The Crisis of American Foreign Policy: Wilsonianism in the Twenty-first Century [Course Book ed.] 9781400829774

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THE CRISIS OF

AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY

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THE CRISIS OF

AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY Wilsonianism in the Twenty-first Century

G. John Ikenberry Thomas J. Knock Anne-Marie Slaughter Tony Smith Princeton University Press Princeton and Oxford

Copyright © 2009 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The crisis of American foreign policy : Wilsonianism in the twenty-first century / G. John Ikenberry . . . [et al.]. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-691-13969-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. United States—Foreign relations—2001– 2. Wilson, Woodrow, 1856–1924—Influence. 3. International relations. I. Ikenberry, G. John. JZ1469.C75 2009 327.73—dc22 2008028823 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Electra Printed on acid-free paper. ∞ press.princeton.edu Printed in the United States of America 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Contents

Introduction Woodrow Wilson, the Bush Administration, and the Future of Liberal Internationalism n G. John Ikenberry

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1. “Playing for a Hundred Years Hence” Woodrow Wilson’s Internationalism and His Would-Be Heirs n Thomas J. Knock

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2. Wilsonianism after Iraq The End of Liberal Internationalism? n Tony Smith

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3. Wilsonianism in the Twenty-first Century n Anne-Marie Slaughter

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Notes

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Contributors

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Index

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THE CRISIS OF

AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY

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Introduction Woodrow Wilson, the Bush Administration, and the Future of Liberal Internationalism G. John Ikenberry

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as George Bush the heir of Woodrow Wilson? This is a question of some importance. In the years since September 11, the Bush administration pursued one of the most controversial foreign policies in American history. It articulated a sweeping new doctrine of national security based on provocative ideas about American global dominance, the preventive use of force, coalitions of the willing, and the struggle between liberty and evil. In the spring of 2003, this doctrine provided the intellectual backdrop for the invasion of Iraq—a costly and contested war that has now gone on longer than America’s military involvement in World War II. As the invasion turned into a protracted war, the Bush administration increasingly invoked liberal internationalist ideas to justify its actions. In his now famous Second Inaugural address, George W. Bush stood on the steps of the U.S. Capitol and proclaimed that “We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.” The echoes of Woodrow Wilson and the Cold War liberal internationalism of Truman and Kennedy were unmistakable. Bush wanted Iraq to be seen ostensibly as part of America’s historic commitment—reaching back to Wilson—to advance the cause of freedom and democracy worldwide. But is this true? Did Bush foreign policy reflect continuity with America’s liberal internationalist past or a radical break with it? As the Iraq war has turned into a crisis of global significance, answers to this question become critical because we want to identify the causes of this debacle. We want to know not just “who” is responsible for the Iraq

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war but “what” is responsible—“what” in the sense of ideas and ideological impulses. Did Bush foreign policy—and the Iraq war in particular— grow out of the Wilsonian tradition or was it actually an aberration or even the antithesis of this tradition? This is another way of asking if liberals share the blame for the Iraq war. After all, many liberals did in fact support the invasion. Was the Iraq war an outgrowth—at least indirectly— of an evolved Wilsonian worldview that is widely shared across the political spectrum in America, or was American foreign policy hijacked by a group of ideological outliers who hid behind Wilsonian ideas but were ultimately wielding a very different vision of America and the world?1 The essays in this book debate these questions.2 Tony Smith argues that the Bush administration and the neoconservative architects of the Iraq war were the natural heirs to the Wilsonian tradition. Wilson and post1945 liberal internationalists blazed a trail that Bush followed. In this view, it is America’s commitment to promote democracy worldwide—a sort of liberal imperial ambition—that is at the core of Wilsonianism, and it was the animating vision behind the Bush Doctrine. Thomas Knock and Anne-Marie Slaughter disagree, each arguing that the Wilsonian vision was not directly concerned with the spread of democracy but rather with the building of a cooperative and rule-based international order—an idea that the Bush administration actively resisted. Knock emphasizes the centrality of the League of Nations itself—the embodiment of conflict resolution and the collective security idea—to Wilson’s own conception of enlightened international order. Slaughter emphasizes the inherent multilateralism of the Wilsonian vision. For Tony Smith, the Bush administration’s foreign policy was a natural extension of the ideas that liberal internationalists have developed over the decades, including in the 1990s by the Clinton administration. For Knock and Slaughter, the Wilsonian tradition and postwar liberal internationalism are about building rules and institutions that advance collective security and cooperation among democracies. This debate is joined on five key questions. One question is about the actual character and logic of the Bush foreign policy “project.” Was it really about the spread of freedom and democracy—a goal to be pursued when necessary by the force of arms? Or was it about something else, a sort of neoimperial effort to assert American global rule in which

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democracy promotion is decidedly less important, perhaps even a sort of fig leaf to cover more hard-nosed geopolitical ambitions? Was the Iraq war really pursued as part of a global campaign to spread democracy and transform the Middle East, or was this a secondary rationale that was emphasized only after the war faltered? The second question is about Wilsonianism and its essential logic. What precisely was Wilson’s vision? How much was the global spread of democracy at the heart of Woodrow Wilson’s approach to international relations? Is the promotion of democracy the cutting edge of Wilsonianism, or is it international law and collective security? Wilson clearly believed that a world—or at least a core grouping—of mature democracies was a necessary feature of a peaceful and cooperative international order. But how important was the promotion of democracy—and what role did Wilson see for the use of force and regime change in the promotion of democracy? Likewise, was multilateralism—embodied in his beloved League of Nations—simply a means to an end for Wilson or was multilateralism an end in itself, the indispensable essence of the new system of liberal global order that Wilson sought? If the United States abandons multilateralism in favor of the unilateral and unfettered use of American power to foster democracy worldwide, is this simply taking Wilsonianism, as Henry Kissinger argues, “to its ultimate conclusion,” or is it a deep violation of the letter and spirit of the Wilsonian tradition?3 Third, how has liberal internationalism evolved since the days of Woodrow Wilson? The liberal internationalist tradition has not stood still over the course of the twentieth century; it has taken on new ideas and adapted to shifting global realities, particularly in the early decades after World War II and again in the 1990s. During the Cold War, a wider array of institutions was seen as necessary for the progressive governance of world order, and America’s role in the running of the system also expanded. The postwar human rights revolution also expanded the commitments and obligations of the international community, loosening the norms of state sovereignty and nonintervention. By the late 1990s, expansive notions of liberal interventionism had emerged—pursued under the auspices of the United Nations or by the United States as the “indispensable” nation. The question, then, is whether this evolved liberal internationalism or what Tony Smith calls neoliberalism—which is more encompassing and

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interventionist than the original Wilsonian vision—cleared the way and set the stage for the Bush security doctrine. Fourth, does liberal internationalism have within it the principled and institutional safeguards to prevent liberal imperialism? There are few observers today who do not think moments arise when the international community—or, if necessary, the Western democracies—should intervene in troubled countries to prevent genocide, alleviate humanitarian crises, and thwart transnational terrorists. There is also a good deal of support across the political spectrum for international assistance in support of struggling democracies. But how do these Western democracies distinguish between enlightened and legitimate interventions and liberal imperialism? Tony Smith argues that the contemporary “neoliberal” incarnation of liberal internationalism is a slippery slope for American policy makers, built on optimistic assumptions about democracy promotion and peace, that leads inevitably to imperialist adventures. There is much to be admired in the Wilsonian tradition, Smith asserts, but the problem is that it cannot contain its own excesses. In contrast, Thomas Knock and AnneMarie Slaughter argue that Woodrow Wilson’s original conception of liberal international order—in which member nations would consult, cooperate, and constrain one another through a sort of “international common counsel”—provides the corrective mechanisms to prevent abuses. Finally, how relevant is the Wilsonian tradition for the twenty-first century? What the essays agree on is that liberal internationalism is in crisis today—or at least it stands at an intellectual and political juncture—and the direction of American foreign policy after Bush hangs in the balance. Whether Smith is correct or Knock and Slaughter are correct, all agree that the Iraq war has put in jeopardy America’s long commitment to some form of liberal internationalism or another. At one level, the crisis of liberal internationalism is political—endangered by a domestic and global backlash against the Iraq war and the perceived dangers and failures of Bush administration foreign policy. Bush, at least to some extent, has wrapped himself in Wilsonian clothing and so—even if he has not appropriated the full set of liberal internationalist ideas and even if his embrace of these ideas, such as they are, is only cynical—the liberal internationalist agenda is in trouble. By association, the crisis of Bush foreign policy has become a crisis of liberal internationalism. Thus the political question is

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about how liberal internationalism reconstitutes and asserts itself in the post-Bush era. But there are also deeper intellectual questions about the liberal international “project” as such. These are questions about how the international community actually makes good on its commitments to support democracy and human rights around the world. The United States has the military power to act on behalf of the international community, but it alone does not have the legitimacy. As Slaughter suggests, the problem is the weakness of the authority structures at the global level to carry out evolving liberal international goals. What the essays in this volume make clear is that there are really no good options for international order other than to try to rebuild multilateral institutions and strengthen cooperative mechanisms to tackle twenty-first-century global problems. In a fundamental sense, there is no turning back to pre-Wilsonian ideas about international order, such as those associated with the old classical balance of power system. For better or worse, we are all Wilsonians now. In this introduction, I will set out some orienting ideas about these five questions—and thereby set the stage for the essays that follow.

George W. Bush’s Foreign Policy and Liberal Internationalism The Bush administration did herald a remarkable turn in American foreign policy: a conservative American president—perhaps the most conservative in the postwar era—who campaigned for office seeking a return to a “realist” philosophy of foreign policy but who, in the course of events, invoked liberal internationalist ideas to justify a controversial war and an expansive global agenda. In one sense, this might not be surprising. American presidents from FDR and Truman to Kennedy and Reagan to Clinton have made the championing of democracy and freedom a centerpiece of their foreign policy. At the very outset of the Cold War, President Truman called on the United States to “support free peoples who are resisting subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” President Kennedy proclaimed in his inaugural address that America “shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in

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order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” In his 1982 speech before the British Parliament, President Reagan portrayed the struggle for liberty and democracy as the central drama of a bloody twentieth century: “Let us now begin a major effort to secure the best—a crusade for freedom that will engage the faith and fortitude of the next generation. For the sake of peace and justice, let us move toward a world in which all people are at least free to determine their own destiny.” In the aftermath of the Cold War, President Clinton made “enlargement” of the democratic world America’s guiding goal. Indeed, the history of American diplomacy in the twentieth century is the repeated encounter of American liberal ideas with the tough and often unyielding realities of the wider world. Across the decades, these ideas continue to find their way into American diplomacy.4 No less than Henry Kissinger—an icon of the realist alternative to Wilsonianism—concedes that Wilsonianism is the dominant tradition of American foreign policy. “Though Wilson could not convince his own country of its merit, the idea lived on. It is above all to the drumbeat of Wilsonian idealism that American foreign policy has marched since his watershed presidency and continues to march to this day.”5 Nonetheless, the Bush administration’s embrace of Wilsonian ideas is actually quite surprising. President Bush brought to office the rhetoric of a traditional realist. His national security advisor and future secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, had famously written during the 2000 presidential campaign that a Republican administration would return foreign policy to its traditional emphasis on the management of great power relations and the realist pursuit of the national interest.6 Candidate Bush himself had argued that, “I don’t think our troops ought to be used for what’s called nation-building. I think our troops ought to be used to fight and win war.”7 Three years later, Bush would be engaged in the most ambitious nation-building experiment since the 1940s, asserting that bringing democracy to Iraq and the Middle East was critical to world peace and American national security.8 Bush foreign policy passed through several phases. The early “realist” emphasis of the Bush administration was matched with a resistance to the liberal multilateral emphasis of the Clinton years. This was signaled early in the administration by its resistance to a wide array of international

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agreements, including the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change, the International Criminal Court (ICC), the Germ Weapons Convention, and other arms control agreements. It also unilaterally withdrew from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which many experts regard as the cornerstone of modern arms control agreements. Unilateralism, of course, is not a new feature of American foreign policy. In every historical era, the United States has shown a willingness to reject treaties, violate rules, ignore allies, and use military force on its own. But many observers saw the unilateralism of the Bush administration as something much more sweeping—not an occasional ad hoc policy decision but a new strategic orientation or what one pundit touts as the “new unilateralism.”9 The most systematic statement of Bush strategic thinking came after the September 11 attacks with the 2002 National Security Doctrine and the Iraq war, articulating a vision of America as a unipolar state positioned above and beyond the rules and institutions to the global system, providing security and enforcing order. It was a strategy of global rule in which the United States would remain a military power in a class by itself, thereby “making destabilizing arms races pointless and limiting rivalry to trade and other pursuits.”10 American preeminent power would, in effect, put an end to five centuries of great power rivalry. In doing so, it would take the lead in identifying and attacking threats—preemptively if necessary. America was providing the ultimate global public good. In return, the United States would ask to be less encumbered by rules and institutions of the old order. It would not sign the land mine treaty because American troops were uniquely at risk in war zones around the world. It would not sign the ICC treaty because Americans would be uniquely at risk of political prosecutions. In effect, the United States was to become the unipolar provider of global security and order. The leading edge of this new conception of America’s role and rule in the world concerned the use of force. The Bush administration’s security doctrine was new and sweeping. The United States asserted the right to use force anywhere in the world against “terrorists with global reach.” It would do so largely outside the traditional alliance system through coalitions of the willing. The United States would take “anticipatory action” when it determined the use of force was necessary. Because such action would be taken to oppose terrorists or overthrow despotic regimes, it

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would be self-legitimating. Countries were either “with us or against us,” or as Bush announced, “no nation can be neutral in this conflict.” Moreover, this new global security situation was essentially permanent, not just a temporary emergency. There could be no final victory or peace settlement in this new war, so there would be no return to normality.11 The Bush administration was, in effect, announcing unilaterally the new rules of the global security order. It was not seeking a new global consensus on the terms of international order and change, and it was not renegotiating old bargains. The United States was imposing the rules of the new global order, rules that would be ratified not by the support of others but by the lurking presence of American power. This grand strategic move was a more profound shift than is generally appreciated. The Bush administration was not simply acting a bit more unilateral than previous administrations. In rhetoric, doctrine, and ultimately in the Iraq war, the United States was articulating a new logic of global order. The old liberal hegemonic rules, institutions, and bargains were giving way to new American-imposed global arrangements. The grandiosity of the Bush vision—as articulated in the 2002 National Security Strategy—had elements of the “one-world” vision of Woodrow Wilson. The first page of the Bush strategy document proclaims: “Today, the United States enjoys a position of unparalleled military strength and great economic and political influence. In keeping with our heritage and principles, we do not use our strength to press unilateral advantage. We seek instead to create a balance-of-power that favors human freedom.” American dominance would be put in the service of ending arms races and centuries of great power rivalries. The world would be united under American leadership. As Fareed Zakaria noted at the time: “It is a breathtaking statement, promising that American power will transform international politics itself, making the millennia-old struggle over national security obsolete. In some ways, it is the most Wilsonian statement any President has made since Wilson himself, echoing his pledge to use American power to create a ‘universal dominion of right.’”12 The Bush administration’s vision of a world order favoring freedom and protected by American power was the backdrop for the Iraq war and the promulgation of a “global war on terror.” Initially, this war on terror was aimed at an enemy that was “evil” and who “hated us for who we

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were.” But as the Iraq war turned into a protracted and costly struggle, both the rationale for the American presence in Iraq and the aim of the war on terrorism shifted substantially. The Iraq war was less about relinquishing Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction than about bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East. Likewise, the war on terrorism slowly became less a battle against evil than a struggle to overturn tyranny. This was the theme of Bush’s Second Inaugural address, in which the president said that only the “force of human freedom” could “break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and the tolerant . . .” The underlying argument was given more elaboration several weeks later in Bush’s State of the Union address. “In the long run,” he said, “the peace we seek will only be achieved by eliminating the conditions that feed radicalism and ideologies of murder. If whole regions of the world remain in despair and grow in hatred, they will be the recruiting grounds for terror, and that terror will stalk America.”13 The Bush administration had moved from fighting “evil” to combating the socioeconomic conditions that encouraged terrorism. The implication was that the United States would not just need to use military force to destroy terrorists but to engage in a long-term transformation agenda aimed at overturning tyranny and spreading freedom and democracy. Democracy promotion and American national security were one and the same. This new emphasis on ending tyranny fit with the larger global role of the United States. It would not merely be the world’s policeman; it would be the vanguard force that would extend the reach of liberty and democracy into troubled regions. America was doing the world a favor by taking the lead—but its mission was tied directly to creating a safer and more secure environment for the United States. In effect, America would not be safe until the world was fully democratic. As Robert Jervis has noted, Bush was going beyond the Wilsonian vision. Woodrow Wilson wanted to make the world safe for democracy. George Bush wanted to “make the world democratic so the United States could be safe.”14 In effect, Bush was pessimistic that democracy will triumph over tyranny without the exertion of American power—including use of force—and optimistic that the resulting democratic transitions will create the conditions for stable peace.

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Taken together, the Bush administration advanced a set of ideas about American dominance, security threats, political transformation, and the governance of international order. Many observers see echoes of Woodrow Wilson in the vision of a unified world order organized around democracies and inspired by American ideals. Others also see aspects of Wilsonianism in the emphasis on the promotion of democracy and active efforts to speed the forces of history toward a triumph of Western institutions worldwide. But we need to look more closely at the ideas of Woodrow Wilson and the evolution of liberal internationalism during the twentieth century.

The Wilsonian Tradition in American Foreign Policy Woodrow Wilson had a grand liberal vision of world order, but, ironically, he did not bring a developed view of world affairs or an ambitious foreign policy agenda to his presidency in 1913. Nor did he expect to be consumed by foreign affairs. “It would be the irony of fate if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign affairs,” is what he told a Princeton University colleague before he went off to Washington to take the oath of office.15 Nonetheless, Wilson became the founding father of the liberal tradition of American foreign affairs. He did it initially in speeches—speeches during the period of American neutrality and, later, in his justification of war with Germany. It was in a speech before a joint session of Congress in the spring of 1917 that Wilson declared that war against Germany was necessary so the world could be “made safe for democracy.” Indeed the entering intellectual wedge of Wilson’s liberal vision was the conviction—felt most emphatically about Germany—that the internal characteristics of states are decisive in matters of war and peace. Autocratic and militarist states make war; democracies make peace. In retrospect, this is the cornerstone of Wilsonianism and, more generally, the liberal international tradition. Wilson’s famous Fourteen Points speech to Congress, delivered on 8 January 1918, is arguably the most important statement of American foreign policy in the twentieth century. It was Wilson’s statement of American war aims, but it was also a blueprint to reorganize world politics. The

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actual drafting of the speech occurred on 5 January 1918, at the White House when Wilson and Colonel House hammered it into shape. Colonel House records in his diary: “We actually got down to work at half past ten, and finished remaking the map of the world, as we would have it, by half past twelve-o-clock.”16 The Wilsonian tradition of American foreign policy was born. Six ideas make up Wilsonianism. First, the foundation of a peaceful order must be built on a community of democratic states. War was the product of antiquated social systems. Accountable governments that respect the rule of law are essential building blocks of a peaceful and just world order. As Wilson articulated the idea: “A steadfast concert of peace can never be maintained except by a partnership of democratic nations. No autocratic nation could be trusted to keep faith within it or observe its covenants. . . . Only free peoples can hold their purpose and their honor steady.” Democratic states are not just less likely to go to war with one another, they also have capacities to engage in more elaborate and far-reaching forms of cooperation. On 4 July 1918, Wilson went to Mount Vernon and described his vision of postwar world order: “What we seek is the reign of law, based on the consent of the governed and sustained by the organized opinion of mankind.” Second, free trade and socioeconomic exchange have a modernizing and civilizing effect on states, undercutting tyranny and oligopoly and strengthening the fabric of international community. This was the third of Wilson’s fourteen points: “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.” Wilson was simply bringing forward the well-understood idea that trade had a positive impact on relations among states, promoting prosperity and encouraging commitment to peaceful, rule-based relations among nations. Third, international law and international bodies of cooperation and dispute settlement also have a modernizing and civilizing effect on states, promoting peace and strengthening the fabric of international community. As Wilson put it, “the same law that applies to individuals applies to nations.”17 Yet, if Wilson championed a world ordered by international law, he had a very nineteenth-century view of international law. That is,

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Wilson did not see international law primarily as formal, legal-binding commitments that transferred sovereignty upward to international or supranational authorities. International law had more of a socializing dynamic, creating norms and expectations that states would slowly come to embrace as their own. As Thomas Knock notes: “Wilson emphasized that international law actually was ‘not made,’ as such. Rather, it was the result of organic development—‘a body of abstract principles founded upon long established custom.’”18 Wilson did not see the great liberal “project” involving a deep transformation of states themselves as sovereign legal units. States would just act better, which for Wilson meant they would act in less selfish and nationalist ways. So international laws and the systems of collective security anchored in the League of Nations would provide a socializing role, gradually bringing states into a “community of power.” Fourth, a stable and peaceful order must be built around this “community of power.” This was a new concept that Wilson introduced by which he essentially meant collective security, a system of peace sustained by commitments to arms control and disarmament, self-determination, and freedom of the seas. The embodiment of this notion was to be the League of Nations, or as Wilson urged in the last of his Fourteen Points: “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.” Despite the vagueness of the notion of a “community of power,” Wilson was clear that this new international creation would replace older forms of order based on the balance of power, military rivalry, and alliances. In the Wilsonian view, power and security competition would be decomposed and replaced by a community of nations. Fifth, these conditions—democracy, trade, law, collective security— were possible because the world was moving in a progressive and modernizing direction. A “new order of things” was emerging. The world could be made anew. The old world of autocracy, militarism, and despotism could be overturned and a new world of democracy and rule of law was over the horizon. America had a leading role to play in this progressive world-historical drama, but the forces of history were already moving the world in this direction.

