December 18, 2020
IT ENDED IN 1919:
The End of the Wilsonian Era: Why Liberal Internationalism Failed (Walter Russell Mead, January/February 2021, Foreign Affairs)
One hundred years after the U.S. Senate humiliated President Woodrow Wilson by rejecting the Treaty of Versailles, Princeton University, which Wilson led as its president before launching his political career, struck his name from its famous school of international affairs. As "cancellations" go, this one is at least arguably deserved. Wilson was an egregious racist even by the standards of his time, and the man behind the persecution of his own political opponents and the abuses of the first Red Scare has been celebrated for far too long and far too uncritically.But however problematic Wilson's personal views and domestic policies were, as a statesman and ideologist, he must be counted among the most influential makers of the modern world. He was not a particularly original thinker. More than a century before Wilson proposed the League of Nations, Tsar Alexander I of Russia had alarmed his fellow rulers at the Congress of Vienna by articulating a similar vision: an international system that would rest on a moral consensus upheld by a concert of powers that would operate from a shared set of ideas about legitimate sovereignty. By Wilson's time, moreover, the belief that democratic institutions contributed to international peace whereas absolute monarchies were inherently warlike and unstable was almost a commonplace observation among educated Americans and Britons. Wilson's contribution was to synthesize those ideas into a concrete program for a rules-based order grounded in a set of international institutions.
Even that simple description depicts how his vision was stillborn. An inveterate racist, he happily traded the legitimate sovereignty--that held by free peoples who determine the course of their own nation--of Europe's colonies for his League, which we never joined and which never worked even in later incarnations. Recall that when W issued the most forthright summons ever to the UN to enforce its own rules and rulings it failed to do so and America had to take on the task instead. Of course, the reason Saddam existed was because Wilson had betrayed the Arab world in the first place. His legacy was a century of wars on behalf of the American values he failed to vindicate when he had the opportunity.
Posted by Orrin Judd at December 18, 2020 9:10 AM