-that sought to throw off foreign rule. Perhaps the single most striking example this pattern was the Wilsonian moment 1919: after a world war that caused unprecedented devastation, Wilson was hailed in Europe, and many places besides, as a herald peace, independence, and dignity. For a brief period, in the words H. G. Wells, he ceased to be a common statesman; he became a Messiah.'The American president soon proved to be a false Messiah, and in the decades since Wilson, his ideas and his policies have had many critics. In the wake Versailles, the president's Republican opponents attacked him for compromising American sovereignty in his quest for the League Nations, while erstwhile supporters were disappointed that he had not gone far enough: rather than heralding the promised new where right would triumph over might, the peace treaty reaffirmed the old order empire and domination. In the middle decades the last century, as the collapse the Versailles settlement led to another world war and then the Cold War, Wilson came under fire realist critics like E. H. Carr, Hans Morgenthau, and George F. Kennan. They ridiculed his naive, impractical idealism and moralism, and called for a dear-eyed approach to international relations that proceeded, to cite latter-day realist Condoleezza Rice, from the firm ground the national interest, not the interests an illusory international community.2Some these early critics have since changed their views. Kennan, shaken by the superpower conflict that brought the world to the brink nuclear war, admitted in 1989 that he had reversed his earlier view Wilson and now saw him as a leader of broad vision and acute sensitivities who was ahead any other statesman his time.3 Henry Kissinger, an icon realpolitik, has nevertheless credited Wilson with a pivotal role in defining the terms American engagement with the wider world, and, indeed, this view reflects a broad consensus among commentators on US foreign policy. The international posture the administration George W. Bush, with its emphasis on the forceful projection America's power abroad and on the close relationship it envisions between spreading American ideals and safeguarding American interests, is often described as one that harks back to Wilson's vision. But so were the (quite different) foreign policies the preceding administration. For that matter, the foreign policies nearly every American president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt can be understood, in one way or another, to owe a debt to Woodrow Wilson. The frequent invocation Wilson's ghost to describe a diverse range approaches and policies, however, has done nothing to clarify the precise meaning the term. …
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May 17, 2021
Kim Girouard + 1
Open Access