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Wilson’s proposals at Versailles were premised on a belief that the world was in the midst of a major democratic revolution. The crowds who cheered him in Europe in the winter of 1918/19 seemed to be confirmation of this fast-developing global revolution. Russia’s revolution was initially seen in this light. With the assumption that Europe and the wider world would embrace American democratic principles, Wilson could pass over otherwise thorny issues of the postwar settlement. His view that a democratic revolution was gaining strength—not an altogether silly idea when he headed for Paris in December 1918—meant that history was on his side and its forces would bring leaders to power in Europe who would buy into his new vision. Alas, in retrospect, the winter of 1918/19 was a democratic high tide rather than a gathering flood—at least as worldhistorical events mattered for the peace treaty and League of Nations.19 But Wilson would not be surprised that in the century to follow the forces of history would again push the world toward democracy, trade, and the rule of law.20 Finally, the United States was at the vanguard of this movement, and it had special responsibilities to lead, direct, and inspire the world due to its founding ideas, geopolitical position, and enlightened leadership (which meant Wilson himself). America was the great moral agent in history. America was God’s chosen midwife of progressive change. Thus, Wilson was not advocating American hegemonic dominance of the global system. Indeed, he was directly rejecting traditional geopolitical dominance by the great powers—America and the European state—of the international system. This vision of America leading the world to a better place is captured in one of Wilson’s last speeches in support of the League of Nations, delivered in Pueblo, Colorado, on 25 September 1919. In the final sentences of his address, Wilson said: “There is one thing that the American people always rise to and extend their hand to, and that is the truth of justice and of liberty and of peace. We have accepted that truth and we are going to be led by it, and it is going to lead us, and through us the world, out into pastures of quietness and peace such as the world never dreamed of before.” Woodrow Wilson’s vision embodied impulses toward both “liberal internationalism” and “liberal imperialism” (or “liberal interventionism”), an awkward and problematic duality that persists today within the liberal

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tradition. The liberal internationalist impulse was embodied in Wilson’s Fourteen Points address and his ambition to forge a postwar order built around law, the consent of the governed, and the organized opinion of mankind. The “liberal imperial” impulse was on display in Wilson’s earlier interventions in Mexico in 1914 and 1916. Wilson said that America’s deployment of force was to help Mexico “adjust her unruly household.” Regarding Latin America, Wilson said: “We are friends of constitutional government in America; we are more than its friends, we are its champions. I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men.” Indeed, Wilson used military force in an attempt to teach Southern republics, intervening in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, and Nicaragua. But Wilson’s enthusiasm for these sorts of adventures did seem to wane during his presidency.21 Thus one can identify a relatively coherent set of ideas that form the core of Woodrow Wilson’s liberal vision. But there are also tensions and ambiguities. As Anne-Marie Slaughter argues in her essay, Wilson’s liberal imperialist impulse was evinced early in his presidential term, but by the time the United States was entering the European war his conception of international order was decidedly built around collective security and self-determination.22 The promotion of democracy did not play a prominent role in Wilson’s agenda to remake the world. This might be partly due to his sobering experience with military intervention in Mexico in particular, as well as a general rethinking of America’s proper role in the world. It was almost surely also due to the optimistic view Wilson had of the coming world democratic revolution.

From Wilsonianism to Liberal Internationalism Woodrow Wilson did not have the last word on how to build a liberal international order. His vision of order was expanded and deepened in the 1940s when America again had an opportunity to shape the world system. FDR and Truman were young admirers of Wilson, and later, as leaders, they built on and modified the earlier ideas and designs. Sobered by the failure of the League of Nations and years of economic upheaval and war, the postwar liberal internationalist project was transformed. Liberal order

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was now to be anchored by a core of Western democracies bound together in a security alliance, and the United States became more integral to the functioning of the economic and security architecture. Along the way, the postwar human rights revolution was set in motion, and by the 1990s it had created aspirations and obligations for the international community well beyond anything Wilson could have imagined. FDR shared Wilson’s vision of an enlightened peace, as he made clear in the Atlantic Charter in 1941. Truman’s belief in the necessity of the United Nations was shaped by his earlier devotion to Wilson’s proposal for a League of Nations. FDR and Truman also learned lessons from Wilson. They cared much more about getting the postwar international economic system organized in an open and orderly manner, and indeed the Roosevelt administration started working on this part of the postwar agenda even before the United States entered the war. More importantly, they saw that Wilson’s vision of a world democratic order was a bridge too far. Postwar order would need to be built around a Western core of states that formed a natural political community. Atlantic community came first. Collective security would be built around traditional alliance partnership and a reformation of the balance of power in light of the ascendance of the Soviet Union. Specific strategic bargains—political, economic, and security—were also part of the post-1945 liberal international order. A broader array of institutions was built and capacities deployed to manage and sustain liberal order. Finally, American power—or hegemony—was built into the postwar liberal order. All of these innovations updated or altered the Wilsonian vision. The general thrust of the postwar liberal international project was that the United States and its partners would need to take a more comprehensive approach to building an open, stable, and secure global environment. This postwar liberal international vision updated Wilsonianism in a variety of ways. First, liberal order would again be built around free trade and open markets, but it would be a more managed openness. Capitalism would be organized internationally and not along national, regional, or imperial lines. In many ways, this is what World War II had been fought over. The Smoot-Hawley tariff, the imperial preference system, and the nationalist and imperial ambitions of Germany, Japan, and other great powers were

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all seen as sources of instability and war. Accordingly, American liberals— starting with FDR and Truman—were convinced that an open system of free trade was an essential precondition for all other progressive international steps. Wilson and the architects of the Versailles settlement had given short shrift to economics, setting the stage for the economic calamities of the 1930s, according to John Maynard Keynes.23 So in the 1940s, Truman emphasized the need for an “economic peace,” which would involve tariff reductions and rules and institutions of trade and investment. Conflicts would be captured and domesticated in an iron cage of multilateral rules, standards, safeguards, and dispute resolution procedures. According to Truman, “this is the way of a civilized community.”24 Further, a new social bargain would underlie the liberal economic order. Progressive notions embedded in New Deal liberalism were brought forward into America’s vision of postwar arrangements. This was the message that Roosevelt and Churchill communicated to the world in the Atlantic Charter of 1941. The industrial democracies would provide a new level of social support—a safety net—under the societies of the Atlantic world. If the citizens of these countries were to live in a more open world economy, their governments would take steps to stabilize and protect market society through the welfare state. Job insurance, retirement support, and other social protections were to help the industrial democracies operate in a free trade system. An open system would provide both winners and losers. Economists argue that in such a system, the winners always win more than losers lose, and if there is a compensation mechanism it is possible for the whole of society to benefit. It was the building of such a compensation mechanism—the modern welfare state—that provided a fundamental support to an economically integrated Western democratic order.25 New permanent multilateral institutions would be deployed to manage a widening array of political, economic, and social relations. It was not enough simply to open the system up. There would need to be an array of transgovernmental and international organizational institutions that would bring government officials together on an ongoing basis to manage economic and political change. This was the conviction of the economic officials who gathered in Bretton Woods in 1944. Many of them took the lesson from the heightened role of governments during the economic

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downturn of the 1930s. Governments would need to play a more direct supervisory role in stabilizing and managing economic order. New forms of intergovernmental cooperation would need to be invented. Indeed, it is no accident that the most ambitious era of international institutional building took place after 1945—bilateral, multilateral, regional, global, economic, political, and security-oriented. The democratic countries would enmesh themselves in dense institutional relationships. Faced with the incipient Cold War and fearing a renewal of European instability, the new Western liberal order would also be tied together by a system of security alliances. Wilson’s collective security would be replaced by cooperative security. This was a very important departure from past security arrangements, and it was something that Wilson himself had resisted. The idea was that Europe and the United States would be part of a single security system. Such a system would ensure that the democratic great powers would not go back to the dangerous game of strategic rivalry and balance of power politics. It helped, of course, to have an emerging Cold War with the Soviet Union to generate this cooperative security arrangement. But the goal of cooperative security was implicit in the other elements of Western order. Without the Cold War, it is not clear that a formal alliance would have emerged as it did. Probably it would not have taken on such an intense and formal character. But a cooperative security order—embodied in a formal alliance institution—provided a framework for the reintegration of West Germany and ensured that the power of the United States would be tied to Europe and rendered more predictable. Power would be exercised within alliance institutions, thereby making American dominance more reliable and connected to Europe and to East Asia. The United States would be the hegemonic leader of the new liberal order. The United States took the lead in organizing and running the order, but it did so on terms that were more or less mutually agreeable to states that were inside it. In effect, the United States had a special functional-operational role. America was positioned at the center of the liberal international order. It provided the public goods of security protection, market openness, and sponsorship of rules and institutions. The American dollar became an international currency, and the American domestic market became an engine of global economic growth. Alliance institutions and an array of formal and informal intergovernmental institutions

18

Introduction

provided the international order with mechanisms and channels for consultation and collaboration. The security of each became the security of them all. The resulting order was hierarchical—the United States was most powerful and led the order. But the rules and institutions that it promulgated gave the order its liberal character.26 Implicit in this vision of liberal international order is the view that the West could serve as the foundation and starting point for a larger postwar order. The West was not fundamentally a geographical region with fixed borders. Rather it was an idea—a universal organizational form that could expand outward, driven by the spread of liberal democratic government and principles of conduct. In this sense, the postwar West was seen as a sort of molecular complex that can multiply and expand outward. The most explicit and radical version of this view was perhaps Clarence Streit and his proposal for a union of the North Atlantic democracies—and in his proposal was the idea that these countries would form a “nucleus” of a wider and expanding world order.27 But the idea that a unified West could provide a stable and expandable core for postwar order was widely shared by American officials in the 1940s. Finally, the postwar liberal international order went beyond the Wilsonian vision in its more expansive embrace of universal human rights. This commitment was foreshadowed in FDR’s Four Freedoms speech and in the promises laid out in the Atlantic Charter in 1941. They were later enshrined in the United Nations in 1945 and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the UN General Assembly in December 1948, which launched the postwar human rights revolution. Championed by liberals such as Eleanor Roosevelt and others, this document articulated a notion of universal individual rights that deserved recognition by the whole of mankind and not simply left to sovereign governments to define and enforce.28 A steady stream of conventions and treaties followed that together constitute an extraordinary new vision of rights, individuals, sovereignty, and global order.29 This human rights revolution is deeply rooted in a progressive liberal vision that emerged in the 1940s. Roosevelt and Truman were clearly sobered by the failure of Wilson but convinced that a new global order committed to human rights, collective security, and economic advancement was necessary to avoid the return to war. This point is made by

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Elizabeth Borgwardt, who traces the intellectual breakthrough back to 1941: The Atlantic Charter called for self-determination of peoples, freer trade, and several New Deal–style social welfare provisions. It also mentioned establishing “a wider and permanent system of general security,” arms control, and freedom of the seas. But this AngloAmerican declaration was soon best known for a resonant phase about establishing a particular kind of postwar order—a peace “which will afford assurance that all the men in all the lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want.” To link antifascist politics and economic well-being was unusual in an international instrument. But to speak explicitly of individuals rather than state interests—to use the phrase “all the men in all the lands” in place of a more traditional reference to the prerogatives of nations— was positively revolutionary. The phrase hinted that an ordinary citizen might possibly have some kind of direct relationship with international law, unmediated by the layering of a sovereign state. Though oblique, this hint that ideas about dignity of the individual were an appropriate topic of international affairs was soon to catalyze groups around the world committed to fighting colonialism and racism as well as nazism. It marked a defining, inaugural moment for what we now know as the modern doctrine of human rights.30 This postwar evolution in underlying norms of state sovereignty became particularly clear after the Cold War—sovereignty was not absolute and the international community had a moral and legal claim on the protection of individuals within states. Indeed, in the 1990s, this “contingent” character of sovereignty was pushed further. The international community was seen as having a right—even a moral obligation—to intervene in troubled states to prevent genocide and mass killing. NATO intervention in the Balkans and the war against Serbia were defining actions of this sort. Overall, as Wilsonianism evolved into postwar liberal internationalism, two logics of liberal order emerged. One logic concerned the organization of liberal order within the West. Pacts of restraint and commitment bound the Western democracies together, providing a framework for integrating

20

Introduction

Germany and Japan, opening the world economy, and fighting the Cold War. Under the cover of the Cold War, a revolution in relations between the Western great powers took place. The other logic was the liberal internationalist agenda for spreading liberty and democracy worldwide. These two impulses—to deepen and expand liberal order—were evinced during the early postwar years in the Truman administration’s two hallmark initiatives—the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine. One sought to save and unite Western Europe, while the other advanced ambitious ideals for coming to the assistance of nations and peoples struggling to be free.31 Both impulses were present in the thoughts and actions of Woodrow Wilson. The struggle over the legacy of Woodrow Wilson is in part a struggle between these two parts of the larger liberal vision.

Wilsonianism in the Twenty-First Century The end of the Cold War seemed to be a vindication of the Wilsonian vision. Democratic transitions and economic integration had ushered in what some saw as a global Wilsonian era. Indeed the 1990s were in many ways the greatest “liberal moment” of the twentieth century. The Cold War ended; democracy and markets flourished around the world; globalization was enshrined as a progressive historical force; and ideology, nationalism, and war were at a low ebb. NAFTA, APEC, and the WTO signaled a strengthening of the rules and institutions of the world economy. NATO was expanded and the U.S.-Japan alliance was renewed. Russia became a quasi-member of the West, and China was a “strategic partner” with Washington. President Clinton’s grand strategy of building post–Cold War order around expanding markets, democracy, and institutions was the triumphant embodiment of the liberal vision of international order. But the end of the Cold War also set in motion shifts in the global system that generated new challenges for liberal internationalism. The liberal international order was no longer simply the West or the “free world”—it was now truly global. As a result, dilemmas and tensions within the liberal international tradition that had remained mostly out of sight now appeared in the full light of day. Questions about the ability of the international community to make good on its expanding normative commitments to human rights and the responsibility to protect emerged. With

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the end of the Cold War, the role of the United States as a hegemonic leader became more problematic—and contested. The rules on great power intervention and the role of the United Nations as a site for legitimating the use of force were also newly debated around the world. Clearly, the debate is not simply the question of whether Bush is a Wilsonian—it is about the future of liberal internationalism in the twentyfirst century. The essays that follow speak to these challenges. First, as we have noted, certain Wilsonian ideas evolved into a more encompassing liberal international “project” in the postwar decades. But also, of course, the world itself changed after the Cold War, and this has rendered problematic the older, Cold War–era liberal vision. During the Cold War, the liberal international order was built “inside” the larger bipolar global system. This bipolar framework provided the outside geopolitical beams and girders for building liberal internationalism within the West. When the Cold War ended, the “inside” order became the “outside” order; that is, its logic was extended to the larger global system. In one sense, this is a story of the triumph of an American-style liberal international order. The collapse of the Soviet bloc was a collapse of the last apparent great challenge to this order. But in another sense, the scale and scope of the open, capitalist system dramatically expanded—it became truly global, and this brought into the liberal system new states, peoples, and problems. The problem increasingly was not how to build binding relations among advanced democracies but how to integrate and strengthen weak or emerging non-Western democracies situated in troubled regions of the world. If liberal order is a political system designed to “do the business” of the community of democracies, there was suddenly a lot more business to do among a more varied array of states. Second, the global “security problem” also shifted in the last decade from war among the great powers to terrorism and other transnational threats that emerge from weak states in the periphery. The Bush administration has stressed this new reality, as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice put it: “In 1945, the fear that strong, aggressive states—eager and able to expand their frontiers with force—would be the primary cause of international problems. Today, however, it is clear that weak and poorly governed states—unwilling or incapable of ruling their countries with justice—are the principal source of global crises—from civil war and

22

Introduction

genocide, to extreme poverty and humanitarian disaster.”32 In these changed circumstances, the debates are now about the terms of action and intervention in weak and failed states. This triggers new controversies over who, where, and how to act and intervene. It is here that the claim is most convincing that the Bush administration was following in the footsteps of Wilsonian and liberal internationalists. Building liberal order today must entail some systematic response to the problem of weak and failing states; globalization and the increasingly deadly technologies of violence makes this so, even if more idealist aspirations of democracy promotion do not. Tony Smith and Anne-Marie Slaughter both acknowledge that liberal internationalism has evolved a set of ideas about the terms and conditions of intervention in the post– Cold War era; their disagreement is about whether the Bush administration was acting in accord with these liberal interventionist ideas or not, and the implications for the principles and doctrines themselves. There is also the growing problem of American power. The United States has emerged from the 1990s as a unipolar military power. It alone has the capacity to act on a global basis to support and enforce the evolving human rights and security norms. Implicit in the Wilsonian and postwar liberal vision is the notion that an “international community” exists that is the repository of global rules and norms, and it is this international community that is empowered to act on behalf of its members to uphold human rights and security norms. The United Nations is the institutional embodiment of the international community. The problem is that the international community is still divided into unequal nation states, and the United States alone has the capacity to act or stand in the way of action on behalf of the international community. This makes American power controversial, and even illegitimate, at least as it is seen in large parts of the world. In a multipolar or bipolar world, the United States is one among several great powers. But today it stands alone at the center of the global system, and the terms of authority and power within the wider global liberal order are thrown into question. This situation is again central to the debate among the authors in this volume. Tony Smith argues that the fact of unipolarity makes Wilsonianstyle multilateralism problematic, and it has given neoconservatives an

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opening to champion the unilateral exercise of American power. Thomas Knock and Anne-Marie Slaughter argue that multilateralism is at the heart of Wilsonian internationalism. But the problem remains that in an era of American unipolarity, the ability of the international community to act collectively is particularly difficult. American power becomes a problem as much as a solution for many states and peoples within the system. If, however, liberal internationalism is to promote international authority it must wrestle with the problem of democracy and the accountability of international organizations. This has always been a challenge of liberal internationalism: how do you build rules and institutions above the nation-state while remaining committed to democratic accountability? To be sure, much of the liberal order building of the postwar era actually strengthened the ability of states to serve and protect their societies. For example, the Bretton Woods rules and institutions provided tools for governments to pursue full employment and social security goals. Across the realms of economics, politics, and security, postwar multilateralism tended to be loose, accommodating state sovereignty. Today, however, more sophisticated and legal-binding sorts of international agreements appear to be placing more severe demands on governments. In areas as diverse as the environment, human rights, and arms control, multilateralism is becoming more demanding. If the world of the twenty-first century will require more complex and far-reaching sorts of multilateral cooperation, how can this be squared with state sovereignty and accountability?33 Finally, there is the challenge that is central to the debate between Smith and Slaughter. This is the question of how liberal internationalism can safeguard against abuses that turn enlightened intervention into imperialism. How can you get the progressive benefits of action by leading democracies that seek to strengthen and uphold collective liberal norms without falling prey to abuse? Smith sees that a slippery slope is embedded in postwar liberal internationalism. The “neoliberal” American grand strategy of the late 1990s had lofty intentions but, according to Smith, it also did the intellectual heavy lifting for neoconservatives who brought forward the Iraq war. Slaughter disputes this claim and advances the view that a mechanism does exist—or can be devised—to separate good interventions from bad. She suggests that it is a mechanism that grows out of

24

Introduction

the Wilsonian vision—a process of ongoing and institutionalized consultation among the leading democracies. In effect, the democracy community must be seen as a source of enlightenment and restraint in an era when action and intervention are necessary for the security and management of liberal order. In the following essays, these issues are explored.

1. “Playing for a Hundred Years Hence” Woodrow Wilson’s Internationalism and His Would-Be Heirs

Thomas J. Knock They believe that the United States is so strong . . . that it can impose its will upon the world if it is necessary for it to stand out against the world, and they believe that the processes of peace can be processes of domination and antagonism, instead of processes of cooperation and good feeling. I therefore want to point out to you that only those who are ignorant of the world can believe that any nation, even so great a nation as the United States, can stand alone and play a single part in the history of mankind. —Woodrow Wilson, on the western tour1

I

n early 1919, just as the leaders of the victorious nations gathered in Paris at the end of the Great War, George Bernard Shaw wrote a little book titled Peace Conference Hints. Midway into the treatise he observed that Europeans were so deeply impressed by the president of the United States that they regarded him as their own, as “our Wilson,” at least for the moment. “All Europe hails him as a godsend; half America groans under him as an affliction.” Alas, the playwright added, “American democracy . . . has accidentally produced a greater individual success than it is capable of appreciating.”2 Shaw was commenting on the fact that, in the previous weeks, literally millions of war-weary people had flooded the streets and boulevards and piazzas of Paris and London and Rome to catch a glimpse of “Wilson the Just,” to hail the “Moses from across the Atlantic.”

