WHAT HAS WILSONIANISM TO DO WITH LIBERALIZATION?:

Riddle of the Sands: A review of A Path Out of the Desert: A Grand Strategy for America in the Middle East, by Kenneth M. Pollack; The Politics of Chaos in the Middle East, by Olivier Roy; and Beyond Terror and Martyrdom: The Future of the Middle East, by Gilles Kepel (Andrew C. McCarthy, Spring 2009, Claremont Review of Books)

None of George W. Bush's alleged treacheries more riles leftists than that, on the international stage, he was one of them. For his dreamy Wilsonian trouble, he was savaged mercilessly, the Left having ceased to see the wisdom in democracy evangelism, military adventures, and edgy security tactics once the Clinton Administration closed shop.

Bush's exodus was marked by historically low approval ratings, his party ejected from power after successive electoral routs. Yet, as the heat of campaign cant gave way to the cold reality of governing, President Barack Obama retained his predecessor's defense secretary while filling other top posts with Iraq invasion supporters and democratization devotees. "Progressives" are painting new lipstick on the enlightened interventionism they've spent the last several years deriding as a pig. And so the rush is on to reclaim Woodrow Wilson from the Bush legacy. The problem, it turns out, was not the ambitious project to remake the Muslim Middle East. It's just that the noble effort was horribly implemented by incompetent, moralistic dullards who never really believed in it and who, in their arrogant disregard for the rule of law, came to mirror the terrorists they were fighting.

That is the collective story of three new books addressing post-Bush Middle East policy.

Not only did FDR and Truman cede Eastern Europe to Communist domination and Democrats since JFK pursue a fairly isolationist foreign policy, but even Wilson threw the colonies the mercy of the European imperialists to try and get support for his pet project, the League of Nations. The great liberators have been the two moral conservatives--Reagan and Bush.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 12, 2009 6:07 AM