Let’s Build That Wall(The Indian Express)
Woodrow Wilson’s venerated but dubious foreign policy has exhausted its moral core.
What to make of an American president who proclaims that “the principle of public right must henceforth take precedence over the individual interests of particular nations”? The imperative mood, the unqualified generalisation, the moral grandiloquence: these are the rhetorical habits of American imperialism. Though the statement was uttered nearly a century ago by President Woodrow Wilson, it echoes the evangelism of George W. Bush: “Freedom is the non-negotiable demand of human dignity.”
US President Donald Trump represents the demise of this venerable, dubious legacy. Challenged about his respect for Vladimir Putin despite Putin’s use of violent political repression, Trump once replied, “There are a lot of killers. You think our country’s so innocent?” This exhaustion of moral self-belief has found a material form in Trump’s recently proposed budget, which would slash diplomacy, bulk up the military, and fund a border wall.The foreign policy of America First is the final stage of Wilsonianism gone to rot.
Tony Smith’s new book, Why Wilson Matters: The Origin of American Liberal Internationalism and Its Crisis Today, was published too soon after the election to include much commentary on Trump. This makes for a striking sort of timeliness: his history of “liberal internationalism” happens to be a history of what ended only four months ago. Examining the rise and fall of this school of American foreign policy, Smith seeks to “rescue the tradition…from itself”. His focus is Wilson, whose declarations about “the principle of public right” were intended to convince the American public of the wisdom of joining the League of Nations. Wilson brought a close to America’s founding isolationism.
Smith, a leading American scholar of comparative politics, divides the subsequent reign of liberal internationalism into three phases: “classical Wilsonianism”, “hegemonic Wilsonianism”, and “imperialist neo-Wilsonianism”. In the classical phase, Wilson struck a fine balance between idealism and prudence. Following a military coup in Mexico, for example, Wilson offered support and encouragement to the Mexican “Constitutionalists” while helping to cut off trade to the new dictator, General Victoriana Huerta. In just a few years, Mexico returned to democracy. Its liberal constitution of 1917 stands to this day.
Underlying Wilson’s hopeful moderation was both a faith in the peaceful nature of democracies and a scepticism about the possibility of controlling events in foreign nations. Progress in world affairs, however construed, called for a mechanism like the League, whose deliberative nature Wilson hoped would work against the logic of the balance of power, a main cause, he thought, of German bellicosity and World War I. “Your choice,” he told a political rally, “is between the League of Nations and Germanism.”
The League failed to prevent World War II, but its Wilsonian successor, the United Nations, along with other multilateral groups like the European Union, have helped create a new, less murderous world order. Wilson’s democracy agenda, meanwhile, found its most dramatic success in the conversion of Germany and Japan from expansionist autocracies into liberal democracies following postwar American occupation.
In what Smith calls its “hegemonic” phase, during the Cold War, Wilsonianism was subordinated to the containment of communism. Regime change in Iran and Chile and Guatemala, support for a wide range of dictators, arms for illiberal revolutionaries like the Afghan mujahideen—these grave errors of American Cold War policy, Smith’s account suggests, proceeded more from the calculations of the balance of power than from the tenets of Wilsonianism. Perhaps Wilson’s values were not really, truly those of the United States, but his values as such were not discredited by these unscrupulous interventions and strategic follies.
What seemed to undermine the values themselves came after the Cold War: imperialism in a Wilsonian guise. The fall of the Soviet Union left the US without obvious rivals, while the rise of democracy in Eastern Europe and elsewhere indicated that liberalism could take root in previously authoritarian societies. Thus arose a new mentality Smith trenchantly describes as a kind of Wilsonian Leninism. The delicate contingency with which Wilson viewed the emergence of democracy mutated into a teleological assurance that liberalism was humanity’s imminent destiny; the caution and gradualism of Wilson’s diplomacy grew into the violent immediatism of the Iraq War. Such an attempt to impose Wilsonian values was itself a betrayal of Wilsonianism.
Trump’s announcement of his recent missile strike in Syria sounded like the tradition’s last gasp. “America stands for justice,” he proclaimed, even as he used the spectacle to show up unnamed predecessors, who he described as having “failed and failed very dramatically”. Here is the bloviating and mendacity so many now associate with “liberal internationalism”. In fact, the moral component of American foreign policy has been the source of its glory and its tragedy both. Barack Obama tried, and failed, to disentangle this complexity; we are now witnessing the attempt to bury it.