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In contrast, in the United States, when “the Savior of Humanity” had asked for a vote of confidence in the midterm congressional elections in November 1918, the voters returned Republican majorities to both houses for the first time in six years. Even as Shaw published his Hints, however, the esteem in which Europeans held the president was already starting to fade; and the opinion of his fellow citizens would not improve much. Today, nearly a century later, Woodrow Wilson is still neither fondly remembered nor well understood by most Americans. Yet he occupies a secure position within the pantheon of great presidents. The domestic legislation he signed into law and the new directions he charted in foreign policy during World War I shaped the politics and diplomacy of the United States throughout the twentieth century and beyond. Among all the presidents, only Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson have matched his record in enacting a significant legislative program. (In appraising Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society legislation in 1965, the political columnist Tom Wicker suggested that the early New Deal was an insufficient measure; rather, Wicker said, one had “to go all the way back to Woodrow Wilson’s first year to find a congressional session of equal importance.”) As for the realm in which he carved out his most monumental legacy, no chief executive has ever communicated more effectively to the people of the world the ideals of democracy or set in motion a more original idea for the prevention of war than the twenty-eighth president. Writing of the Covenant of the League of Nations, the most innovative part of the Treaty of Versailles, General Jan Smuts of the Union of South Africa credited Wilson with having actuated “one of the great creative documents in human history.” Nevertheless, few presidents, after accomplishing so much, experienced a reversal of fortunes as tragic as the one he met with near the end of his term. As a consequence, he remains one of the most controversial presidents. And he has refused to go away; or, rather, since the 1920s he has continued to compel the attention of pundits and of scholars and practitioners of American foreign policy, cyclically, and for a wide range of reasons.3 We are now deep into the latest of such cycles. It began modestly, before September 2001, actually, as a way of taking inventory of the good fortune that America seemed to have come into at the dawn of a new millennium, and in the light of serious issues left unresolved during the

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post–Cold War decade. But it has since grown beyond proportions that one might have expected if not for the events that the Bush administration set in motion ostensibly in response to the attacks on the World Trade Center. Thereon, commentators began to invoke Wilson’s name, for instance, in defense of the war in Iraq and in praise of President Bush for having declared “liberty for the Iraqi people” as a motivation behind the war. To cite but two examples, in March 2003, Lawrence F. Kaplan of the New Republic (which endorsed the war) asserted that Bush is “the most Wilsonian president since Wilson himself,” while in January 2004 Michael Barone, on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, likened Bush’s Second Inaugural address to Wilson’s Fourteen Points. At the same time, a few others have cast doubt on such comparisons. In a post-Inaugural assessment, David E. Sanger said in the New York Times that President Bush had left “Wilson’s idealism in the dust,” and that phrases such as “the expansion of freedom” and “the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world” were in fact a “retroactive rationale for the war in Iraq, where Americans were originally told that weapons stocks were the primary justification for war.” In a monographic study, yet another editor of the New Republic, John B. Judis, has characterized Bush as “a president deeply ignorant of the past and what it teaches” and his administration as “deeply hostile to the tradition of Wilson.”4 All of the meditations on the present and future circumstances of American foreign policy through a Wilsonian lens have had something worthwhile to say. With one or two exceptions, those preceding the conflict in Iraq perhaps have offered the more substantive examinations thus far. Foremost among this group is a work by the irrepressible Robert S. McNamara; indeed, the former secretary of defense makes clear that Woodrow Wilson’s ghost has been hovering over us all for some time. Wilson’s Ghost, of course, is the title of McNamara’s study, coauthored with James Blight of Brown University and published in 2001 just prior to 9/11. The book, which inspired Errol Morris’s Academy Award–winning documentary, The Fog of War (2003), is neither a biography nor a monograph about Wilson, per se; rather, it holds up Wilson’s ghost as “a historical mirror” and his tragedy as a parable for our own time. (Its subtitle is Reducing the Risk of Conflict, Killing, and Catastrophe in the 21st Century.)5 Along with other propositions, the authors issue a summons for

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sweeping reductions in the world’s nuclear arsenals and “a bottom-up reinvestment in the United Nations,” as well as for a reformulation of the Security Council, involving the gradual replacement of the veto power with 75 percent majority rule. They also advocate “Zero-Tolerance Multilateral Wilsonianism,” meaning “only multilateral interventions on the part of the United States.” McNamara and Blight admit that convincing Americans “of the virtues of multilateralism” will require extraordinarily strong and wise leadership; but the approach offers several distinct advantages, they explain, not the least being that “multilateralism . . . reduce[s] the risk of a disastrous intervention caused wholly or in part by misinformation, misperception, misjudgment, and/or miscalculation.”6 With respect to disarmament, peacekeeping, and conflict resolution, Wilson’s Ghost remains the only study of its kind, to date, devoted exclusively to exploring the relevance of authentic Wilsonian internationalism for the twenty-first century. Then there is Michael Mandelbaum’s The Ideas That Conquered the World: Peace, Democracy, and Free Markets in the Twenty-First Century (2002). The opening chapter of this cautiously optimistic volume is titled “Wilson Victorious.”7 Therein, Mandelbaum refers not to the United Nations but instead to a concept he christens the “Wilsonian Triad”—that is, “restraints on armaments, popular government, and the unimpeded flow of commerce across borders.”8 He observes that “although when Wilson unveiled his ideas at Paris they were utopian, eight decades later they had become pedestrian.” Thus, according to Mandelbaum, since the end of the Cold War, Wilson’s principles have at last “achieved unchallenged status.”9 His chief concern (and the advice he gives) centers primarily on the second and third legs of the triad, specifically regarding the relationship between democracy and open market economics and their widening prospects in the new century. As Mandelbaum puts it, “Liberal economics begets liberal politics, which beget liberal security policies.”10 Curiously, however, the core elements of Wilsonian internationalism—as Wilson himself laid them out and which have not achieved “unchallenged status”—go almost entirely unattended to in an otherwise impressive study. (The League of Nations, for example, is accorded about three pages in five hundred.) This omission appears to grow out of the author’s implicit disapproval of Wilson’s willingness, through the League’s provisions

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for arbitration and disarmament, to relinquish some sparing measure of sovereignty to the organization.11 Even so, in a postscript, Mandelbaum laments the Bush administration’s “threat to go to war without consulting other governments.” (He also considers the United States to be “the country with the largest capacity for perpetrating global disruption.”)12 The cycle of regular, useful references to Wilson continued in important periodicals as well. In the September/October 2002 issue of Foreign Affairs (a special edition assessing President Bush’s diplomacy midway into his first term), Michael Hirsh reproved the administration for its “stunted vision [that] fails to recognize that U.S. security is now inextricably bound up in global security and in strengthening the international community.” Hirsh’s greatest concern here settles upon the “axis of realist unilateralists” rotating around the president and who resuscitated the “ideological twins” of unilateralism and isolation. In particular, he worries about the administration’s pursuit of missile defense (the centerpiece of its defense strategy at the time) that “renounces international law and organizations . . . while slighting multilateral efforts to contain proliferation.” Hirsh characterizes the policy as “delusional” and then goes into detail about “the need for a new Wilsonianism,” emphasizing one of the “more derided elements of Woodrow Wilson’s old program for peace” as embodied in the Fourteen Points—the reduction of national armaments to the lowest point consistent with domestic safety.13 In the same issue of Foreign Affairs, G. John Ikenberry also takes on a Wilsonian temper in a sharp indictment of the administration’s “New Grand Strategy.”14 Like Hirsh, Ikenberry is troubled by those items on the Bush agenda that have stressed unipolarity, the impulse to global hegemony, and a nuclear policy that, he argues, has actually encouraged proliferation. (This imputation is reminiscent of Wilson’s objections to the Lodge Reservations regarding the League of Nations.) The problem, says Ikenberry, is “the belief that American sovereignty is politically sacred,” and that the administration’s view “is not that the United States should withdraw from the world but that it should operate in the world on its own terms.”15 Some of the foreign policy studies engaging Wilson anew, it must be noted, have rejected his ideas categorically. Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace conspicuously led the charge in a widely discussed essay, “Power and Weakness,” in the June 2002 issue of

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Policy Review, and then in a short book, Of Paradise and Power, that became a bestseller in 2003.16 In these works, Kagan defends the United States’ increasing unilateralism. He also disdains the European Community’s ongoing conversion to “neo-Wilsonianism,” as manifested in the EC’s apparent repudiation of the use of force in international relations. In their astonishing preference for international law, diplomacy, moral considerations, and multilateralism, Kagan characterizes Europeans as “bornagain idealists.” This is a condition he does not necessarily admire or endorse. By the end of his article, he avers that “the United States can shoulder the burden of maintaining global security without much help from Europe.”17 Kagan’s expanded treatise tones down this defiance, though it implicitly makes a case for the then newly begun war in Iraq. Invocations of Woodrow Wilson have multiplied in the period since President Bush declared, “Mission accomplished!” on the decks of the USS Abraham Lincoln. Indeed, the war in Iraq fed a spate of editorials, magazine articles, and short monographs on American foreign policy that offered interesting riffs on Wilsonianism, if not in all cases sustained analyses of his legacy. Some of the authors have resurrected the term in defense of the putative motive behind the war, while others have done so as a way of condemning it and regretting the broader failure that the war has come to represent.18 Regardless of their differences, they are but a part of the latest in a series of writings reflecting on Wilson’s centrality that stretches back to the interwar period; and, like all the others before them, these studies are informed by some degree of ideology and partisanship and are freighted in the context of the times in which they were written. But perhaps more so than any of those who preceded them, the authors who lately have rediscovered Woodrow Wilson remind us that the president had hardly uttered idle words when, during a critical juncture in the Armistice negotiations with Germany in October 1918, he said to an anxious Democratic senator, “I am now playing for 100 years hence.”19 And so, once again we are reminded as well of the protean nature of Wilsonianism and the diverse adjectives that the term continues to host. Yet, herein lies a substantial problem: the term is in danger of becoming what literary critics call a “free-floating signifier”—that is, one constantly deployed, yet stripped of any consistent meaning or historical context. Thus, Jonathan Schell has written about “nuclear Wilsonianism.” Francis

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Fukuyama, in his latest book (in which he separates himself from the neoconservative movement), cites the need for a “realistic Wilsonianism.” Walter Russell Mead coins the term “Revival Wilsonianism” and even refers to “Wilsonianism on steroids.” But, with the exception of McNamara and Blight, none of the current studies or commentaries directly confronts that crucial element of Wilsonianism to which Wilson himself attached the supreme importance—what one might call “Wilsonian Wilsonianism.” In coming to grips with the essentials of this subject, to begin, one must observe two things about Woodrow Wilson and his times. The first is that he occupied the White House at the dawning of a new epoch in world history characterized not only by the Great War, but also by profound revolutionary movements in China, Mexico, and Russia. These revolutions were informed by the socialist critique of industrial capitalism and imperialism. Wilson tended to see them as the repercussion of political and economic exploitation of great masses of people by reactionary governments determined to thwart orderly change at any cost. The second observation is that Wilson was arguably the first president to use military force systematically to bring about certain kinds of political results. Yet, very much unlike George W. Bush (or, for that matter, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon), Wilson did so without letting the military intervention get out of hand. Thus, while he sometimes failed to achieve his desired ends, this president nonetheless averted potential catastrophes by the controlled use of force in tandem with diplomatic solutions, and also by keeping his generals in check.20 In the end, partly because of his own interventions, Wilson came to believe that, except in the case of unprovoked attack, there were probably no circumstances that could justify unilateral military action on the part of the United States (or of any other great power), and that disputes and various other problems among or between nations were best left to solutions openly arrived at through the agency of international organization. At the same time, Wilson believed there were ways that America could serve as “the light which will shine unto all generations and guide the feet of mankind to the goal of justice and liberty and peace,” as he once immodestly put it early in his presidency.21 To that end, for example, in 1913

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he extended diplomatic recognition to the new republic of China (the first world leader to do so) and then pulled the United States out of a multinational banking consortium that was impairing China’s economic and political well-being. In confronting the Mexican Revolution, however, he undertook a more hazardous mission, with mixed results at best. This was the occasion for Wilson’s single most important (and illustrative) military intervention exclusive of the world war, the lamentable “affair of honor,” that took place at Veracruz in April 1914. Although most historians and political scientists tend not to acknowledge it, the intervention’s most significant consequence, for Wilson, was to challenge his belief that democratic processes alone could compose practically any situation and bring about necessary political, social, and economic change. Moreover, unilateral military intervention, he would conclude, was quite possibly the least propitious way one country might attempt to influence another, let alone bring democracy to it. As Lloyd Gardner, a historian steeped in the radical tradition, has written, Wilson’s confrontations with Mexico “stand out as remarkable exercises in self-awareness and criticism.”22 The origins of the tarnished intervention lay in the demise of Francisco Madero, the ill-starred leader of the revolution, whose murder was ordered by General Victoriano Huerta on behalf of Mexico’s ancien régime and foreign investors, only weeks before the author of several books on constitutional government took control of American foreign policy. Then, near the end of 1913, General Huerta arrested the entire Chamber of Deputies and proclaimed a dictatorship. President Wilson certainly could have recognized the counterrevolutionary junta, as the European powers had done with unseemly alacrity, and thereby safeguarded American business interests. (American and British firms together controlled 90 percent of Mexico’s oil industry and virtually all of its mineral wealth and railroads.) But instead he pursued a policy intended to bring Huerta down and to allow the revolution to resume course.23 Initially, Wilson had demanded that the Mexicans get rid of their dictator and put their house in order by holding an election. Yet, even Huerta’s opponents, the so-called Constitutionalists led by Venustiano Carranza and Pancho Villa, wondered how the good doctor could prescribe a mere patent medicine for a revolution as profound as theirs, and they resented the presumption. By January 1914, Huerta was still in power, and Wilson

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decided to grant the Constitutionalists the right to purchase arms in the United States. With this act, he had begun to shed the panacea of “a free and fair election” and to accept the necessity of more sweeping solutions to Mexico’s problems, of the sort advanced by Villa.24 To shocked British officials, Wilson now asserted that “the real cause of the trouble in Mexico was not political but economic,” for the mass of the peasantry did not own the land to which their lives were bound. Indeed, “a radical revolution was the only cure,” he declared and then insisted that His Majesty’s government withdraw its support of Huerta so that Mexico could “be left to find her own salvation in a fight to the finish.” When an aide to the British ambassador rejoined that only foreign intervention could bring ordered justice to Mexico, the president said that he “knew of no instance in history in which political advance had been made by benefits granted from above; they all had to be gained by the efforts and blood from below.”25 From this pass onward Wilson’s thoughts followed a consistent line, but his next step would earn him everlasting notoriety. In the spring of 1914, a dispute over manners and punctilio escalated into a bloody clash after officials at the port of Tampico detained seven American sailors; the Huertistas released the sailors and apologized profusely, but they balked when the American naval commander demanded a 21-gun salute. Wilson seized upon the incident when he learned coincidentally that a German ship carrying arms and ammunition was heading for Veracruz and Huerta’s arsenal. On April 21 he ordered the occupation of the coastal city, ostensibly to prevent delivery of the weapons. By the next morning, 126 Mexican patriots and nineteen American marines lay dead in the streets and on the rooftops.26 For a brief moment, General Huerta could pose as the heroic nationalist, and the situation might have gone from bad to far worse had it not been for three factors: Whereas Carranza feigned outrage, Pancho Villa declined to protest Wilson’s conduct; Wilson himself had no intention of permitting further bloodshed; and Argentina, Brazil, and Chile offered to mediate. Huerta’s downfall nonetheless had begun and he abdicated in July. The revolution recommenced, but, in September, Villa broke with Carranza and for months thereafter Wilson vacillated over whom to recognize.27 Meanwhile, Republicans condemned him for having rekindled

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the revolution, according to his archrival-to-be, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, “in an attitude of an ally of Pancho Villa.” Theodore Roosevelt, the president’s harshest critic, insisted he should have either recognized Huerta and or established a protectorate over Mexico.28 The deeper impact of the revolution on Wilson’s thinking about foreign policy (whether on behalf of democracy or not) is complex but unambiguous. First, it did not take him long to accede to the revolutionaries’ ministrations that elections would not redress the desperate social and economic conditions besetting Mexico. As he told the journalist John Reed during a White House interview in June 1914 (shortly before Huerta fled the country), now “the Mexicans can restore the land as they see fit. If they want to confiscate the great estates, that is their business.” His one aim, he went on, was to help make sure “that no one shall take advantage of Mexico—in any way; neither dictators; citizens of this country; citizens of foreign countries, nor foreign governments.” Then, too, Wilson’s private correspondence reveals a chastened view of military intervention after Veracruz. In August 1914, for instance, his secretary of war pressed (just as Roosevelt did) for a full-scale invasion to protect American property, to which Wilson answered that there were “no conceivable circumstances which would make it right for us to direct by force or threat of force the internal processes of . . . a revolution as profound as that which occurred in France.”29 Yet, Wilson had employed a measure of force to affect those internal processes. And, for that, many historians have reproached him for Yankee imperialism in one form or another, just as some scholars and commentators today may cite the Mexico imbroglio as an illustration of a connection with George W. Bush and the neoconservatives.30 In reckoning with this trespass, however, they are holding Wilson to an absolute standard, when a historically contextual standard might be the more appropriate and instructive. For instance, in his defense, John Reed and other contemporaries on the left argued that Wilson actually “had not interfered, paradoxical as it may seem.” The president was still under enormous pressure to impose a protectorate, Reed explained, and “the Tampico incident was [his] opportunity to check this tendency without harm to the Mexican people and with comparatively little bloodshed.” Max Eastman, the editor of The Masses, agreed; whereas he considered the country fortunate

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that the combustible Roosevelt was not in office, he regarded Wilson with “unreserved admiration . . . for his statesmanship . . . and for his unswerving purpose to let the Mexican people govern, or not govern, themselves.” All in all, then, the professor who had set out “to teach the South American Republics to elect good men” ended up the wiser pupil.31 Be that as it may or not, if any aspect of the foregoing seems to sustain serious comparison with President Bush’s war in Iraq (or with any other feature of the latter’s foreign policy), as some writers have claimed or implied, then one is tempted to enjoin them to keep a sense of proportion and recall what it was that the Bush administration did and at what cost. The Bush administration concocted a set of false propositions for war and foisted them upon the Congress and the American people; then, once there proved to be no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the administration “flip-flopped” and began to emphasize a different rationalization for the war—that its purpose was to bring democracy to the Middle East. Woodrow Wilson, even as he led the United States into the most terrible and disastrous of all armed conflicts theretofore in history, had said simply, “The world must be made safe for democracy.” Nor in circumstances otherwise did he go abroad in search of monsters to destroy in the manner in which the Bush administration has done, causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people and inflicting mass destruction upon a modern state located in the center of the most volatile region in the world. If this, after all, is what Wilsonianism has come to mean, then of what real use is the term, and should we not, if only out of decent respect to him, invent another term for it? To be sure, Woodrow Wilson spoke and wrote with unequaled rhetorical grace and power about democracy. And he was, as well, the first president to champion the idea of free trade and free markets. Nevertheless, whatever his claim to transcendent historical significance, in the end it rests unquestionably upon his having set in motion what Senator J. William Fulbright once characterized as “the one great new idea of the [twentieth] century in the field of international relations, the idea of an international organization with permanent processes for the peaceful settlement of international disputes.”32 And so, in light of the national (even international) debate we are in and the grave issues that it involves, let us explore what Wilson had to say about these matters, to provide some historical

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perspective on the essence and particulars of the Wilson formula, how he arrived at it, and the way he envisioned it operating practically. For the things that worried him the most, worry us, too—questions about preponderating armaments and the avoidance of war, about sovereignty as it relates to unilateralism and multilateralism, and, one way or another, the future of the United Nations and the United States’ disposition toward it. It would be misleading to portray a solitary Wilson, imperturbably contemplating possible solutions to the world crisis laid bare by the Great War. Yet the most controversial provision of the Covenant of the League— the mutual guarantee of political independence and territorial integrity as against aggression—does appear to have originated with him. It evolved from a proposal he drafted in December 1914 to create a system of collective security for the Western Hemisphere. Known as the Pan-American Pact, this was Wilson’s very first such composition, and it would become the seed of Article 10 of the Covenant. Augmented by machinery for the arbitration of disputes, he conceived of it as serving two vital purposes. The first was to rehabilitate relations between the United States and Latin America in part by providing some means of placing restraints on unilateral interventions of the sort he considered himself guilty of. The Pact, the president later told a delegation of Mexican newspaper editors in 1918, was “an arrangement that would protect you from us.” The second purpose behind it was to “show the way to the rest of the world as to how to make a basis of peace.” More specifically, Wilson hoped to establish an exemplary structure grounded in collective security that Europeans might find worthy of adoption—a lever that he hoped would help to move the belligerents toward mediation. For about a year, then, the Pan-American Pact played a recurring role in American efforts to bring about a negotiated settlement of the war in Europe. Its ratification, however, was repeatedly hampered by Chile, owing both to its incurable skepticism and a long-standing boundary dispute with Peru. Ironically, it was sundered permanently in the spring of 1916 when Wilson, in reaction to Pancho Villa’s deadly raid on Columbus, New Mexico, ordered the “punitive expedition” into Mexico, which practically all parties to the revolution deeply resented and which nearly led to war between the two countries that summer.33

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The Pan-American Pact notwithstanding, the general idea of a league of nations had many authors and, from beginning to end, the concept was in a constant state of metamorphosis. Wilson’s essential contribution was grand synthesis and propagation, as he drew most of his ideas from a new internationalist movement that had come into being in the United States during the two and a half years that the country remained officially neutral in the war. This movement had tens of thousands of adherents, and it was composed of two divergent groups of activists—“progressive internationalists” and “conservative internationalists.” Wilson’s relationship with both groups not only informs our understanding of the struggle over the League in 1919–20, it has implications for our own time as well. For at stake were two competing approaches to internationalism. As Gilbert Hitchcock, the Democratic leader in the Senate, said at the start of the parliamentary debate: “Internationalism has come, and we must choose what form the internationalism shall take.”34 No one, before or since, ever put the matter more succinctly. And that is how most participants at the time understood it—as a struggle between Wilson’s and a more conservative internationalism. The contention between progressive and conservative internationalists, not incidentally, was compounded by their conflicting, respective visions for the future of American society as well. The nature of the debate cannot be fully appreciated without taking that fact into account. To begin, let us look at conservative internationalism, as manifested in the program of the League to Enforce Peace (LEP), founded in June 1915 and led by former President William Howard Taft and other Republicans prominent in the field of international law. The LEP’s “Warrant from History” called for American participation in a world parliament that would assemble periodically to make appropriate changes to international law and employ limited arbitration and conciliation procedures to settle certain kinds of “justiciable” disputes. Whereas a fair number of conservative internationalists more or less endorsed the principle of collective security, most of them, including Taft, also believed that the United States should build up its military capacity and reserve the right to undertake independent coercive action whenever the “national interest” was threatened. Unlike Wilson, they did not advocate disarmament or even a military standoff in Europe. These internationalists were openly pro-Allied; in

