March 8, 2010
THE LOSING OF WWI:
Wilson, Past and Present: The neoconservatives turned Woodrow Wilson into something he was not. In truth, Obama is more like him than Bush ever was. (Trygve Throntveit, Spring 2010, Democracy)
[C]ooper’s book suggests the irrelevance of Wilson’s vision to the self-styled "Wilsonians" who have shaped American policy since his time. Take FDR. For him, Wilson’s political failure evinced a flaw in Wilson’s vision. Combined with the belief that America–having beaten the Depression and the Nazis–had things figured out, FDR sought a postwar architecture that facilitated pursuit of the world’s best interests as America understood them. His successors in both parties followed his lead, winding up in both Vietnam and Iraq, among countless places mostly forgotten. All of them, at one point or another, claimed the banner of Wilsonianism.Applied to such imperial internationalism, the Wilsonian label would seem a libel to Wilson. Yet this brand of internationalism has cornered the conceptual market, so that any politician supporting constructive engagement with the outside world has to invoke the "realistic" idealism of the postwar philosopher kings. Compounding the irony, the memory of World War I as a failure has deposed Wilson from his eponymous pantheon, so that even "Wilsonian" liberals treat him like the crazy uncle in the attic. Barack Obama’s Nobel acceptance was telling. Though briefly mentioning Wilson’s own Peace Prize for his League of Nations campaign, Obama consistently invoked post-1945 administrations in both describing how force could underwrite peace and rejecting the "stark choice between the narrow pursuit of interests or an endless campaign to impose our values around the world."
Yet if Wilson has a contemporary avatar, surely it is Obama, whose 2008 campaign promised a deliberative alternative reminiscent of Wilson’s. Contrary to disgruntled Republicans citing his campaign pledges of "pragmatic" governance, Obama has insisted that deliberation does not mean "getting chronically steamrolled" in the name of centrism. Contrary to those further left who sneer at his "pragmatism," he continues to assert that deliberation means approaching issues critically, empirically, and compassionately rather than dogmatically. And despite countless difficulties, he seems hopeful not only of building such deliberative capacities into American government, but of infusing a new appreciation of them into American culture.
History might seem against him. For decades, Americans have trumpeted deliberative ideals while accepting policies that skipped the deliberation, masking domestic conflicts with economic growth and overcoming international differences through economic or military coercion. But they also recently elected a president espousing two impeccably Wilsonian ideals. The first is the promotion, at home, of a political culture in which ideals, visions, and values are tested against the changing circumstances and differing perspectives that define life in a dynamic, diverse, free society. The second is the adoption of a similar approach to international affairs. Like no president since Wilson, Obama has insisted on America’s responsibility not just to subordinate narrow national interests to common international interests, but to let other peoples help determine what those interests are and how to pursue them.
Close. There are basically two different Wilsons in conflict with one another after WWI. If we examine the Fourteen Points we find the sort of liberalizing/democratizing ideals of a Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush:
I. Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view.II. Absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas, outside territorial waters, alike in peace and in war, except as the seas may be closed in whole or in part by international action for the enforcement of international covenants.
III. The removal, so far as possible, of all economic barriers and the establishment of an equality of trade conditions among all the nations consenting to the peace and associating themselves for its maintenance.
IV. Adequate guarantees given and taken that national armaments will be reduced to the lowest point consistent with domestic safety.
V. A free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined.
VI. The evacuation of all Russian territory and such a settlement of all questions affecting Russia as will secure the best and freest cooperation of the other nations of the world in obtaining for her an unhampered and unembarrassed opportunity for the independent determination of her own political development and national policy and assure her of a sincere welcome into the society of free nations under institutions of her own choosing; and, more than a welcome, assistance also of every kind that she may need and may herself desire. The treatment accorded Russia by her sister nations in the months to come will be the acid test of their good will, of their comprehension of her needs as distinguished from their own interests, and of their intelligent and unselfish sympathy.
VII. Belgium, the whole world will agree, must be evacuated and restored, without any attempt to limit the sovereignty which she enjoys in common with all other free nations. No other single act will serve as this will serve to restore confidence among the nations in the laws which they have themselves set and determined for the government of their relations with one another. Without this healing act the whole structure and validity of international law is forever impaired.
VIII. All French territory should be freed and the invaded portions restored, and the wrong done to France by Prussia in 1871 in the matter of Alsace-Lorraine, which has unsettled the peace of the world for nearly fifty years, should be righted, in order that peace may once more be made secure in the interest of all.
IX. A readjustment of the frontiers of Italy should be effected along clearly recognizable lines of nationality.
X. The peoples of Austria-Hungary, whose place among the nations we wish to see safeguarded and assured, should be accorded the freest opportunity to autonomous development.
XI. Rumania, Serbia, and Montenegro should be evacuated; occupied territories restored; Serbia accorded free and secure access to the sea; and the relations of the several Balkan states to one another determined by friendly counsel along historically established lines of allegiance and nationality; and international guarantees of the political and economic independence and territorial integrity of the several Balkan states should be entered into.
XII. The Turkish portion of the present Ottoman Empire should be assured a secure sovereignty, but the other nationalities which are now under Turkish rule should be assured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development, and the Dardanelles should be permanently opened as a free passage to the ships and commerce of all nations under international guarantees.
XIII. An independent Polish state should be erected which should include the territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations, which should be assured a free and secure access to the sea, and whose political and economic independence and territorial integrity should be guaranteed by international covenant.
XIV. A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.
Had President Wilson sought to vindicate the ideas here it would have gone a long way towards avoiding WWII, the Cold War and the War on Islamicism (see David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace). Instead he was willing to sell out pretty much every people in order to obtain the transnational institution upon which his heary was set, the League.
Mr. Obama does indeed resemble this Wilson, the one who doesn't really care if a regime is oppressive so long as its leader is willing to "deliberate" with him. The reviewer states that "Like no president since Wilson, Obama has insisted on America’s responsibility not just to subordinate narrow national interests to common international interests, but to let other peoples help determine what those interests are and how to pursue them." But what is meant here is that the universal rights upon which America is based are to be eschewed and it is to be left up, not to other peoples, but to those who exercise power over them to tell us what their interests are and how they'll pursue them. It is the abandonment of idealism altogether in our foreign policy and the embrace of Realism. It is, literally, un-American. But it is certainly, and tragically, Wilsonian.