Alex Traub is an American journalist based in India
What to make of an American president who proclaims that “the principle of public right must henceforth take precedence over the individual interests of particular nations”? The imperative mood, the unqualified generalisation, the moral grandiloquence: these are the rhetorical habits of American imperialism. Though the statement was uttered nearly a century ago by President Woodrow Wilson, it echoes the evangelism of George W. Bush: “Freedom is the non-negotiable demand of human dignity.”
US President Donald Trump represents the demise of this venerable, dubious legacy. Challenged about his respect for Vladimir Putin despite Putin’s use of violent political repression, Trump once replied, “There are a lot of killers. You think our country’s so innocent?” This exhaustion of moral self-belief has found a material form in Trump’s recently proposed budget, which would slash diplomacy, bulk up the military, and fund a border wall.The foreign policy of America First is the final stage of Wilsonianism gone to rot.
Tony Smith’s new book, Why Wilson Matters: The Origin of American Liberal Internationalism and Its Crisis Today, was published too soon after the election to include much commentary on Trump. This makes for a striking sort of timeliness: his history of “liberal internationalism” happens to be a history of what ended only four months ago. Examining the rise and fall of this school of American foreign policy, Smith seeks to “rescue the tradition…from itself”. His focus is Wilson, whose declarations about “the principle of public right” were intended to convince the American public of the wisdom of joining the League of Nations. Wilson brought a close to America’s founding isolationism.
Smith, a leading American scholar of comparative politics, divides the subsequent reign of liberal internationalism into three phases: “classical Wilsonianism”, “hegemonic Wilsonianism”, and “imperialist neo-Wilsonianism”. In the classical phase, Wilson struck a fine balance between idealism and prudence. Following a military coup in Mexico, for example, Wilson offered support and encouragement to the Mexican “Constitutionalists” while helping to cut off trade to the new dictator, General Victoriana Huerta. In just a few years, Mexico returned to democracy. Its liberal constitution of 1917 stands to this day.
Underlying Wilson’s hopeful moderation was both a faith in the peaceful nature of democracies and a scepticism about the possibility of controlling events in foreign nations. Progress in world affairs, however construed, called for a mechanism like the League, whose deliberative nature Wilson hoped would work against the logic of the balance of power, a main cause, he thought, of German bellicosity and World War I. “Your choice,” he told a political rally, “is between the League of Nations and Germanism.”
The League failed to prevent World War II, but its Wilsonian successor, the United Nations, along with other multilateral groups like the European Union, have helped create a new, less murderous world order. Wilson’s democracy agenda, meanwhile, found its most dramatic success in the conversion of Germany and Japan from expansionist autocracies into liberal democracies following postwar American occupation.
In what Smith calls its “hegemonic” phase, during the Cold War, Wilsonianism was subordinated to the containment of communism. Regime change in Iran and Chile and Guatemala, support for a wide range of dictators, arms for illiberal revolutionaries like the Afghan mujahideen—these grave errors of American Cold War policy, Smith’s account suggests, proceeded more from the calculations of the balance of power than from the tenets of Wilsonianism. Perhaps Wilson’s values were not really, truly those of the United States, but his values as such were not discredited by these unscrupulous interventions and strategic follies.
What seemed to undermine the values themselves came after the Cold War: imperialism in a Wilsonian guise. The fall of the Soviet Union left the US without obvious rivals, while the rise of democracy in Eastern Europe and elsewhere indicated that liberalism could take root in previously authoritarian societies. Thus arose a new mentality Smith trenchantly describes as a kind of Wilsonian Leninism. The delicate contingency with which Wilson viewed the emergence of democracy mutated into a teleological assurance that liberalism was humanity’s imminent destiny; the caution and gradualism of Wilson’s diplomacy grew into the violent immediatism of the Iraq War. Such an attempt to impose Wilsonian values was itself a betrayal of Wilsonianism.
Trump’s announcement of his recent missile strike in Syria sounded like the tradition’s last gasp. “America stands for justice,” he proclaimed, even as he used the spectacle to show up unnamed predecessors, who he described as having “failed and failed very dramatically”. Here is the bloviating and mendacity so many now associate with “liberal internationalism”. In fact, the moral component of American foreign policy has been the source of its glory and its tragedy both. Barack Obama tried, and failed, to disentangle this complexity; we are now witnessing the attempt to bury it.
Alex Traub is an American journalist based in India
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