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fact, the slogan, “The LEP does not seek to end the present war,” appeared on the organization’s letterhead in the autumn of 1916.35 Progressive internationalism was different in both subtle and conclusive ways. Like the conservative form, progressive internationalism evolved within the context of American neutrality—coincidentally, during an extended interlude in American political history when many liberal reformers and socialists frequently joined forces on behalf of progressive causes. Until at least early 1918, Wilson regularly sought the counsel and political support of individuals and organizations of the liberal left outside the Democratic Party. This communion exerted a profound impact on his foreign policy, especially on the League idea. Organizations such as the Women’s Peace Party, founded in January 1915 and led by Jane Addams; the American Union Against Militarism; and various elements of the Socialist Party of America were at once the advance guard of the so-called New Diplomacy in the United States and the impassioned proponents of an Americanized version of social democracy. In addition to their program for social and economic justice at home, from them emanated most of the salient components of Wilson’s blueprint for a new world order— for the settlement of disputes through compulsory arbitration, accords to reduce or limit armament, the reduction of trade barriers, self-determination, and collective security as against external aggression enforced by both economic and military sanctions. Conservative internationalists (from Taft to Lodge and Roosevelt) looked upon some of these proposals, probably correctly, as a diminution of national sovereignty. At this time, the foremost goal of the progressives, in contrast to the conservatives of the LEP, was to help Wilson effect a negotiated settlement of the war; if it were permitted to rage on indefinitely, they believed, then the United States could not help but get sucked into it, and not only reform, but also the very moral fiber of the nation, would be destroyed.36 Progressive internationalists, moreover, made up a vital part of the crucial, left-of-center coalition that elected Wilson to a second term. It was at this point (months before Germany’s unrestricted submarine warfare thrust the United States into the war and long before the Treaty of Versailles was written) that the League began to take on a partisan dimension. In 1912 the Democrats had prevailed only because the Republicans were split between Taft and Roosevelt. By 1916, the former Bull Moose had reconciled

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with the GOP’s conservative chieftains, and it appeared that Wilson was destined to be a one-term president. But Wilson won (narrowly) because he was able to pull together a remarkable coalition of Democrats, independent progressives, and socialists, which put him over the top. He accomplished this feat, in part, first, by appointing to the Supreme Court two leading progressives, Louis D. Brandeis and John H. Clark, early in the year. Then he pushed through Congress an impressive array of social justice legislation, which included the first federal eight-hour-day law for some three hundred thousand railroad workers, the first federal restrictions on child labor, and a progressive income tax that placed almost the entire burden on corporations and the wealthy. (In addition, in 1913–14, he had signed into law the Federal Reserve Act, the Clayton Antitrust Act, and the Federal Trade Commission Act.) The victory coalition was also built around foreign policy, for this president ran for reelection on the slogan, “He Kept Us Out of War.” Starting in May 1916, in a notable address to the League to Enforce Peace, then in the Democratic Party platform as well as several speeches throughout the fall campaign, Wilson began openly to champion the idea of a future association of nations. This fact did not go unremarked upon. The socialist Max Eastman compared Wilson to Lincoln and predicted he would win because “he has attacked the problem of eliminating war, and he has not succumbed to the epidemic of militarism.” Herbert Croly of the New Republic threw his support to the incumbent not only owing to his domestic record but also because of his advocacy of a postwar League. The progressive Amos Pinchot interpreted the significance of the outcome this way: “The President we reelected has raised a flag that no other president has thought or perhaps dared to raise. It is the flag of internationalism.”37 (It is interesting to note that in foreign and domestic policy alike, Woodrow Wilson’s campaign for reelection presents stark contrasts with that of George W. Bush.) Meanwhile, the Republicans had bitterly castigated Wilson both for his social justice legislation and for being “too proud to fight.” Taft, for instance, had pronounced the eight-hour-day legislation “the most humiliating thing in the recent history of the United States.” But far more importantly, Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge had thwarted Taft’s efforts to secure even a vague endorsement of the League proposition in

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their party’s platform; in a sense, the Republicans had handed the issue of the League to Wilson and the Democrats.38 Soon after his dramatic triumph at the polls, Wilson decided on a bold stroke. In a climactic attempt to end the war through independent mediation, he went before the Senate on 22 January 1917 and called for “peace without victory.” With this progressive internationalist manifesto the concept of Wilsonianism itself was born. For the first time publicly, Wilson launched a penetrating critique of European imperialism, militarism, and balance-of-power politics; these were the root causes of the war, he said. In their stead, he held out the promise of a “community of nations” in which the great powers, including the United States, could prosper by exercising restraint—a new world order sustained by procedures for the arbitration of disputes between nations, a dramatic reduction of armaments, self-determination of colonial peoples, freedom of the seas, and a collective security. The main instrumentality of this sweeping program was to be, of course, a league of nations. By means of the “Peace without Victory” address, then, Wilson’s ascent to a position of enduring importance in the history of modern world politics had begun.39 Perhaps a brief discussion about how the collective guarantees might operate is in order. Wilson realized that such a fundamental restructuring of international relations could not be accomplished overnight. His approach to building the League—and a gradual process, he believed, it should be—was similar to his early thoughts and writings on the developmental aspects of democracy and international law. In his treatise “The Modern Democratic State” (1885), and in his lectures on international law at Princeton University in the 1890s, he had suggested that democracy was both a means and an end, “a stage of development . . . built by slow habit.” Like international law, it was “not made,” as such; rather, it was the result of organic maturation. One could not expect a people or a nation to attain a working democracy except by stages, he said; thus, neither could one expect an emerging community of nations to come into its own until it, too, had had time to experiment and to apply new ideas to events as they unfolded. In the process, however, nations would find themselves bound together in “a humane jural society” that would secure

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for its members “a common protection of law for their general human and international rights.”40 Likewise, his view was that “the League must grow and not be made.” It must come about by stages, on a case-by-case basis. One should begin with simple covenants—for example, the obligation to submit disputes to arbitration. Then, as he explained to Jean Jules Jusserand, the French ambassador, “there would thus be created, little by little, precedents that would break the habit of having recourse to arms.” And, “in the very process of carrying out these covenants . . . a machinery and practice of cooperation would naturally spring up which would . . . produce . . . a regularly constituted and employed concert of nations.” (In 1993, in an essay about “factors that hamper principled collective action” and how a lack of faith in the United Nations might be overcome, Lori Fisler Damrosch of Columbia University Law School observed much the same thing, that it was a matter of cultivating the habit. “Small achievements will lead to greater ones,” she wrote, “and to more of them, and eventually to patterns that will reflect underlying principles.”)41 As for military sanctions, Wilson did not believe that they would come into play very often in the postwar period, for several reasons. The implicit restrictions on precipitate unilateral action, the deterrent manifest within the threat of collective force, the “cooling-off” provisions in the arbitration features of the League, and disarmament (upon which he laid heavy stress) together would help to eliminate most problems from the start. Indeed, that was how he sometimes explicated Article 10, the collective security provision, during his western tour, and by pointing out that two-thirds of the Covenant’s substantive provisions dealt with arbitration, disarmament, and other ways of defusing potential conflicts before they could explode into war. The League probably would not prevent conflict in every instance, he admitted. But it could provide, as Walter Lippmann once explained, “a temporary shelter from the storm.” It could at least bring about some measure of tranquility for a few years in order to explore the potential for rationality and enlightened self-interest—that is, to see whether collective security, in tandem with arbitration and disarmament, stood a reasonable chance of acceptance in the conduct of international relations. For Wilson, therefore, what the League offered was a compass

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rather than a final destination. Could such a league, formed under specific covenants and subject to broad construction, really work in actual practice? That, the president acknowledged, was a good question. As he said to Jusserand, “It would be an experience to try it,” and then later to his fellow peacemakers at Paris, “if the delegates . . . decided it must succeed, it would succeed.”42 The conservative internationalists of his own time did not agree. The circumstances in which the war ended—in particular, the coincidence of the German appeal for an armistice just as the congressional campaign was heating up—compounded the larger political problem. The unprecedented centralization of the wartime economy and the core principles of Wilson’s foreign policy placed him far enough to the left as to make all Democrats vulnerable to charges that they were “unAmerican.” (The Republican strategy of 1918, one might conclude, cut the pattern for the party’s campaigns for the rest of the century.) In an exposition of their ultraconservative platform, the Republican national chairman decried the “bolshevik principles” and “the socialistic tendencies of the present government.” Lodge railed against Wilson and “the socialists and Bolsheviks among his advisors” while worrying that he would make “peace at any price.” To tens of thousands of Chicagoans, Theodore Roosevelt declared, “We are not internationalists. We are American nationalists.” A few days later he told New Yorkers, “To substitute internationalism for nationalism means to do away with patriotism.” And Taft, in his weekly column, denounced the Fourteen Points and referred to their author as “an absolute dictator.” This, then, was the intensely ideological and partisan atmosphere in which the great struggle was about to unfold.43 But Wilson was also having trouble with progressive internationalists. Whereas they once had reposed great faith in him and enlisted enthusiastically in his reelection in 1916, by the summer and fall of 1918 the coalition was starting to unravel, mainly due to the omnipresent superpatriotism known as “One Hundred Percent Americanism” and Wilson’s acquiescence in the suppression of civil liberties. (Acts of political repression and violence were committed practically everywhere against not only German-Americans but also pacifists and radicals; to cite but one example, Eugene Debs was sentenced to ten years imprisonment for making a

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speech against American involvement in the war.) Along with the Appeal to Reason, the New Republic, and the Nation, numerous advisors and commentators—including Oswald Garrison Villard, Amos Pinchot, Dudley Field Malone, John Spargo, and even the administration’s chief propagandist, George Creel—attributed the grievous Democratic losses in the midterm elections of 1918 to defections among progressives and socialists over the civil liberties issue. On that score, Villard and Creel urged Wilson to reverse course, to issue a sweeping amnesty and restore the coalition, if he hoped to prevail. The president demurred. Just a week before the Armistice was signed, the Republicans captured a majority of two in the Senate. If the election results did not quite seal the fate of a Wilsonian League, they were the first tangible sign of the erosion of the domestic political foundation essential to both ratification on Wilson’s terms and American leadership in a progressive, as opposed to a conservative, league movement. (Interestingly, so close were some races, the addition of a mere ten thousand Democratic ballots, strategically distributed in five states, would have yielded a Democratic majority of three in the Senate.) Then, as summer approached, after having lost the support of most socialists and left-wing progressives, Wilson saw many renowned liberals draw back from him because of the punitive features in the Treaty of Versailles; regardless of his motives, they believed that he had forsaken the Fourteen Points in the territorial compromises with the Allies. (“THIS IS NOT PEACE,” the New Republic editorialized.) If the League were only to serve reactionary interests, they reasoned, it would be best to stay out. This was the position that Wilson ultimately would come to himself.44 Conservative internationalists nonetheless accurately discerned in the president the soul of a progressive internationalist. Although sheer partisanship motivated some, ideological conviction played the larger role. In this respect, few of the League’s Republican opponents were isolationists, strictly speaking. But most of them, like Senator Lodge, believed that Wilson had consigned (or would consign) too many vital national interests to the will of an international authority. “Some of our sovereignty would be surrendered,” he had frankly told thirty-four members of the House and Senate during a momentous four-hour meeting in the White House in February 1919. “[It is] inconceivable that any concert of action

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of the nations . . . [of] the world could be taken without some sacrifice.” To temper that admission, he reminded them that unanimity was required on the Executive Council of the League before economic sanctions or military force could be set in motion under Article 10 (although he privately told a group of supporters on another occasion that, in amending the Covenant itself, a Council majority of two-thirds would be better). Still he emphasized that the League would fail “if the objection of sovereignty [is] insisted upon by the Senate.” Other statements he made about the matter—that the United States “would willingly relinquish some of its sovereignty . . . for the good of the world”—did little to persuade or reassure his critics. (The time was not far off, he said to Taft, “when men would be just as eager partisans of the sovereignty of mankind as they were now of their own national sovereignty.”)45 By the end of August, Wilson had not changed a single Republican’s mind; clearly, forty-two or forty-three loyal Democrats were hardly enough when ratification required a Senate majority of two-thirds. Despite his doctor’s advice and his wife’s pleading, he insisted he must undertake a speaking tour to build public support to carry the treaty. Out on the hustings, in Indianapolis, he addressed his interlocutors’ concerns this way: “Every man who makes a choice to respect the rights of his neighbors deprives himself of absolute sovereignty, but he does it by promising never to do wrong, and I cannot for one see anything that robs me of any inherent right that I ought to retain when I promise that I will do right.” With regard to Senator Lodge’s objections to both Article 10 and arbitration, and therefore to the hindrance to unilateral action that League membership implied, Wilson said in Billings, Montana: “The only way in which you can have impartial determinations in this world is by consenting to something you do not want to do.” The corollary to this, then, was to refrain from something that you want to do. There might be times “when we lose in court,” he continued, “[and] we will take our medicine.”46 The Republicans’ worries did not end there. For, just as Wilson embarked upon his swing around the circle, they and Lodge had drawn up a list of wide-ranging reservations to the treaty (curiously, fourteen in number) as the conditions under which they might accept it. These reservations were designed to impose a distinctly conservative construction on Wilson’s internationalism. Contrary to the Covenant, they would make

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arbitration voluntary, not mandatory, and they would counter restrictions on the right to increase the size of the armed forces without consulting the League. They also would reject membership in the International Labor Organization (“a nursery for bolshevistic doctrines,” according to one irreconcilable). Another reservation asserted that American businesses would retain the right to continue trading with a Covenant-breaking state in the face of a League boycott. And still another even cast doubt on whether the United States would fairly contribute to the League’s expenses. Taken together, in both spirit and substance, the Lodge Reservations constituted a frontal assault.47 In response, Wilson argued that the unwelcome interposition would utterly change the meaning of the treaty, the Covenant most of all. The United States could not go in grudgingly or with special dispensations of its own choosing—not if the League were to work properly. And if it refused to join, the United States would have to go it alone and live forever with a gun in its hand. America would have to have never-ending taxation, a “militaristic organization of government” with “a system of intelligence,” and “secret agencies planted everywhere.” In short, it would always have to be “ready to fight the world.” Bearing these and other tidings, Wilson traveled ten thousand miles throughout the western United States for twenty-one days in September 1919, giving some forty impassioned speeches, almost as if in a presidential campaign. Medically, however, “the stern covenanter” was much older than his sixty-two years; the exertion proved too strenuous and brought on a nearly fatal stroke that rendered him unfit for office. Political gridlock spread over Washington for the remaining sixteen months of his presidency. The Senate would vote on the treaty three times, twice in November 1919 and once in March 1920; but, whether on a motion to ratify unconditionally or with the Lodge Reservations, a two-thirds majority could never be mustered.48 “The imperialist wants no League of Nations,” the president wrote to Senator Gilbert Hitchcock in a letter published just before the Senate rendered its final verdict, “but if . . . there is to be one, he is interested to secure one suited for his own purposes.” For Wilson, international security involved not only responsibilities but also restraints, or “a renunciation of wrong-doing on the part of powerful nations,” including the United States. Thus Article 10 constituted “a bulwark, the only bulwark . . .

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against the forces of imperialism and reaction.” And so, if he permitted the United States to go in under the reservations, the meaning of the League would indeed be clear. It would become a Lodgian league, a reactionary league. And no league at all would be better than one that would “venture to take part in reviving the old order.” Whatever the central cause of his historic failure, Wilson’s conservative and partisan critics believed that his was a dangerously radical vision, a new world order alien to their own understanding of how the world worked. His severest critics among progressives believed he had not done enough to resist the forces of reaction—either at home or at the Paris peace conference. Perhaps more perceptively than anyone else, the great journalist Ray Stannard Baker commented on Wilson’s fate: “He can escape no responsibility and must go to his punishment not only for his own mistakes and weaknesses of temperament but for the greed and selfishness of the world.”49 Twenty-five years later, as World War II neared its climax, Wilson’s popular reputation experienced an extraordinary, if ephemeral, recovery. A new wisdom held that the second great war might have been averted if only the United States had joined the League of Nations back in 1919. The American people had been given a “second chance.” This conviction was implicit in the era’s best-selling work of nonfiction, Wendell Willkie’s One World (1943); in Thomas A. Bailey’s two widely read volumes, Woodrow Wilson and the Lost Peace (1944) and Woodrow Wilson and the Great Betrayal (1945); and in a variety of other books and journalistic media. Even Hollywood weighed in, with Darryl F. Zanuck’s Academy Award–winning epic, Wilson (1944), “the motion picture to prevent World War III,” according to the Philadelphia Enquirer. When the United Nations Charter was signed in the summer of 1945, Harry Truman declared that Wilson at last had been vindicated, and the “ism” has persisted ever since.50 Yet, in so many respects, the United States thereafter would establish an anti-Wilsonian pattern to its internationalism and, protests to the contrary notwithstanding, that pattern did not begin with George W. Bush & Co. Wilson’s views had set him at odds not only with his own conservative contemporaries but also with the “realists” of the post–World War II era— those diplomatists and their counterparts in the academy who sought to

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establish a new balance of power, advanced the doctrine of “containment,” and constructed the American military-industrial complex. Cold War intellectuals, from George Kennan to Henry Kissinger, incessantly denied kinship with Wilson. Despite the fact that Wilson’s conception was never systematically implemented, Kennan, for example, repeatedly reproached him for failing to provide any realistic foundations for foreign policy, for his “inordinate preoccupation with arbitration . . . efforts toward world disarmament . . . and illusions about the possibilities of achieving a peaceful world through international organization and multilateral diplomacy, as illustrated in . . . the League of Nations or the United Nations.” Robert E. Osgood, one of the leading realists among political scientists, sounded the same note: “How poorly Wilson’s conception of collective security fits contemporary American practice,” he wrote in 1957, “and how badly the prevailing American conception of collective security is distorted by efforts to reconcile the two.” Kennan and Osgood were not alone in scoring Wilson. Walter Lippmann, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hans J. Morgenthau all published similar critiques of what they considered the misguided, unrealistic aspects of Wilson’s foreign policies, often singling out his concept of collective security as a negative object lesson.51 If Wilson was the father of American internationalism, then a fair number of his children—those who fashioned Cold War Globalism—were, to put it politely, illegitimate. What triumphed in the postwar period was a mutant form of Wilson’s internationalism, and Wilson almost certainly would have denied paternity. For example, Franklin Roosevelt’s concept of the United Nations, based on the “Four Policemen,” was in many respects closer to Lodge’s and Theodore Roosevelt’s than to Wilson’s version. Indeed, Henry Cabot Lodge II, the American ambassador to the United Nations under President Eisenhower, made the case, perhaps inadvertently, in a novel commentary printed in the 1953 biography of his grandfather by John Garraty. The United Nations Charter, the grandson demonstrated with obvious satisfaction, embraced virtually all of the salient “Lodge Reservations.”52 Yet, even at that, within less than two years of its creation, American foreign policy makers had proceeded to undermine the organization. “Faith in the ability of the United Nations as presently constituted, to protect, now or hereafter, the security of the United States,” the Joint Chiefs

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of Staff, for example, concluded in April 1947, “could quite possibly lead to results fatal to that strategy.” Thenceforward, the architects of Cold War containment consistently spurned instruments for the peaceful settlement of international disputes and never seriously attempted to reduce armaments; the United States also always reserved the right to undertake, sometimes covertly, unilateral military interventions at will and frequently in direct violation of the UN charter and of international law. There are no instances of Woodrow Wilson either overthrowing a functioning democracy, or stifling the potential for one, only to replace it with a military dictatorship, as Eisenhower and Dulles did in Guatemala, Iran, and Vietnam, and as Nixon and Kissinger did in Chile. (These kinds of interventions may well constitute the most regrettable aspect of the legacy of Cold War “realism,” and the United States has yet fully to own up to them.) Moreover, whereas both Republican and Democratic administrations promulgated a series of multilateral security pacts—NATO being the most striking example—one could argue that such treaties represented, not an affirmation, but a negation of Wilson’s internationalism. NATO and the Warsaw Pact constituted opposing systems of collective security—that is, a reformulation of the balance of power not entirely different from the pre– World War I alliance system based on that concept, and one rendered by nuclear weapons far more susceptible to calamity than the balance of power that had obtained prior to 1914.53 By the 1980s, as third world countries numerically began to assert themselves in the General Assembly, President Reagan dubbed the United Nations “anti-American.” In the spirit of the Lodge Reservations, the White House withheld financial support and hinted about the possibility of American withdrawal from the organization. “Compliance with the Charter’s principles of nonintervention and the non-use of force,” affirmed UN Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick, “are hardly a sound basis for either U.S. foreign policy or for international peace and stability.” Nor did the Reagan administration’s open discussion about the feasibility of “limited” nuclear war suggest that Wilsonian progressive internationalism was alive and well.54 Indeed, it was that kind of talk that caused none other than George Kennan to wonder where it all might end. In 1947, the author of the containment doctrine had uttered the cynical oath, “Peace if possible and insofar as it effects our interests.” But during the first Reagan

