HE WOULD CHOOSE THE WRONG HALF OF WILSONIANISM:

Obama Delivers Another Clunker (Peter Beinart, 5/24/10, Daily Beast)

Obama’s problem is not that he doesn’t have big, serious ideas about foreign policy. To the contrary, he has several of them, which he trots out again and again. The first is “collective security,” the idea that the same forces that threaten the United States—global warming, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, financial collapse—also threaten most other nations, and that they can only be solved through intensive global cooperation. In the United States, collective security was the brainchild of Woodrow Wilson, who told Americans that they were entering World War I not to restore the European balance of power, but to create a League of Nations that would bring all the world’s “civilized” nations together to safeguard their common interest in prosperity and peace. It has been the default liberal foreign policy vision ever since.

It has also been a failure ever since, while the other 13 points of Wilsonianism--which the Gipper and W in particular fought for--have succeeded.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 24, 2010 3:38 PM