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administration, he began to take on a wholly different tone. “War itself, as a means of settling disputes among the great industrial powers, will have to be in some way ruled out,” he now argued, for it was “simply no longer a rational means of affecting the behavior of other governments.” His apprehensions of impending apocalyptic nuclear catastrophe (and of global environmental degradation) also led Kennan to another radical reevaluation: “I now see Wilson as ahead of any other statesman of his time,” he wrote in 1989. The father of the League of Nations was a man “of broad vision and acute sensitivities [who] . . . did not live long enough to know what great and commanding relevance that many of his ideas would acquire before the century was out.”55 Mikhail Gorbachev, too, made allusions to Wilson as part of his manifold exertions to end to the Cold War. “Our ideal is a world community of states with political systems and foreign policies based on law,” he declared in his celebrated address to the United Nations in December 1988. Gorbachev went on to appeal for “consistent movement” toward disarmament and the “demilitarization of international relations” in order to “make the world a safer place for all of us,” and the New York Times observed that “not since Woodrow Wilson presented the Fourteen Points” had any world statesman demonstrated such vision.56 Upon the liquidation of the Cold War, Wilson began to enjoy a tentative vogue (albeit for reasons somewhat different from Kennan’s and Gorbachev’s). After the speech on the Persian Gulf crisis by the first President Bush in September 1990, references to “new world order” and to Wilson for a while became commonplace. And the ensuing Persian Gulf War, as Brian Urquhart wrote, probably was “the first exercise in the unanimous collective security that we’ve been talking about since the days of Woodrow Wilson.” Yet, after the Gulf War, the Wilsonian genie was quickly put back into the bottle. President Bush’s pronouncement proved to be little more than rhetorical effusion to accompany a highly selective, transitory application of but a single internationalist principle.57 Hence, in the first post–Cold War decade, questions about Wilson’s contemporary applicability received conflicting answers. For example, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in On the Law of Nations, suggested, “The Wilsonian project is still before us,” while Frank Ninkovich, in The Wilsonian Century, wrote that the post–Cold War normality “provided the occasion for dispensing with

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[Wilsonian policies] altogether.” Then, too, Henry Kissinger opened his acclaimed volume, Diplomacy (1994), with successive chapters titled “The New World Order” and “The Hinge: Theodore Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson.” Nevertheless, whereas he registered cautious praise for the latter, Kissinger did not hide his preference for Roosevelt. “Wilsonianism is becoming less relevant and the dictates of Wilsonian foreign policy . . . are becoming less practicable,” he wrote, specifically citing collective security and international adjudication of disputes among the illustrations for his assertion. As for the principles upon which America ought to base its foreign policy in the twenty-first century, “it would do well to consider the era before Woodrow Wilson,” the former national security adviser concluded.58 In the Clinton years, NSC adviser Anthony Lake talked of “Wilsonian enlargement,” a term that meant expanded trade and some emphasis on human rights; but ambivalence and divided counsel seemed the order with regard to the United Nations, as McNamara and Blight contend in Wilson’s Ghost. And Michael Hirsh reminds us that Clinton “failed to deliver on his four-year-old promise to pay most of Washington’s back dues.” By December 2000, the United States still accounted for half of the organization’s arrears of $3.24 billion. (Nor did Clinton otherwise ever seem to get the better of Senator Jesse Helms, the United Nations’ self-appointed Designated Tormentor.) In any case, it is not unreasonable to question the extent to which both the first President Bush and President Clinton were authentic Wilsonians, or whether the United Nations was substantially the stronger for their efforts a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall.59 As for what might be on the horizons of American foreign policy after Clinton, in 1999 Robert Kagan and William Kristol provided this preCampaign 2000 update: “The real debate in the coming year will be: What brand of internationalism? This is the debate between the internationalism of Theodore Roosevelt and that of Woodrow Wilson.” As the intellectual leaders of the cluster of neoconservatives that soon would suffuse the staffs of the White House and the Pentagon, Kagan and Kristol made perfectly clear their historical point of departure (which was Kissinger’s as well) for the policies they would advocate. “The central transitional figure in introducing the idea of responsibility into American

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foreign policy,” wrote Kagan in 1999, “was not Woodrow Wilson but Theodore Roosevelt.” For his part, Kristol flatly rejected “the utopian multilateralism of Woodrow Wilson” and instead called for the exercise of “the muscular patriotism of Teddy Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan.”60 Condoleezza Rice, in one of her earliest policy papers, and echoing Jeanne Kirkpatrick, counseled that the administration of George W. Bush would “proceed from the firm ground of the national interest and not from the interest of an illusory international community.” This was, of course, just the beginning. It was an outlook that anticipated the doctrine and the disastrous practice of “preemptive” war as well as the abrogation of the ABM Treaty of 1972, the foundation of international arms control for three decades. It was a predisposition that foretold the rejection of the Kyoto Accords, the Biological Weapons Convention, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the landmine treaty, and the quashing of the International Criminal Court (any of which might have served creatively as one of those Wilsonian “small steps” toward the “habit” of cooperation). And it surely presaged the abandonment of true cooperation with the United Nations and the World Court, not to mention the seemingly almost spiteful promotion of John Bolton—the man who had once declared that the Security Council should be reduced to one member only—as Ambassador to the United Nations. (In an open letter in 2006 protesting his reappointment, sixty-four former American ambassadors and other diplomats summed up both the insult and the injury this way: “With so much at stake, our country cannot afford to permit John Bolton to continue his destructive course,” adding that his “hard-core, go-it-alone posture . . . [had] cost the United States its leadership role.”)61 McNamara was right: “as the 21st century dawns, we are being pursued by Wilson’s ghost.” And it may be a good thing that the ideas associated with him once again command our attention (even if one cannot always find comfort in some of the reasons why). A growing recognition seems to be taking hold that any number of critical problems besetting all the nations of the world simply cannot be solved except through the concerted action of the international community; and that Wilson may have had a point in his conviction, as he put it on the western tour, that “only those who are ignorant of the world can believe that any nation, even so great a nation as the United States, can stand alone and play a single part in the

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history of mankind.”62 If, as it often seems, the entire system of international relations has reached a state of perpetual crisis, then it is essential that we remember progressive internationalism for what it was and the good will and humanity with which it was imbued. To his credit, when Wilson spoke about the virtues of refraining from war until every other possible means has been exhausted and about an experimental approach to international security that would impose upon the great powers constraints as well as responsibilities, he did not lay claim to ultimate wisdom. Even while assuming that Americans would extend their hand to the enterprise in his own day, he also felt compelled to say, “I do not know any absolute guarantee against the errors of human judgment or the violence of human passion.” But there is not a single tenet of progressive internationalism that does not resonate still—from the proposals for the peaceful resolution of disputes among nations and the imperative of reducing the redundancy of nuclear armaments in the world, to multilateral peacekeeping, multilateral enforcement of international law, and the coincident requirement of substituting nationalism with ungrudging internationalism, at least from time to time.63 For his comprehension of history, for his eloquence, and for the enduring relevance of his vision, Woodrow Wilson remains unique among presidents of the United States. Yet, let us hope that that distinction will not obtain very much longer. For those “100 years hence,” for which he said he was playing, have nearly run out. And we are confronted now by a question that his erstwhile intellectual antagonist once asked, on Veterans Day in 1984, as he was entering the decidedly Wilsonian stage of his career. “How fine it would be,” George Kennan exclaimed, reflecting upon both world wars, “if it could be said of us that we had pondered these ominous lessons and had set about, in all humility and seriousness, to base our national conduct on a resolve to avoid the bewilderments that drove our fathers and grandfathers to these follies. If civilization is to survive, these perceptions must come, ultimately, to the governments of all the great nations. The question is only: will they come soon enough? The time given to us to make this change is not unlimited. It may be smaller than many of us suppose.”64

2. Wilsonianism after Iraq The End of Liberal Internationalism?

Tony Smith

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he repeated assertions by President George W. Bush since 2002 that the national security of the United States depends on the spread of democratic government to the Middle East qualify to make the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 a Wilsonian undertaking. While definitions of what constitutes Wilsonianism, or liberal internationalism, most certainly vary, and while the implementation of Wilsonian foreign policies by American presidents have shown greater variance still, it nonetheless remains the bedrock conviction of this framework for American foreign policy that wherever democratic government appears, American security interests are likely to be served. By contrast, corrupt and cruel authoritarian regimes (Wilson died in 1924 before the concept of totalitarianism was formulated) are likely to be untrustworthy partners in the pursuit of world peace if not actively responsible for the wars that plague the human condition. As President Woodrow Wilson put his position in his War Message to the Congress on 2 April 1917: A steadfast concert for peace can never be maintained except by a partnership of democratic nations. No autocratic government could be trusted to keep faith within it or observe its covenants. It must be a league of honor, a partnership of opinion. Intrigue would eat its vitals away; the plottings of inner circles who could plan what they would and render account to no one would be a corruption seated at

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its very heart. Only free peoples can hold their purpose and their honor steady to a common end and prefer the interests of mankind to any narrow interest of their own. Accordingly, nothing could have been more Wilsonian than President George W. Bush’s oft-cited words in his Second Inaugural in January 2005: We are led by events and common sense to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world. . . . So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world. Following the terrorist attack of 11 September 2001, the Bush Doctrine emerged in a series of presidential addresses in the course of 2002, and in its most definitive statement in the National Security Strategy (NSS) of the United States published that September. As a framework for American foreign policy, the doctrine is usefully analyzed as having two major pillars, the one of power and the other of purpose. As its authors recognized, power without purpose is ephemeral, while purpose without power is impotent. Although the immediate aim of presidential policy was to justify the decision to invade Iraq, the ultimate ambition of the Bush Doctrine was to leave an enduring mark on world affairs by a confident combination of power and purpose, leaving as its testament the example of a policy that was comprehensive, long term, and capable of reworking the terms of international relations to favor American security and world peace for generations to come. The ingredients for the success anticipated in “winning the peace” after winning a war was the confidence the Bush administration placed in the universal appeal of spreading “market democracy” and the capacity of the expansion of this economic, social, and political form of interaction around the globe to create a stable environment for international relations. Here was the quintessential expression of the Wilsonian dream: that war could be replaced by peace if the peoples

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of the world but came to agreement on how rightly to govern themselves. As the NSS put it: The great struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom—and a single sustainable mode for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise. . . . These values of freedom are right and true for every person, in every society—and the duty of protecting these values against their enemies is the common calling of freedom-loving people across the globe and across the ages. . . . Today, humanity holds in its hands the opportunity to further freedom’s triumph over all [its] foes. The United States welcomes our responsibility to lead in this great mission.1 The Bush Doctrine’s pillar of power was American military primacy, a trump that this country would continue to possess “beyond challenge,” as the administration repeatedly phrased it in 2002. We can concede paternity of the military pillar to the neoconservatives, a group of Republicans whose intellectual roots go back to the 1940s but whose emergence as a self-conscious public policy-making association dates from the late 1960s. In 1992–93, during the last year of the administration of President George H. W. Bush, the “neocons” in the Pentagon under the direction of then Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney authored position papers on the need to maintain American military primacy over world affairs that leave no doubt as to the intellectual origins of this aspect of the doctrine. Their formulation was refined by studies published during the Clinton years by the leading neoconservative organization, the Project for the New American Century, founded in 1997 in league with the Weekly Standard, founded two years earlier. A moral and practical imperative for neoconservatives was that the United States remained the dominant world power militarily. Preemption, unilateralism, and, above all, a determination to maintain a preponderance of force worldwide are all aspects of the doctrine that may safely be ascribed to neoconservative thinking.2 That said, the neocons had no monopoly on such thinking. Other Republicans from Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Cheney to then Governor Bush endorsed such ideas without

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being part of their school of thought. The bottom line was that the Bush Doctrine’s pillar of power, its confidence in America’s military supremacy and its willingness to reshape global events through the use of force, encompassed a variety of perspectives within the Republican Party even if the neocons were particularly articulated exponents of the viewpoint. The aspect of the Bush Doctrine that asserts the imperative of American military supremacy in world affairs is difficult to reconcile with traditional Wilsonianism. Woodrow Wilson favored proposals of disarmament and collective security that dictated multilateral decision-making and a limited surrender of sovereignty to international institutions. Wilson was no pacifist, and as his salute to the taking of the Philippines and Puerto Rico in 1898 by President William McKinley and his own seizure of the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua indicate, Wilson could be an imperialist as well. On balance, nevertheless, Wilson counseled prudence, restraint, and cooperation with other democratic states while seeing collective action with them as key to the pursuit of their common interests. From this perspective, it is understandable that some liberal internationalists today— such as Thomas Knock and Anne-Marie Slaughter in this volume—are reluctant to locate the Bush Doctrine in the Wilsonian tradition. Where the Wilsonian tradition contributed fundamentally to the Bush Doctrine was in its pillar of purpose, with its assertion that with the expansion of “free market democracies,” the United States possessed a blueprint capable of fostering global freedom, prosperity, and peace. If power without purpose was ephemeral, here was a mission to make American foreign policy a beacon to the ages. This grand design for world order was the necessary complement of the military pillar, for it promised to restructure domestic and international politics in such a way that future generations would come to bless the American Peace. Its origins lay with Woodrow Wilson. Sympathetic though the neoconservatives were to the notion of the global expansion of market democracies as a way of assuring American national security, they did not engage in the intellectual heavy lifting required to elaborate a blueprint for the worldwide expansion of the American way. Instead, the analysis of the intellectual roots of the Bush Doctrine’s pillar of purpose leads to two surprising and important conclusions. First, its basic terms were conceived by those who might be called the “neoliberals,” intellectuals mostly to the left of the Republican Party, and

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therefore rather distant from the Bush administration. Second, the home of most of these intellectuals was the Democratic Party, not the Republican. Because many leading Democratic intellectuals became as committed to the invasion of Iraq as the neoconservatives ever were, the antiwar movement has been weak and the appeal of the kind of thinking one finds in the Bush Doctrine seems likely to endure. Viewed from this perspective, Wilsonianism is in crisis—the dimension of the defeat in Iraq makes any other conclusion impossible to sustain. Yet given its resonance with American interests and values, its tenets may well endure in modified form to guide this country in world affairs.

Debating the Bush Doctrine’s “Wilsonianism” There should be no doubt the intellectual centerpiece of the Bush Doctrine lay in its confidence that the appeal of market democracy could transform the Middle East in ways friendly to American security. In her contribution to this volume, Anne-Marie Slaughter makes much of this point, writing that liberal internationalists believe “as I do, that the origins of international conflict and cooperation lie in the political and economic microfoundations of individual societies. That is a deeply Wilsonian claim.” The debate among liberal internationalists accordingly centers on the importance of the democratization project to the identity of the Wilsonian tradition. Central to my argument is the conviction that the intellectual origins of the call to democratize the world and open its markets that we find in the Bush Doctrine lie in Wilsonianism, the liberal democratic internationalist package put together by President Woodrow Wilson when in office from 1913 to 1921. True, Wilson’s program was more complicated than simple democratization. In fact, his design for world order was premised on four concepts, whose character and interrelationship have a complexity that invites disagreement on what constitutes the heart of the Wilsonian project.3 First, and most fundamentally, Wilson called for the spread of liberal democratic government, constitutional orders limited by checks internal to the government and coming from society that would make the state transparent, predictable, and accountable. The expectation was that just

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as nonviolence and the rule of law came to dominate domestically so they could spill over into world affairs and promote peace among democratic peoples. Immanuel Kant had been the first to advance such a proposition in the 1790s, and liberals in the 1990s worked out empirically based conceptual schemes to demonstrate the argument was sound. A world at peace and safe for democracy would be a world dominated by democracies. “National self-determination,” the goal Wilson sought at Versailles in 1919 for the peoples freed by the collapse of the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires, was to be ultimately validated by the creation of regimes that were constitutional democracies. In the interwar period, only Czechoslovakia lived up to Wilson’s hopes, whereas other countries succumbed to the authoritarian or totalitarian choices of the times. One of the problems with Wilson’s hopes for the League of Nations was that its membership was not dominated by democratic states (thanks in good part to the refusal of the Senate to ratify American participation). It is my contention that the importance of the spread of democracy constitutes the first and most essential ingredient of liberal internationalism, for without it none of the other elements of the doctrine would be viable. Second, Wilson wanted open international markets. In line with traditional liberal thinking inherited from arguments first formulated by the British in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, his expectation was that a world increasingly integrated economically would be more prosperous, and that interdependence would also necessarily promote peace among those countries participating in it. It appeared obvious that where countries enjoyed both democracy and open markets, peace was even more likely to reign. Third, Wilson called for multilateral institutions to mediate conflicts and provide for collective security against aggression. Organizations as varied as the United Nations (UN), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and the World Trade Organization (not to speak of the success of the European Union) are testimonies to this dream. “Multilateralism” emerged, then, as a leading tenet of the liberal internationalist creed for its functional utility, which was also directly related to the prospects for peace. Finally, Wilson understood that American leadership would be indispensable for the success of his vision. His thinking was hegemonic, not

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imperialist, in that he expected fellow market democracies to understand the compatibility of their interests and values with those of the United States and so act in harmony with Washington. Still, as the American conquest of the Philippines in 1898 (approved of by Wilson), and its occupations of Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic during Wilson’s years in office attest—armed interventions aimed at creating what today might be called “democratic regime change”—progressive imperialism could most certainly be a feature of his thinking. When Slaughter writes in this volume that Wilson “could never have thought that democracy could be externally imposed,” she appears to have forgotten these initiatives. Yet when Wilson declared in a famous line “I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men,” the use of force was one of the instruments of instruction he was prepared to employ. The Bush Doctrine may be called Wilsonian, for it embraces all but the third of these propositions. Because the fourth pillar may be seen as substituting for the third—that is, American leadership is a plausible alternative to collaboration in multilateral institutions on an equal basis—I maintain that the bona fides of the doctrine as Wilsonian are very much in order. However, the contention that the Bush Doctrine is properly Wilsonian is open to debate. In their contributions to this volume, both Thomas Knock and Anne-Marie Slaughter insist in different ways on multilateralism as the most important feature of the Wilsonian foreign policy agenda. If their positions are accepted then it could be maintained that the invasion of Iraq, which was the product of a high-handed unilateralism flouting both the United Nations and NATO, was not a Wilsonian undertaking. The implication of their arguments is that liberal internationalism may be spared serious intellectual damage from the fallout of this calamitous conflict and so continue to serve as an important framework for making recommendations to our foreign policy elite. At first approach, Knock’s and Slaughter’s positions may seem plausible. Doubtless an array of international institutions would be necessary for liberal internationalism to function successfully. A world of democratic states would necessarily be politically plural, an order in need of mechanisms to integrate it so as to resolve conflicts and to handle the requirements of an open international market. Wilson saw the League of

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Nations as the greatest of the international institutions he hoped to bequeath to future generations, for he maintained that a concert of powers, a system of collective security, alone held the promise of peace that balance of power politics had never been able to deliver. From this perspective, the morally arrogant and practically imprudent unilateralism displayed by the Bush administration as it charged to war in Iraq was strikingly illiberal, a road that Wilson surely would never have sanctioned. But I question that multilateralism should be selected out as the chief, or defining, element of Wilsonianism. It was clear that in Wilson’s mind, effective international organizations capable of preserving the peace and ushering in a new day in world affairs presupposed that their members be predominately democratic and already committed to a high level of free trade for them to function harmoniously in the international arena. That is, democratic political organization and market capitalism would seemingly be prior, and far more critical, features of a Wilsonian world order than simply sponsoring a system of international organizations blind as to the political character of their membership. In a word, the keystone of Wilsonianism is democratic government built on strong foundations of national self-determination. Multilateralism is accordingly seen as the necessary outcome of a politically plural world of democracies. But international organizations not dominated by market democracies may fail to protect the peace. Whatever the importance of the United Nations, for example, it is of less obvious utility to American security than is NATO. Here is why Secretary of State Madeleine Albright proposed in the late 1990s that a “Community of Democracies” be established alongside the United Nations to oversee world order. Albright recognized, as Wilson had before her (and indeed Immanuel Kant had before him though he used other terminology for obvious reasons), that cooperation among market democracies was of an altogether different character than could be provided by organizations such as the United Nations (or the League after it admitted authoritarian states as members). Nor would NATO alone suffice, for the world of market democracies needed to expand to protect its perimeter of security to include such distant lands as Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, and India, as well perhaps as Taiwan and Israel. Here, too, is why John Ikenberry and Slaughter called in late 2006 for a “global ‘Concert of Democracies’” to be capable of collec-

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tive action should the United Nations be paralyzed in the face of serious challenges to the world peace.4 In sum, not “multilateralism” considered as an anonymous set of organizations whose membership might be extended to any and all was important for the Wilsonian project so much as a concert of liberal democratic countries organized on the basis of common values and interests for the sake of their common defense from the threat of war. A critical issue is the extent to which the term multilateralism is a euphemism for American primacy over a global coalition of liberal democratic peoples. In her chapter in this book, Slaughter is adamant that the United States would have to submit itself to decisions made in common by a “Concert” or “Community” of democracies. “Multilateral processes are messy, frustrating, and political,” she writes, “just like pluralist government at home. But they are also indispensable, not only to deter and constrain governments that are either threatening international peace or their own people, but also to legitimize and improve the judgments of the governments seeking to uphold international order.” The result, then, she avers, would be a genuine restriction on a measure of U.S. sovereignty, similar to the constraints on sovereignty that the United States has accepted in joining the World Trade Organization or NATO. It is all too easy to “accept” multilateral processes only as long as they give us the results we seek at any one moment. But that way lies long-term loss of credibility and power in the world. Yet reality is surely likely to be quite different from the egalitarianism that Slaughter describes the United States as practicing in her Concert of Democracies. As during the Cold War, such a concert is likely to be a convenient cloak for American hegemony. But unlike the Cold War, the threats to any such concert would be far more scattered today, and the ability of the United States to provide for common goods and collective action in these changed circumstances may make acceptance of its hegemonic status harder to gain, especially in the aftermath of the calamitous intervention in Iraq that began in March 2003. We are living “at a genuinely Wilsonian moment,” Slaughter writes. “The twenty-first century, like the twentieth century, must be made safe for democracy.” But it is just such a vigorous assertion of the need for collective action that gives rise to the suspicion that for Slaughter, as for most

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liberal internationalists still today, multilateralism is a code word for a form of American leadership indistinguishable from a hegemonic project. There are two problems with such an ambition: first, it is unlikely to take wing given the character of American power and the challenges to world order; and second, if perchance it does, then it is possible to degenerate in ways that Paul Wolfowitz once indicated when he declared that “unilateralism is the high road to multilateralism,” meaning that where we lead our liberal democratic, open market allies must necessarily follow. We should remember, after all, that NSS 2002 repeatedly saluted the virtues of multilateralism. It warned that unilateralism might be necessary should America’s allies refuse to cooperate for the sake of world order with Washington’s leadership, but in formal pronouncements (as opposed to less public statements and a myriad of actions from repudiating the Kyoto Protocols to rejecting the International Criminal Court) the Bush administration stayed committed to a multilateral approach to world affairs. Given the diffuse nature of global challenges and the diminished ability of the United States to act, how likely is multilateralism to be effective? To a point, Slaughter is correct to juxtapose multilateralism with unilateralism. The limits of American power have been plainly exposed in Iraq and the high-handed approach of the Bush administration to a range of international issues has bred little but failure. Yet would multilateral action have been more successful, had, for example, Nicholas Sarkozy been president of France rather than Jacques Chirac and so carried NATO into the Middle East alongside Tony Blair? Nor is multilateralism the even playing field Slaughter implies. Such talk disguises the unavoidable role of American leadership in any such arrangement by misleadingly insisting on “the sacrifices of sovereignty” the United States too must make. The Bush administration’s repeated disregard for collective action is indeed an example for our times of the dangers of unilateralism. But the suspicion of countries like France that multilateralism is a camouflage for American hegemony, and that Washington’s leadership is likely to be selfserving and potentially dangerous for the other members of a global Concert of Democracies, is well founded. Put differently, multilateralism can be a disguised formula for what in practice may amount to unilateralism.

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Wilson recognized that the relative power position of the United States meant it had a leadership role to play in world affairs. Multilateralism thus needed to be inspired and maintained by vigilant American participation. The failure of the League of Nations in the 1930s was the inevitable outcome of a system of international order where America was absent. In the aftermath of World War II, it was abundantly clear to leaders in the world democracies that the United States alone had the power to coordinate what was understandably called “the free world” for the sake of its common peace and prosperity. Multilateralism (be it in the creation of the Bretton Woods system, the United Nations, or NATO, for example) was therefore a product of America’s relative power position after 1945. Such a system of international institutions could not have come about without such a preponderance of power. Here was the meaning of Secretary Albright’s baptism of the United States as “the indispensable nation,” the only power capable of effectively organizing what she labeled “muscular multilateralism.” It is no accident that Albright was also the author of the concept of a “Community of Democracies,” one presumably to take form and direct itself under the sway of her “indispensable nation.” Albright understood that muscular multilateralism would contribute to American hegemonism and would be impossible without it. Thus, to suggest that multilateralism is a concept more fundamental than democratization to the Wilsonian project seems to me obviously mistaken given the need for democratic participation in such an international regime to make it successful in the first place. Moreover, to imply that unilateralism and multilateralism are somehow polar opposites is to misunderstand the nature of the latter concept as it emerged after 1945 (and indeed as it was understood by Wilson). “Multilateralism” was, and remains, a code word for American hegemony. Such a form of leadership was a necessary, if not sufficient, condition of a Wilsonian world order and would remain so for a goodly length of time into the future. As the structure of world politics changed after the Cold War, so too did the relative meaning of multilateralism as an operative feature of American foreign policy. In time, it came to mean that America’s allies would be “force multipliers” as they helped bear the burden of decisions made in Washington as it pushed abroad the perimeter of the world of market democracies.

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Wilsonianism as an Evolving Foreign Policy Doctrine Yet to call the Bush Doctrine “Wilsonian,” as if it grew out of an immutable orientation toward America’s role in the world on hand for nearly a century now, would be misleading. Nevertheless, this is what both Knock and Slaughter seem to me to suggest—that there is some eternal essence to Wilsonianism that can be recovered today much as it was intended yesteryear if we but look at Wilson hard enough. However, Wilsonianism has changed over the decades, and at no time more drastically than in the aftermath of the Cold War. Thanks to new categories of understanding world affairs generated during this period, we may now speak of neoWilsonian and neoliberal as terms born of the 1990s that have serious meaning. The historical evolution of liberal internationalism indicates the importance of changes that have occurred to it since the late 1980s.5 In a “preclassical” period that started with the American Revolution and stretched through the nineteenth century, we find the nation’s leaders speculating on their country’s role in serving as a beacon for liberty that might be followed by peoples worldwide. Still, such thinking remained largely rhetorical and, exception made for the arguments underlying Manifest Destiny, seldom involved thoughts of using force under the terms of what might be called a doctrine of progressive imperialism. With the Spanish American War in 1898, numerous foreign peoples in the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico fell under American control. Now the practical terms of liberal progressive imperialism might be more clearly defined as these foreign peoples were to be uplifted by foreign conquest. The emergence of a doctrine of liberal progressive imperialism was not to happen immediately. Liberal internationalism’s “classic” phase as a grand strategy for the United States to adopt had to await Woodrow Wilson’s presidency. The concepts for the doctrine to guide American foreign policy were now rather clearly spelled out—as we have seen, the United States would foster democratic governments, economic openness, and multilateral institutions—and the belief that what was good for American national security (the expansion of democracy worldwide) was also good for world peace became the operative assumption.

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The trouble was that Wilson’s efforts to spread constitutional government in Latin America by force came to naught. Moreover, the vicissitudes of the interwar period meant that Wilson’s design was left on the drawing board. The Bolshevik Revolution and the Depression, combined with the Nazi movement in Germany, meant that Wilson’s ambitions (which were also damaged by the president’s inept handling of his case with the American Congress) fell on barren soil. Still, the policy framework Wilson left behind constituted enough of an ideological statement of American interest and purpose that later generations could use it should the occasion be warranted. And warranted it soon was. The follow-up stage of liberal internationalism that we might call hegemonic appeared in the 1940s building on Wilson’s “classic” design. Under presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, the United States gave birth to a series of initiatives and organizations that in the minds of most students of American foreign policy constituted the finest days of the Republic in world affairs. With the Occupation of Germany and the Marshall Plan, Washington would promote in Western Europe both democratic government and economic integration. The fact that today war is unthinkable within the European Union is a testament to the boldness and the acuity of the Wilsonian vision. The glory days of liberal international hegemonism stretched from the Marshall Plan and the founding of NATO in the late 1940s to the expansion of NATO and the European Union into Eastern Europe some two generations later.6 Here is the period of liberal internationalist “hegemonism,” when the United States emerged as the leader of the free world, a collection of countries united by their commitment to democratic government and open market economic arrangements whose unified strength eventually led to victory in the Cold War. That said, for the duration of the Cold War, “containment” remained the first track of American foreign policy, with liberal internationalism consigned to an important, but nonetheless secondary, track. It was natural enough in the aftermath of the Cold War that liberal internationalist thinking would evolve. Its ideological rival had gone down to defeat with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and a vacuum opened, with other peoples asking how they might join the club of market democracies. The United States had become the undisputed center of power

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internationally, and a new nationalism based on liberal values might define the way forward. The moment was seized as men and women in American academic life especially, and usually center-left politically, came to redefine Wilsonianism in ways that made it fundamentally more assertive than it had ever been previously. With “containment” as the leading doctrine of American foreign policy a thing of the past, the enlargement of the Community of Democracies (terms from the Clinton administration) would take its place. The important point to stress is that it was not neoconservatives, but instead neoliberals, who did the intellectual heavy lifting at this point. To be sure, the progenitors of neoconservatism (as the movement came to be called in the early 1970s) were champions of liberal democracy and unrelenting opponents of totalitarianism in whatever form. But with the exception of Francis Fukuyama, not a single idea in the set of concepts that lead to a doctrine of “progressive” liberal imperialism came from a neoconservative. Nor can Leo Strauss, the éminence grise of the neoconservative movement, be invoked as the father of the idea that the goal of American foreign policy should be ending tyranny in our time. Strauss had a deep-set skepticism about Enlightenment notions of social engineering and human perfectibility. While his influence may explain some of the behavior of high officials in the Bush administration—their elitism, their use of “noble lies,” their conviction that liberals were their own worst enemies, their insistence on executive privilege—Strauss’s fingerprints are not on the Wilsonian aspects of the Bush Doctrine, for which he surely would have had a healthy disregard.7 If we would look for the arguments underlying progressive imperialism after the terrorist attack of 11 September 2001 we must turn instead to the neoliberals.

The Rise of the Neoliberals and Neo-Wilsonianism For the classical and hegemonic periods of liberal internationalism to give way to a stage that was frankly imperialist, seeds dormant in earlier years needed to germinate. The spring showers that brought forth these ideas came from world affairs. The triumph of America over the Soviet Union was better seen by many Wilsonsians as the decisive victory of liberal over proletarian internationalism. Whether in Latin America or Eastern

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Europe, South Asia or sub-Saharan Africa, what the Chinese students called the Goddess of Liberty in Tiananmen Square in June of 1989 seemed everywhere the aesthetic to be emulated. Crisis called for a reformulation of liberal thinking as much as opportunity did. In Central Asia and many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, in the Balkans, Cambodia, and Iraq, murderous civil strife and cruel dictatorships seemed enduring features of political life. Given America’s preeminent role in world affairs, did some kind of Good Samaritan argument not apply saying that we should come to the aid of these peoples in distress? Given the demonstrated success of the West in providing peace and prosperity, what role could now be played to help these parts of the world, so desperately at risk? A host of nongovernmental institutions, including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the Open Society Institute, and Freedom House, responded in the affirmative to these appeals. But a mood of the times is not an ideology. For liberal internationalism to become the voice of American foreign policy more robust concepts were called for than had hitherto been articulated. Three sets of ideas were soon forthcoming, concepts born not of 9/11 but of 11/9, that is November 9, 1989, the date chosen by the Germans to commemorate the fall of the Berlin Wall and so the death of Soviet communism. Each set of concepts contributed to the emerging imperialist consensus on the part of American Wilsonians, but taken together they were a veritable witches’ brew capable of leading a global crusade, a bid for global supremacy on Washington’s part for the sake of freedom and peace and American national security.8 The first, and most important, of these ideas is called “democratic peace theory.” Its essential claim is that democracies do not go to war with one another. According to the tenets of the argument, democratic governments are instead predisposed to cooperation and the peaceful resolution of differences with their sister republics. The nonviolent practices that govern state/society relations domestically, and that are held in place by the rule of law, spill over into interactions with other democracies. When, moreover, these peoples are integrated economically and participate jointly in multilateral institutions, the propensity for violence is dampened even more.

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Consider the reasons for the relative success of the European Union, born of this liberal internationalist vision. Here was a fratricidal region second to none that in the course of two generations had found peace and prosperity based on an embrace of the liberal internationalist creed. The success of democracy in Germany combined with the economic integration of the European Community had given rise to one of the marvels of world history, a zone of wealth and freedom where war among its constituent peoples was impossible to imagine. The example of Western Europe could be a model perhaps for reform worldwide. According to democratic peace theory—which was able empirically, theoretically, and philosophically to defend the proposition that it would be highly desirable if all the nations of the world were democratic—the American government should see human rights and democracy promotion as in the national interest. Should such a conversion take place, international affairs, a state of nature described by Hobbes as nasty, brutish, and short, would come to be replaced by a Kantian order of “perpetual peace.” A “zone of democratic peace,” a “pacific union,” could expand, and in its enlargement bring a new order to world affairs from which all democracies would benefit, including, of course, the United States. With democratic peace theory the Wilsonian notion that the spread of democratic government worldwide could have a decisively positive impact on world affairs reached a new level of conviction. What previously had been something of an article of faith lacking a substantive argument now came in the hands of the neoliberals of the 1990s to have established, seemingly beyond reasonable doubt, the Wilsonian faith in democratic government as a panacea for much of the world’s ills. So Jack Levy could write in an oft-quoted line, “The absence of war between democracies comes as close as anything we have to an empirical law in international relations.”9 In the words of Bruce Russett and John Oneal, “our findings and their implications for the future should encourage us to do what we can today to ensure that the Kantian peace is strengthened where it now operates and spread to areas still gripped by realpolitik . . . the unipolar character of the world is inevitably transitory. It does provide, however, the opportunity to create a more peaceful world, one based not so much on military force as on the principles of democracy, interdependence,

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and international cooperation. Kant would say it is a moral imperative.” The ultimate result was that John Rawls, the man usually considered America’s most eminent liberal political philosopher, could explicitly use democratic peace theory to speculate in Kantian terms on the possibility of a “realistic utopia.” Rawls embraced the idea that “lasting peace” was indeed conceivable among democratic peoples, but he enjoined them not to take on aggressively those regimes he termed “decent hierarchies.” By contrast, for what he called “outlaw states,” Rawls issued a clear warning: “All people are safer and more secure if such states change, or are forced to change, their ways.”10 But, if the spread of democratic government around the globe were desirable, was it feasible? New reasons were found to be optimistic. The second important ingredient of neoliberal reconceptualization during the 1990s had to do with the understanding of the transition from authoritarian to democratic government in a way that made the process easier to contemplate fostering. During the Cold War, the American academy had been skeptical that democratization could be easily or quickly undertaken. True, Japan and Germany had each become liberal democracies under American occupation, yet that development had as much, if not more, to do with the internal character of these countries as with the compulsion of U.S. authorities. These two countries aside, all kinds of “sequences” and “preconditions” were advanced by specialists on the topic of political transformation that made it seem unlikely liberal democracy would quickly spread worldwide.11 In terms of “sequences,” American experts spoke of the way advances in liberalizing the political order by making constitutions work might precede the incorporation of social forces into a newly emerging democracy. Nevertheless, peoples unacquainted with democratic life would doubtless benefit from having certain characteristics that could be seen as “preconditions” for any sequencing to work. Thus, a middle class and an industrial economic base seemed necessary, if not sufficient, for democratic government to emerge. A middle class had the values and interests that called for responsible, limited government, while an integrated, specialized economy called for the kind of decentralized regulation that had an affinity with the rule of law. As the

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political sociologist Barrington Moore famously put it, “no bourgeoisie, no democracy.” A tradition of limited government might also help the emergence of democratic rule. Such constraints might come either from within a traditional state—some form of checks and balances—or from an institution outside the state, such as a religious authority, that made the rule of government less than absolute. In either case, peoples wanting to democratize could work to some extent with established habits, values, and institutions. So, too, an ethic of civil tolerance would aid in the emergence of democratic government. The social contract that underlies democratic life is not simply between the state and society but also, indeed especially, among social forces that otherwise might tear one another apart in the presence of limited state power. Hence, a sense of national unity combined with a recognition of social difference contributed to the likelihood of a successful democratization project. Finally, international conditions might facilitate democratic transitions. Where neighbors not simply refrained from fishing in troubled waters but actually reinforced practices of constitutional government, then the consolidation of democratic life might be promoted. The experience of West Germany illustrated this proposition as it was incorporated into the European Community under the terms of the Marshall Plan and NATO, while the transition in Japan was aided by its incorporation into an American-dominated order in the Pacific. The result of these considerations formulated in the American academy between roughly 1950 and 1980 was a decided skepticism that democratic government would come quickly or easily to peoples who had not experienced the historical evolution of the Western world or who, unlike the Japanese or the Indians, had not been exposed to Western ways on a sustained basis. Consider, for example, the opinion of Robert Dahl in his book Polyarchy, published in 1971. Probably no work on democratization was cited more frequently in the vast literature on the subject prior to the 1990s. The book’s opening line poses our question: “Given a regime in which opponents of the government cannot openly and legally organize into political parties to oppose the government in free and fair elections, what conditions favor or impede a transformation into a regime in which they can?” Dahl devotes a short chapter to “foreign control” in the birth

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of democratic regimes and acknowledges that in lands as different as Japan and Jamaica, American or British imperialism made for important differences. Yet at the point where one would expect a discussion of how these democratic grafts onto foreign cultures occurred, we find a warning that such efforts should be avoided: The whole burden of this book, I believe, argues against the rationality of such a policy. For the process of transformation is too complex and too poorly understood to justify it. The failure of the American foreign aid program to produce any transformations of this kind over two decades gives additional weight to this negative conclusion. Writing eighteen years later, in 1989, Dahl’s position had not changed. He continued to caution that “the capacity of democratic countries to bring democracy about in other countries will remain rather limited.”12 Arguments such as Dahl’s were characteristic of the mainstream of American academic thinking on the question of democratic transitions from the 1950s through the 1980s. But then came the quick and surprising end of the Cold War on terms that favored the globalization of open markets and the spread of democratic governments among peoples as different as the Czechs and the Chileans, the Poles and the South Koreans, the Hungarians, Slovenes, and South Africans. Mexico and Brazil made new efforts toward constitutional government, as did Turkey. In the early 1990s, serious hope was held that Russia and China might move in the same direction. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, then, a new confidence was born that democracy could appear virtually anywhere. Part of the fresh conviction was due to the apparent success of economic globalization, bringing with it the rise of an international middle class, growing prosperity, the increased interdependence of peoples, and the spread of agreements that required a rules-based order domestically as well as internationally. But more of the faith was due to the recognition that liberal democracies had a claim to humane treatment of their citizenries and each other. Liberty, justice, and peace were not hollow words, but concepts capable of having meaning, here and now, and for all peoples.13 The 1990s thus witnessed the growth in numbers and strength of a wide variety of human rights organizations including, in the United States,

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most notably Human Rights Watch, Freedom House, the Open Society Institute, and Amnesty International. Great men such as Vaclav Havel, Nelson Mandela, John Paul II, or Kim Dae Jung attested to the ability of leaders to move nations. And so the mood grew that “sequences” and “preconditions” for democracy were of bygone importance. A new optimism for the possibilities of the human spirit took wing, the result being an increased sense that democracy had a “universal appeal,” that “freedom” was a birthright of all peoples, now theirs to be taken. Great men plus great ideas at certain historical junctures can make history. Was this not the story of the American Revolution and our Constitution? Could not similar examples be seen in lands as different as Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Chile, South Korea, South Africa, and Taiwan—all richer, freer, and more pro-American once they became democratic?14 Why not then too in Mexico, Turkey, China, and Russia, if the right leaders stepped forward supported by Washington and its fellow democrats in Europe and the Far East? A third neoliberal argument came from international lawyers who began to redefine the meaning of “sovereignty.” A “right to intervene” became a “duty to intervene” if a state’s “responsibility to protect” were not honored. The genocide in Rwanda in 1994 had its parallel in the murderous civil war launched by Serbia even earlier. Regimes that did not have legitimacy based on the consent of the governed might find themselves stripped of the protections normally associated with membership in the international community if they were unable to protect their subjects or were themselves guilty of gross and systematic human rights violations. While the United Nations was most certainly seen as the appropriate body to decide which states should enjoy sovereign immunity and which should not, other multilateral groups such as NATO, or perhaps eventually the hoped-for Community of Democracies, could, and should, take on the challenge.15 In short order, neoliberal jurists expanded their argument. Nondemocratic states amassing weapons of mass destruction, like those guilty of serious human rights abuses, were increasingly considered pariahs of the international system. As with pirate ships or slavers of old, they might be attacked by whoever would assume the responsibility for righting the

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wrongs that these regimes caused or who could claim to be acting in legitimate self-defense.16 What was occurring during the 1990s was a three-part argument, each of whose elements was volatile but when combined added up to a powerful inducement for American imperialism. Thanks to the neoliberals who assured us that the enlargement of the “zone of democratic peace” meant a more secure America and a more peaceful world, a Kantian moral imperative emerged to argue that where feasible such change should be promoted.17 Thanks to the neoliberals who brought about new ways of thinking about the universal appeal of democracy and the relative ease of a transition from authoritarianism, one could champion the feasibility of the expansion of democratic government more confidently than ever before. Thanks to neoliberal jurists, a blessing could be given to the tanks that might be called for to bring about a new world of freedom and peace. In sum, the period of liberal internationalist hegemonism that characterized the Cold War years gave way to a new phase of thinking best labeled progressive imperialism. Perhaps the worm had been in the fruit since the beginning; evidence is there that it was present in the policies of Woodrow Wilson. Certainly in the aftermath of World War II, one can discern an American will-to-power worldwide blocked only by the existence of the Soviet Union and later China. However, American power prior to the 1990s had always been obviously limited by other forces in the world arena. Washington would back a liberal program where it could to the national advantage, but it was generally prudent enough to scale back its expectations in situations where the promotion of democratic government could be seen as of little value, or even counterproductive, to what it defined as the national security. With the end of the Cold War this was to change. American nationalism could now deck itself out in an internationalist attire that, thanks to liberal internationalist thinking, had become a veritable ideology, a framework for political action that combined a reading of history with a guideline on current policy that was as self-assured as it was self-righteous and self-interested. The result was that the neoliberals had prepared a potent ideological brew, eventually to become the substance of that pillar of the Bush Doctrine that gave purpose to America’s bid for world supremacy. Not the

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neoconservatives—much less their hapless mentor Leo Strauss—but men and women of the center left must be seen as the authors of ideas of enormous consequence, the concepts that made the will-to-power of the Bush Doctrine seem so legitimate, indeed so compelling. What the Bush Doctrine came down to in intellectual terms was a cross-fertilization by first cousins, the neoconservatives and the neoliberals. To be sure, there were tensions. The neocon insistence on American supremacy in world affairs contradicted long-standing Wilsonian convictions that cooperation, not domination, should be the hallmark of a liberal order, just as the neolib idea that all the world might be democratized ran up against some resistance among neoconservatives better known for their pessimism than for their faith in human perfectibility. But, in short order, world events played their part in easing these tensions. Already the two camps were moving together over events in the Balkans in the mid1990s, encouraging the Clinton administration to move more decisively against Slobodan Milosevic. And then came 9/11.

The Neoconservatives and the Bush Doctrine In order to appreciate the depth of the bipartisan consensus over the terms of the Bush Doctrine, it is critical to be disabused of the belief that policy in Washington flowed directly from neoconservative thinking. We must see instead the fundamental contribution of neoliberal concepts to the intoxicating ideas of progressive imperialism. However, if we are to believe the neocons, they did indeed father the Bush Doctrine. As William Kristol wrote in the Weekly Standard on 17 March 2003, “Our policy specified in 1997 is now official. It has become the policy of the U.S. government. . . . History and reality are about to weigh in, and we are inclined simply to let them render their verdicts.” Months later, in Commentary, Joshua Muravchik explained that 9/11 revealed what his school had understood all along: “a sharp change of course was required” in American foreign policy, “and the neoconservatives, who had been warning for years that terror must not be appeased, stood vindicated. . . . Not only did the neocons have an analysis of what had gone wrong in American policy, they also stood ready with proposals for what to do now.”18

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Whatever the lessons of the Iraq war, they did not diminish neoconservative pride in their accomplishment. In 2004, Max Boot called the National Security Strategy issued in 2002 (and commonly identified as the single best statement of the Bush Doctrine) “a quintessentially neoconservative document.”19 Hence, it was quite in order in the summer of 2005 for Charles Krauthammer to write in Commentary that, in effect, everyone was now a neocon. The remarkable fact that the Bush Doctrine is, essentially, a synonym for neoconservative foreign policy marks neoconservatism’s own transition from a position of dissidence . . . to governance. . . . What neoconservatives have long been advocating is now being articulated and practiced at the highest levels of government by a war cabinet composed of individuals . . . [whose] differences have, if anything narrowed . . . it is the maturation of a governing ideology whose time has come.20 But why should we accept the neoconservative view of things? In fact, as we have seen, key aspects of the Bush Doctrine did not originate with them. And, given the strong support the doctrine continues to possess in concept, if not in name, within the Democratic Party, how likely is it that it is about to fade into history? Neither the pride shown by the neoconservatives in fathering the doctrine, nor their misgivings as to its possible future trajectory, seems justified by the record we have before us. Whatever the day-by-day alternatives debated by policy makers, and however strong the growing dissatisfaction among the Democratic electorate may be, the winds behind the ship of state are constant enough, thanks to agreement on the theoretical “givens” of the doctrine assented to by many Democratic intellectuals. Despite what one might assume to be the lessons of Iraq, American policy in the Middle East is likely to stay on course unless a new consensus can be reached on the American role in world affairs. In effect a “war of ideas,” as it is often called by those who favored the invasion of Iraq, is being fought both in the Middle East and at home, saying that armed intervention in that region is unavoidable, and indeed welcome. If public and elite opinion in the Middle East roundly rejects such arguments, at home an elite consensus seems able to maintain itself

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despite growing popular discontent. The terms of the Bush Doctrine still seem persuasive to many (who blame the execution of policy, but not its initial formulation); and for those who disagree the question remains open of how to define America’s place in the world.

Neoliberalism and the Democratic Party Given that the neoliberals were in the Wilsonian tradition, it should come as no surprise that the pillar of purpose in the Bush Doctrine should appeal to many on the center left. They, and not the neoconservatives, had authored it after all. We must nevertheless be careful not to exaggerate the similarities or reduce the differences between neocons and neolibs. Most liberal internationalists were multilateralists, not sponsors of world supremacy for the United States. They thought of themselves as cosmopolitans more than nationalists; they were intent on doing what was right for world order, not simply for American security. The chapters by Knock and Slaughter in this volume are evidence of the good faith of this conviction. And there is a telling argument to be made that had Al Gore been president in 2001, the United States might well have attacked Afghanistan, but it is rather unlikely that Iraq would have been its next target.21 Yet under the impact of 9/11, and thanks to the seductive arguments made by the neocons that unilateral action alone was called for, many liberal internationalists joined the war party led by President George W. Bush. Consider, for example, the case of Michael Ignatieff, founding academic director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Although Ignatieff regretted the lack of multilateral support for the invasion of Iraq, his outrage at Saddam Hussein’s crimes against humanity and the failure of the United Nations to act moved him to join forces with the Bush Doctrine and its unilateralism. “Human rights groups [objecting to American unilateralism] seem more outraged by the prospect of action than they are by the abuses they once denounced,” he wrote in January 2003. “Multilateral solutions to the world’s problems are all very well, but they have no teeth unless America bares its fangs.” Recognizing that America was creating an empire—“if America takes on Iraq, it takes on the reordering of the

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whole region”—Ignatieff endorsed Herman Melville’s words that Americans “bear the ark of the liberties of the world.”22 Nor was Ignatieff to change his position once the war was well underway. “Just remember how much America itself needed the assistance of France to free itself of the British,” he declared in a surprising historical analogy in mid-2005. “Who else is available to sponsor liberty in the Middle East but America? Certainly not the Europeans who themselves have not done a very distinguished job defending freedom close to home . . . when the chips were down, in the dying years of Soviet tyranny, American presidents were there and European politicians looked the other way.”23 But while Ignatieff was a neoliberal, a “liberal hawk” with a bully pulpit to preach from at Harvard, he was a Canadian and rather far from the center of power in domestic American politics. So far as the Democratic Party was concerned, the ideas of progressive imperialism surfaced in the Party’s self-described “think tank,” Bill Clinton’s “idea mill,” the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) of the Democratic Leadership Council founded in 1989. Here the neoliberal arguments for progressive imperialism held sway without rebuttal. A comparison of the neoconservative Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and the PPI shows a virtual convergence of opinion. In order to see that the Democrats regained control of the White House and the Congress in 2004, the PPI made a great deal of noise about the failures of the Bush administration. But after one cuts through the smoke and mirrors, the bottom line of these Democratic charges was that the Republicans had not succeeded in the Iraq war when it might have been won, and so had jeopardized the likelihood that American bayonets might push the perimeters of the “zone of democratic peace” beyond Iraq. These Democrats wanted to support America’s bid for world supremacy based on the promotion of market democracies every bit as much as the Republicans. The difference was therefore one of tactics, not strategy. Consider as Exhibit A, a volume published in 2006 and edited by Will Marshall, the president of the PPI since 1989, titled With All Our Might: A Progressive Strategy for Defeating Jihadism and Defending Liberty.24 Among its lineup of nineteen writers were such familiar neolibs as Ronald Asmus, Larry Diamond, Michael McFaul, Kenneth Pollack, Jeremy Rosner, Anne-Marie Slaughter, and Stephen Solarz. The difference between

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a volume like With All Our Might and something PNAC would produce is negligible, a point illustrated by a favorable review it received in the Weekly Standard from Tom Donnelly on 22 May 2006. The book presents itself as oriented toward “five progressive imperatives for national security”: (1) “we must marshal all of America’s manifold strengths, starting with our military power, but going well beyond it”; (2) “we must rebuild America’s alliances”; (3) “we must champion liberal democracy in deed, not just in rhetoric, because a freer world is a safer world”; (4) “we must renew U.S. leadership”; (5) “we must summon from the American people a new spirit of national unity and shared sacrifice.” To the extent there was an organized caucus on foreign affairs within the Democratic Party, its members supported the terms of the Bush Doctrine as their own, modified only by their invocation of multilateralism. Like the neocons, “progressive” neoliberal members of the party supported American primacy militarily over all the globe (which they understood to require expanding the country’s armed forces), and they saw democracy promotion and global markets as the key to world peace. “Make no mistake,” wrote Will Marshall and Jeremy Rosner in their introduction to the PPI volume, “we are committed to preserving America’s military preeminence. We recognize that a strong military undergirds U.S. global leadership.” And again, “Progressives must champion liberal democracy in deed, not just in rhetoric, as an integral part of a strategy for preventing conflict, promoting prosperity, and defending human dignity. . . . We believe Democrats must reclaim, not abandon, their own tradition of muscular liberalism . . . violent jihadism, like fascism and communism, poses both a threat to our people’s safety and a moral challenge to our liberal beliefs and ideals.” Still again, “Progressives and Democrats must not give up the promotion of democracy and human rights abroad just because President Bush has paid it lip service. Advancing democracy—in practice, not just in rhetoric—is fundamentally the Democrats’ legacy, the Democrats’ cause, and the Democrats’ responsibility.” The individual contributions to the volume are mostly variations on these themes. A Muslim American writes of how important it is to win the war of ideas to overcome the “cosmic war” of terrorism and so win “The Struggle for Islam’s Soul.” Another chapter addresses the youth of America as “The 9/11 Generation.” Several essays deal with making the

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military dimension of the struggle in the Middle East more effective. Stephen Solarz worries about Pakistan; Anne-Marie Slaughter would “Reinvent the UN.” Larry Diamond and Michael McFaul are once again “Seeding Liberal Democracy.” And Kenneth Pollack, whose 2002 book The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq was as influential as any single writing in justifying the invasion of Iraq in 2003, is still at it with a chapter titled “A Grand Strategy for the Middle East.” “For better or worse, whether you supported the war or not, it is all about Iraq now,” writes Pollack. His political vision? “The end state that America’s grand strategy toward the Middle East must envision is a new liberal order to replace a status quo marked by political repression, economic stagnation and cultural conflict.” The problem with the Bush administration? “It has not made transformation its highest goal. . . . Instead the administration seems to have made advancing reform in the region its lowest priority. Iran and Syria’s rogue regimes seem to be the only exceptions. The administration insists on democratic change there in a manner it eschews for Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and other allies. . . . The right grand strategy would make transformation of our friends and our foes alike our agenda’s foremost issue.” Several contributors to the volume, Diamond and McFaul most explicitly, might agree wholeheartedly with Pollack’s suggestions. Consider as Exhibit B the position of Peter Beinart, an editor of the New Republic. Calling for Democrats to rally to support the war, Beinart was widely cited for his essay, “A Fighting Faith: An Argument for a New Liberalism,” which appeared in his journal on 13 December 2004. After reporting on the “barbaric interpretations of Islam” that underlie “totalitarian Islam,” Beinart asserted that for Democrats, “the struggle against America’s new totalitarian foe [must be] at the center of [our] hopes for a better world.” Today’s “softs,” as he repeatedly called those who failed to take with utmost seriousness the menace of “Islamofascism,” were similar to those who failed to take the Soviet menace seriously in the 1940s. For our day, he declared, Democrats had to come to understand that defeating “Islamist totalitarianism . . . must be liberalism’s north star.” In 2006, Beinart published a book wherein he persisted in his admonitions. Its title strikingly sums up its bombastic, militaristic message: The Good Fight: Why Liberals—and Only Liberals—Can Win the War on

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Terror and Make America Great Again.25 The volume’s cover describes it as “a passionate rejoinder to the conservatives who have ruled Washington since 9/11 . . . an intellectual lifeline for a Democratic Party lying flat on its back . . . a call for liberals to revive the spirit that swept America and inspired the world.” Its primary purpose is to challenge the “narrative” produced by the conservatives that established and justified a grand strategy for American foreign policy with a “narrative” suitable for liberals in today’s world to do the same. Whatever its brave ambitions, the Beinart book summed up the dilemma of the war party among Democrats in the election year of 2006: they could not find any serious ground on which to distinguish themselves from the Bush administration. These Democrats agreed that “totalitarianism” was on the march, and that fighting it with an expanded military force was the answer to the challenge. They also concurred that once the struggle of arms had been concluded, then, to consolidate victory, state- and nationbuilding based on democratizing the conquered peoples was the proper way to proceed. Nor did they see any limit to such ambitions; Iraq was understood to be only the beginning of the challenge. Finally, they saw their goal as character building and morally uplifting, a fitting international accompaniment to what they hoped to see flower domestically if ever they again took control of the national government. For an Exhibit C, consider the writing of Larry Diamond, an active member of the PPI and a professor at Stanford University, who damned the handling of the war in Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq, dedicated “to my students, may they learn from our mistakes.”26 Yet it turns out that the “mistakes” were not the attempt to assert American military and ideological primacy over the entire international system, or even over the broader Middle East, or even simply over Iraq; instead it was to have botched the job. In a companion article published in January 2005 in the Journal of Democracy and titled “Lessons from Iraq,” Diamond presented a series of seven considerations for future armed, democracy-promoting interventions elsewhere. Among them were: “1. Prepare for a major commitment”; “2. Commit enough troops”; “3. Mobilize international legitimacy and cooperation.” Diamond did not criticize the Bush Doctrine. He had no apparent criticism to make of the American determination to dominate the Middle

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East, installing democratic governments there in the name of American national security and world peace. Instead, like most Democrats involved with the war, he was rather working day and night to make the terms of the doctrine more effective. Richard Perle’s testimony before the House Committee on Armed Services of 6 April 2005, “Four Broad Lessons from Iraq,” had nothing in it to which Diamond could object. The neocon Perle and the neolib Diamond were Tweedledum and Tweedledee. The only apparent difference was that Diamond could list three more lessons to be learned than Perle. Intellectuals alone cannot move the Democratic Party. Enter Illinois representative Rahm Emanuel, a Democrat whose fortunes could serve as a marker for where the party is headed. Emanuel was chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and widely agreed to have played an important role in the Democratic takeover of the House in the November 2006 election. He was also president of the Democratic Leadership Council, and thus in close contact with the Progressive Policy Institute. In November 2005, when Pennsylvania Democrat John Murtha called for a troop withdrawal from Iraq, Emanuel was the first to slap him down. Shortly before the 2006 election, Emanuel published a book with Bruce Reed, editor of the PPI magazine Blueprint. In The Plan: Big Ideas for America, Emanuel and Reed call the book edited by Marshall described earlier an “important anthology” that “breathes new life” into the Democratic Party. Beinart’s book they call “fascinating.” “Winning at war is not a partisan or ideological question . . . but a fiercely pragmatic one.” Emanuel and Reed thus position themselves as “centrists” within the “vital center,” while denouncing Republican strategists like Karl Rove as “polarizers.” But the entire exercise is reminiscent of Richard Nixon’s assertion as he ran for president in 1968 that “new leadership will end the war,” a phrase often referred to as Nixon’s “secret plan” to arrange an American withdrawal from Vietnam. In the event, Nixon’s plan turned out to be based on an effort to prevail in Southeast Asia. With leaders like Emanuel weighing in on foreign policy, would Democrats be any different in 2009 if they win the presidency than Nixon was forty years earlier? America’s hegemony project is made of strong stuff both ideologically and in terms of the interests it represents. The failure of the Iraq war at Bush’s

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hands may not mean the Democrats wash their hands of an American ambition to dominate the Middle East. Emanuel and Reed’s decision to cite positively work by the neoconservative Tom Donnelly indicates how far they remained from opposing the Bush Doctrine, indeed how many of its concepts they still embraced.27 Can Democrats rise above the temptations of a superpower?28 Can they recognize the limits of American power and the appeal of its blueprint of market democracy? Or will they stay wedded to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s words on 18 February 1998? “If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall, and we see further into the future.” At present writing, the most trenchant opposition to American imperialism seems to come more from old-line Republicans associated with former President George H. W. Bush—men like James Baker and Brent Scowcroft—than from Democrats with national prominence in foreign affairs. Bob Woodward reported in the Washington Post on 28 December 2006 that Gerald Ford had said to him in July 2004, “I can understand the theory of wanting to free people,” but he doubted “whether you can detach that from the obligation number one, of what’s in our national interest. And I just don’t think we should go hellfire damnation around the globe freeing people, unless it is directly related to our national security.” Who during the primaries in 2008 among top-ranked Democratic candidates for the presidency could be found saying any such thing? That such a position might emerge from rank-and-file Democrats is certainly a possibility. But when it does so, that it will run headlong in to the intellectuals grouped in the Progressive Policy Institute is almost certain.

The Princeton Project on National Security Consider as a final example of how close Wilsonianism comes to the Bush Doctrine an impressive document issued by the Princeton Project on National Security in September 2006. Three years in the making and described as a “bipartisan initiative” “to write a collective ‘X article,’” the “Final Paper” was titled “Forging a World of Liberty under Law: U.S. National Security in the 21st Century.” It had as honorary co-chairs former Democratic National Security Advisor Anthony Lake and former Repub-

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lican Secretary of State George Shultz, and as co-directors Princeton faculty members John Ikenberry and Anne-Marie Slaughter. The question to be asked of this remarkable paper was whether the multilateralism it espoused represented a repudiation of the Bush Doctrine (for it roundly criticized the conduct of the Iraq war), or instead whether it amounted to an effort to reform the doctrine, expressing an ambition to find a way of keeping American hegemony intact by multilateralizing a grand strategy whose terms were remarkably similar to those heard in Washington since 2002.29 That the Princeton Project represented a Wilsonian ambition was clear not just in the identity of its co-directors, both high-profile academic liberal internationalists, but also in its embrace of multilateralism and a host of liberal economic and political reforms as the key to addressing the manifold challenges to the peace of the world. Thus, sections of the document included “A Revived NATO,” “A New United Nations” (which would require “U.S. leadership and determination”), and as an “alternative body” to the United Nations, “a global ‘Concert of Democracies.’” “This concert would institutionalize and ratify the ‘democratic peace.’ If the United Nations cannot be reformed, the Concert would provide an alternative forum for liberal democracies to authorize collective action.” Although it goes unemphasized, we must surely presume that such multilateral structures would depend on American leadership. “The United States should work to sustain the military predominance of liberal democracies and encourage the development of military capabilities by like-minded democracies in a way that is consistent with their security interests,” the paper declares. As we might expect, given the Wilsonian credentials of the project’s directors, “The predominance of liberal democracies is necessary to prevent a return to great power security competition between the United States and our allies, on one side, and an autocracy or combination of autocracies on the other—the sort of competition that led to two World Wars and one Cold War.” More, “the preventive use of force” may have to be employed since “some states simply cannot be trusted with nuclear or biological weapons capable of creating mass destruction.” Outside the pacific zone of democratic states, “America must stand for, seek, and secure a world of liberty under law.” A novelty of the Princeton

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Project is that it downplays the importance of promoting democracy around the world in favor of “liberty,” which involves sponsoring economic growth and promoting a system of legal rights that constrain governments’ actions. The final paper thus has a major section titled “Bringing Governments Up to PAR,” where “PAR” means they are “Popular, Accountable, and Rights-Regarding.” While democracy is obviously to be looked forward to in these circumstances, the authors warn that young democracies may be prone to civil and regional wars so that laying the foundations of constitutional government may be a necessary prelude to a stable democratic regime.30 I would submit that all the elements of the Princeton Project are congruent with the ambitions of the Bush Doctrine with the sole exception of its insistence on multilateralism as the indispensable framework for success. To be sure, there are differences on certain details. The emphasis on liberalism (or constitutionalism) over democracy marks a welcome amendment on Bush administration thinking that regime change would be an easy affair. But whether it is the project’s call for military primacy or its blueprint for PAR, there is the same vision of a pillar of power and a pillar of purpose that are the hallmarks of the Bush Doctrine. Seen from this light, the project’s evocation of multilateralism—and its explicit condemnation of unilateralism—is a difference in means rather than ends, which remains Washington’s supremacy in world affairs based on military might and on a Wilsonian vision of how order may be structured.

Long Live the Bush Doctrine This chapter has tried to establish that the paternity widely ascribed to the neoconservatives (and claimed by them as well) for authoring alone the Bush Doctrine is to an important extent misplaced. To the contrary, it was the neoliberals, men and women of the center left, distant from the Republican Party, who conceived the critical part of the doctrine that called for liberalizing and democratizing the world. Moreover, the chapter has argued that because of the intellectual control these neoliberals exerted over the Democratic Party, as late as 2008, there was no meaningful debate in the United States over any other coherent framework of action than how to provide for a more effective implementation of the Bush

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Doctrine than the Republicans had provided with the disastrous invasion of Iraq five years earlier. These Democrats would try to multilateralize American supremacy in world affairs; a hegemonic concept would replace the frankly imperialist unilateralism of the Bush years, but in essential ways American foreign policy would remain inspired by Wilsonianism and unchanged. The success of these Democratic liberal hegemonists stemmed from the fact that the antiwar sentiment that helped the Democrats in the November 2006 elections was limited by the simple fact that it did not represent a united movement with an alternative plan for America’s place in the world. Whereas, into 2008, the Democratic Party debated withdrawing from Iraq, it coupled such thinking to plans for increased military spending in the years ahead as an indication of America’s plans to remain the sole superpower with a global mission to perform. The “war of ideas” was often said to be one within the Muslim world between “moderates” and “fundamentalists.” In fact, it was being waged within the United States, and so effectively that no credible antiwar movement existed capable of taking power and redirecting America’s role in the world. Whatever its manifold theoretical and practical failings, the Bush Doctrine, in intellectual terms, still reigned supreme. If a way forward existed, it involved acknowledging in debates in 2008 and 2009 over the future of liberal internationalism that the United States was in the grips of an intellectual stalemate, making it unable to deal with the crisis it had provoked by its own actions in world affairs. Blinded equally by its will-to-power; by organized interests from oil to the Israel lobby to conservative Christians; by its self-righteous liberal conviction that it has found the key to the worldwide promotion of freedom, prosperity, and peace; and by a realistic concern that defeat in Iraq could lead to reversals elsewhere, a good part of the political elites in this country, Democrats and Republicans alike, appeared wedded to a self-perpetuating and self-defeating framework for action more dangerous than any other initiative ever undertaken in the history of American foreign policy. Here is why the debate among liberal internationalists is real and important. The Princeton Project is no more than a reformulation of the Bush Doctrine achieved through multilateralizing its terms. Otherwise

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these liberal internationalists remain committed to American hegemony not only over other market democracies but over world order as well. Liberals like John Ikenberry and Anne-Marie Slaughter are convinced that there is a critical difference in what they propose to work for through multilateralism and what the Bush administration presupposed about American security needs with its unilateralism virtually from its first day in office in 2001. Evoking the multiple dimensions of international life that depend on multilateral institutions, from the economic to the political to security, they write: . . . the United States has the largest stake of any nation in fixing this system precisely because we are the most powerful nation in the world. The United States cannot just wield power unilaterally and in pursuit of a narrowly drawn definition of the national interest, because such actions breed resentment, fear, and resistance. . . . Leading Americans across the political spectrum understood [from the end of World War II] that we are far better off if American power is exercised within an international framework of cooperation, where others have a voice—although not a veto—and nations endeavor to work in concert towards common ends. Such a world is one in which other nations bandwagon with the United States rather than balance against us, and where they seek to facilitate American goals, not to inhibit them. That is the world we must rebuild today. Here is solid ground, or so these Wilsonians maintain, from which liberal internationalists can dissent from the unilateralism of the eight years of the administration of George W. Bush in favor of a call for multilateralism. Here lies an apparently solid wall that separates neoliberals from neoconservatives. Yet as the forgoing analysis of the Princeton Project reveals, here too we see the points of convergence between the neolibs and the neocons as well as between larger elements of both the Republican and Democratic parties. All expect continued American military primacy. All see the blueprint of open markets and liberal democratic governments as the basis of world order. And thus, all endorse a form of progressive imperialism. Whatever the damage done by Iraq and eight years of mismanagement in Washington, all may still agree, “it’s morning in America” as well.

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There are good reasons to be skeptical of such Wilsonian ambitions. We are not in the year 2000 anymore, when such a grand design might have been convincing. In eight years too much has changed. America’s economic preeminence has been reduced, its military defeated, and its allies grown increasingly fearful and insular. China and Russia have emerged far more assertive. In present circumstances, the optimism that a liberal order can be regenerated after the depredations of the Bush years is misplaced. The notion that a moribund European Union will be part of a “revived NATO,” much less that a “global Concert of Democracies” can be born (for which the Princeton Project provides a Charter in an Appendix) sounds like pie-in-the-sky dreaming. And then there is the fatuous belief that PAR has any real likelihood of success in most of the world, not to speak of the failure to recognize that such a concept contains within itself the seeds of just the kind of progressive imperialism that led to the illfated invasion in Iraq. Is the bid for American primacy indispensable for world order, or will it be instead the continued source of many of the problems we face? Is such a bid at all realistic in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, America’s “Syracuse expedition?” Wilsonianism has always been in crisis. Wilson himself was unable to persuade the Senate to let the United States join the League of Nations. During the Cold War, the requirements of containment repeatedly meant that liberal internationalism had to take an uncomfortable back seat in Washington. Again and again following the Greek Civil War that ended in 1949, Washington would back authoritarians against communists without giving much consideration to what such policies meant for liberal democrats abroad. Yet this time, the difficulties are even greater. Given its selfinflicted wounds, liberal internationalism may never again be other than a minor theme in the making of U.S. foreign policy, likely to have the sins of the Bush Doctrine waved in its face whenever its arguments surface. Whatever the undeniable rhetorical appeal of current liberal internationalist arguments such as those of the Princeton Project, my belief is that they come when their historical moment is past. Humpty Dumpty will not be put back together again. A renewed American bid for world supremacy lacks credibility. If we see beyond liberal rhetoric it becomes apparent that a club of liberal democracies is unlikely to have much strength; that economic globalization is hurting all Americans except for

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the very rich while it undermines the country’s power base in the world; that liberalism and democracy do not have much appeal outside the lands where they are already consolidated practices; that this country’s vaunted military supremacy is politically hollow; and that the pretension that the United States is, as Abraham Lincoln put it, “the last, best hope of earth” is open to serious question if not to outright ridicule. Or does this exaggerate affairs? Is Wilsonianism too much of the American spirit to be dismissed by the consequences of the American invasion of Iraq? Might liberal internationalism still inspire our natural allies abroad to act in concert with the United States in ways that promote world order? Can a refined vision of world affairs curb the excesses of globalization, address the needs of the environment, and foster human rights, constitutional government, and world peace? Might the dimension of the current crisis created in good measure by the manifold mistakes of the Bush administration not generate a consensus for change equal to the periods of reform under Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal and Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era? Might Wilson still be proven right when, as Thomas Knock tells us, he declared that he was “playing for a hundred years hence”? Is Wilsonianism once again in crisis? One may answer yes, because at a theoretical and practical level its bankruptcy seems apparent. The emperor wears no clothes. Yet one could answer no, because no alternative framework for America in world politics has yet emerged, and because powerful domestic forces—able to invoke a clear and present danger posed by terrorism worldwide—are persuasive at putting forth the argument that there is no other course of action than to multilateralize the Wilsonian project for the sake of continued American hegemony and world order. An argument may therefore persist among Wilsonians as to which aspects of their tradition to embrace in today’s difficult world: what should be democratized, what liberalized; how should economic globalization proceed; how might a Democratic Concert be structured; when might force be used collectively for national security or world order? Despite Iraq, America continues for the moment to dominate world affairs. What will it do with its power? Wilsonians contributed to the current imbroglio but they might contribute to righting the mistakes of the past as well. The Bush Doctrine is dead. Long live the Bush Doctrine.

3. Wilsonianism in the Twenty-first Century

Anne-Marie Slaughter

W

oodrow Wilson brought America the progressive doctrine of “the new freedom.” That included tariff reform, a federal income tax, the Federal Reserve System, federal antitrust laws, child labor laws, federal aid to farmers, and an eight-hour day for railroad workers. Who today would not want to claim the mantle of being his heir? It is worth remembering his domestic accomplishments because they provide an important context for interpreting his international legacy. There too, Wilson was a president who sought to avoid war at all costs; who ran for reelection on a platform of keeping America out of war; and who when he finally concluded that America had to enter World War I went to Congress to ask both counsel and permission. He believed strongly that America should fight “for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured,” but he did not seek war to spread those principles. When Wilson’s legacy is framed in these terms, it is easy to understand why so many schools of foreign policy today seek to wrap themselves in the Wilsonian mantle. Thomas Knock reviews these contenders in his contribution to this volume; they include Francis Fukuyama’s “pragmatic Wilsonianism,” Philip Zelikow’s “pragmatic idealism,” and John Ikenberry’s and my articulation of “a world of liberty under law.”1 This debate might seem like an intellectual game of “Will the Real Woodrow Wilson Please Stand Up,” if the foreign policy stakes were not so high.

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At issue here is nothing less than the lessons to be drawn from the disastrous foreign policy of George W. Bush’s first term, lessons that will shape America’s foreign policy for the next decade. If the principal lesson is that the Wilsonian support for democracy is a fool’s errand, succeeding only in snaring us in the “foreign entanglements” George Washington urged us to avoid,2 then the policy of a new administration will point us back toward a realist calculation of how best to advance our national interest, regardless of the political systems of the nations we deal with. But if the lesson is that the United States can and should stand for democracy around the world, but through the tools of patient support for the building of the political, economic, and social institutions necessary to support liberal democracy on a country by country basis, then a new administration can be expected to work with other liberal democratic nations around the world to find ways to pursue that policy as effectively as possible. That is why the debate between Tony Smith and myself on these pages is more than an academic sparring match. It is also why, sharply as I disagree with Smith’s assertions, I value his contribution in sparking this debate. Smith argues that the neoconservative architects of the war in Iraq are the intellectual doppelgängers of what he terms neoliberals, a hodgepodge of intellectuals on the liberal left who, in Smith’s view, share the neocons’ “Wilsonian” desire to remake the world in their image through American power if need be. This claim twists Wilson and his legacy beyond recognition. It fashions a whole intellectual movement—neoliberalism—largely from a semantic desire to create a parallel to neoconservatism. Worst of all, the substance of this neologism conflates the military adventurism of American conservatives with broad international efforts to build a lawbased world that preserves peace, prosperity, and human rights. Smith’s claim, in a nutshell, is that neoliberalism, authored by people like John Ikenberry and me, differs from the Bush Doctrine of preemptive war, democratization, and U.S. primacy and unilateralism only by virtue of our preference for multilateralism over unilateralism. He goes on to argue that this preference is not a difference that makes a difference, because U.S. power is so dominant in multilateral forums that other countries cannot effectively constrain U.S. action.

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In fact, liberal internationalism today, true to its Wilsonian origins, differs from the Bush Doctrine on multiple dimensions. Scholars like Ikenberry and myself indeed favor multilateralism over unilateralism, as stated. Our commitment, however, is not to cooperation and collective action but rather to an entire liberal international order—an integrated set of rules, institutions, and practices that allow nations to achieve positive-sum outcomes.3 We support liberal democracy, but reject the possibility of democratizing peoples. The better path, the only successful path, is to liberalize democratic processes and institutions where they already exist. And we reject U.S. military primacy, preferring instead to maintain a balance of power in favor of liberal democracies worldwide.4 At the heart of this debate, however, is a deeper question, one that Smith does not propose in terms but one that liberal internationalists must answer satisfactorily. One way to read Smith’s assertions is that Wilsonianism in the twenty-first century, no matter how well intentioned, will inevitably converge with neoconservatism. Open the door to humanitarian intervention and the theories of conditional sovereignty that support it as a matter of law, and it is impossible to close it again on those who advocate coercive regime change in the name of democracy and human rights. Unless a theoretical distinction can be drawn between those two positions that can then be translated into a workable legal and political distinction, liberal internationalists must take Smith’s charges of collaboration and enabling more seriously. If liberal internationalists cannot avoid such a convergence, even if they do not seek it, they must accept at least partial responsibility for the results of neoconservative policies. That is the task I set myself in this chapter: not only to rebut Smith but also to formulate a theoretical and practical distinction between Wilsonianism in the twenty-first century and neoconservatism. That task is particularly pressing because the president who follows Bush will face a genuinely Wilsonian moment. Much like after World War I, the world today needs an America committed to working with other nations to build an international order that preserves peace and prosperity through institutions and law. Pressing challenges such as terrorism, nuclear proliferation, global climate change, and the rise of countries like India and China cannot be met any other way.

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The world does not need an America that turns inward like during the 1920s. It does not need an America that seeks to unshackle itself as a global leviathan. Wilsonianism, properly adapted and updated, offers a far better guide to meeting these challenges in the twenty-first century.

Wilsonianism in the Twentieth Century Smith portrays Wilson as seeking to promote democracy and sees the neocon embrace of external intervention to do so as a natural extension of Wilson’s legacy. Yet the historical record puts Wilson in exactly the opposite light—supporting self-determination and insisting that nations actually determine their destinies without external intervention. It is true that he did not hold this view when he became president in 1913. But he learned his lesson quickly after his disastrous adventure in Mexico in 1914. His internationalist legacy was built on a later and wiser understanding of politics both within and among nations. A logical place to start to understand Wilsonian internationalism is his proclamation of the famous Fourteen Points. He listed these points in a speech to the Senate in January 1918 as a program for peace and a reiteration of the purposes for which the United States was fighting the war in light of the Russian Revolution. Perhaps the most striking aspect of the Fourteen Points, given the way that Smith paints Wilsonianism, is that democracy is never mentioned. Not once. What Wilson refers to over and over again is the right of peoples to autonomous development and the sovereign right of nations to political and economic independence and territorial integrity. Indeed, in his original call for what would become the League of Nations, in his fourteenth point, Wilson sought “a general association of nations” bound by covenants concluded “for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.”5 Wilson sought not democracy but self-determination, a very different proposition in what was still an age of empire. Self-determination meant the rights of minorities within multiethnic conglomerates to determine their own fate and form of government. It also meant guarantees against external intervention, a far cry from Smith’s caricature of Wilson as seeking intervention to impose any particular form of government.

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Wilson’s insistence on self-determination is ultimately a commitment to national, as opposed to imperial, sovereignty—the right of a people, not of individuals, to govern itself in its own way. That view stands in stark contrast to the positions of people Smith would label neoliberals today. Following the horror of World War II, when nation-states proved utterly incapable of protecting their own people, liberals promulgated the idea that states had duties to uphold their citizens’ rights, an idea incorporated into the nascent human rights regime, to which I return below. To the extent that neocons use the language of human rights to advocate forceful regime change—and it is unclear they share many of the same tenets as the liberal human rights regime when they do so—they are making a case that postdates Wilson by a quarter century. According to John Milton Cooper, perhaps the world’s leading authority on Wilson, Wilson’s early experience with intervention to help the democrats in the Mexican Revolution turned him into a staunch antiinterventionist. A week after the outbreak of World War I in Europe, with the guns of August roaring around the world, Wilson explained his altered views on Mexico to his secretary of war: There are in my judgment no conceivable circumstances which would make it right for us to direct by force or by threat of force the internal processes of what is a profound revolution, a revolution as profound as that which occurred in France. All the world has been shocked ever since the time of that revolution in France that Europe should have undertaken to nullify what was done there, no matter what the excesses then committed.6 “No conceivable circumstances” that would justify directing “by force or threat of force” a country’s internal processes. This sentiment is difficult to square with the neoconservative theology that Smith claims neoliberals have enabled.7 Unaccountably, Smith’s description of Wilsonianism mentions “selfdetermination” only in passing, as the goal that Wilson sought at Versailles.8 That goal, on Smith’s account, “was to be ultimately validated by the creation of regimes that were constitutional democracies,” although he offers no citation in support of his claim.9 Smith writes, “A world at

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peace and safe for democracy would be a world dominated by democracies.”10 But those are Smith’s words, not Wilson’s. The interpretation of this famous rallying cry is crucial to understanding Wilson’s legacy. Wilson did indeed hope and expect that democracy would result from self-determination, but he never sought to spread democracy directly. Cooper is again very helpful on the point. He reminds us that Wilson actually said: “The world must be made safe for democracy.” Cooper argues that Wilson was a strict grammarian who would never have used the passive voice unintentionally. Instead, in Cooper’s view, Wilson “meant that democracy must be defended where it existed, and if America could aid others in advancing democracy, so much the better.”11 Defending democracy means fighting the enemies of democracy, which is a very different proposition from being a champion of democracy and seeking to spread it to other nations. Defending democracy is a creed that is quite consistent with noninterventionism, but not with Smith’s desired depiction of Wilson. Equally important is Wilson’s understanding of how the world would be made safe for democracy, and by whom. After America entered the war, Wilson sought above all a “non-punitive settlement and new world order.”12 Punishing Germany, in Wilson’s view, was simply going to lead to more trouble. Wilson instead sought an end to war, and invited Germany to “associate herself with [the United States] and the other peaceloving nations of the world in covenants of justice and law and fair dealing.”13 He imagined that with the establishment of the League the causes of war would be removed. At that point, individual nations would be free to find their own way toward democracy, monarchy, or whatever other form of government they chose. Wilson was not naive about the difficulties of that journey. After all, he came into office as president with an academic background in American and British domestic politics. He also became president at a time when American society faced huge challenges, prompting calls for wholesale reform. Wilson’s diagnosis of what America needed and how best to accomplish the sweeping reforms that would meet those needs can help us understand his views on the foundation of effective liberal democracy and the virtues of multilateralism.

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Trygve Throntveit describes Wilson as a pragmatist progressive who believed in “political and social reconstruction through broadly inclusive, deliberative discourse,” a process that Wilson called “common counsel.”14 Common counsel was the heart of pragmatism: a flexible process that allowed great abstract ideals to be filled and refilled with the meaning that an ever-evolving society gave them in practice. It rested, in turn, on William James’s notion of “corrigible truth,” a truth that could be continually challenged and refined and adapted to circumstance in ways that changed its form but preserved its soul.15 The purpose of common counsel, in Wilson’s view, was to promote social change—social change fostered by the state itself. And not minor social change, but wholesale political and economic reconstruction. That description applies to the first six years of his presidency, when he took on vested economic interests to lower tariffs, regulate banking, increase the federal government’s role in monetary policy through the creation of the Federal Reserve, and strengthen antitrust laws. Wilson took on these Progressive Movement causes with a personal zeal and determination reminiscent of Theodore Roosevelt, and he was not afraid to thrust himself personally into policy debates. Indeed, in 1913, he became the first president since John Adams to address both houses of Congress in person. The most important lesson to draw from Wilson’s domestic political agenda is his deep understanding of what it actually takes to make a liberal democracy work. The roots of a successful liberal democracy must run deep indeed, deep enough to change economic and social conditions at the most micro level. Putting the two halves of Wilson together—the domestic politician and the international statesman—demonstrates that he could never have thought democracy could be externally imposed, or that it could be established by the simple expedient of holding elections. He understood, just as he did at home, that the first prerequisite was peace—absence of violence—to be established not by one nation but by a league of nations. The second was a material degree of economic prosperity and social equality, to be built from the ground up. And the third was time: not months or years, but decades. Wilson’s commitment to multilateralism must be understood in this context. First, the League of Nations was not a democracy-promoting

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institution per se. It was a dike, a bulwark of peace against the violence and aggression that allowed big nations to take over small nations and deprive them of the ability to determine their own fate. Indeed, the seminal difference between the League and the later United Nations was the nature of the security commitment. The League embodied a genuine collective security pact, akin to NATO’s Article 5.16 Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, by contrast, embodies a negative pledge in which all members agree to refrain from the use of force in their international relations except in self-defense or as authorized by the Security Council. The League was intended to be a high wall behind which nations could exercise their right of self-determination, an exercise Wilson did indeed hope would produce liberal democracies, but which he did not propose to direct or even shape.17 Second, “multilateralism” was not merely a blind for American leadership. Quite the contrary; Wilson genuinely believed that processes of collective deliberation produced better results for all concerned. Wilson’s concept of common counsel also demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of political legitimacy. He would not have been in the least surprised to discover that absence of UN approval seriously impeded the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the process of reconstruction afterward. He defined power in terms of getting results, which at least in the international sphere means that multilateralism has to be more than window dressing. Against this backdrop, Smith’s assertion that the Bush Doctrine can be described as Wilsonian because “American leadership is a plausible alternative to collaboration in multilateral institutions on an equal basis” is genuinely perplexing and textually unsupported. As Thomas Knock notes in this volume, “whatever [Wilson’s] claim to transcendent historical significance, in the end it rests . . . upon his having set in motion what Senator J. William Fulbright once characterized as ‘the one great new idea of the [twentieth] century in the field of international relations, the idea of an international organization with permanent processes for the peaceful settlement of international disputes.’” Wilson ultimately staked his presidency on this idea, in combat with a Senate that would have been quite happy with a unilateral alternative. In sum, Smith’s argument that the Bush Doctrine is Wilsonian depends on his claim that American leadership can substitute for multilateralism.

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Woodrow Wilson certainly would not have seen it that way. It is equally important, however, to refute Smith’s framing of the debate between us as turning on the importance of multilateralism to the Wilsonian vision.18 Knock and I both agree that multilateralism was and is an essential element of Wilsonianism in both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. But I actually agree with Smith that the “keystone of Wilsonianism is democratic government built on strong foundations of national selfdetermination.”19 That is why it is so critical to grasp the difference between “democratization,” or “spreading democracy,” and supporting liberal democratic parties and institutions in countries determining their own political future. My differences with Smith also rest on a deeply different view of the potential for American power to be used for good in the world. Wilson believed, and his heirs continue to believe in that potential, even as we acknowledge the many times that we have failed to live up to it. Smith is far more dubious, which is why he portrays “neoliberals” and “neoconservatives” as two branches of the same tree.

Neoliberalism: The Triumph of Semantics over Substance Smith constructs the term neoliberalism to parallel neoconservatism, since he wants to argue that neoliberals and neoconservatives not only share the same ideology, but that neoliberals actually preceded and thereby enabled the triumph of neoconservatism. This neologism affords him semantic satisfaction and frames the debate about the Wilsonian legacy in terms of a set of artificially imposed parallels. While Smith succeeds in reconstructing interesting connections between a quite diverse set of ideas, he does so with the false wisdom of hindsight rather than a genuine exploration of the intellectual trajectory of liberal internationalism. The three supposed elements of neoliberalism—democratic peace theory, a great man approach to democratic transitions, and the responsibility to protect—are stitched together in a crazy and threadbare quilt. To begin with, Smith cannot find a single scholar or public intellectual who actually advocates these ideas together, in contrast to the neoconservatives, who offered the world a manifesto in the Project for the New American Century.20 No self-consciously constituted group of “neoliberals”

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exists to advance a program.21 On the contrary, Democratic foreign policy experts routinely lament the absence of an equivalent set of coherent ideas among their cohort. It is an interesting if not sad commentary on Democratic politics that the only person who sees such coherence is a critic. Each of these three elements has a different pedigree and different groups of supporters. First is democratic peace theory. The empirical father of democratic peace theory is political scientist and former special advisor to Kofi Annan, Michael Doyle, who published two important articles in Philosophy and Public Affairs in the mid-1980s showing that no two mature democracies had ever gone to war with each other.22 Doyle advances this empirical data as a vindication of Kant’s original claim in Perpetual Peace.23 Doyle’s work triggered over a decade of debate among international relations scholars, with various participants challenging, refining, and trying to identify the specific attributes of mature liberal democracies that would account for the phenomenon Doyle identified.24 Along the way, Jack Snyder and Edward Mansfield showed convincingly that while mature liberal democracies might not attack one another, democratizing countries were more likely to go to war against just about anyone, making a strategy of democratization an unlikely recipe for peace of any kind unless conducted with care, sophistication, and a long time horizon.25 By 1994 the Clinton administration had borrowed democratic peace theory as the underpinning of their grand strategy of “enlargement”: expanding the community of liberal democracies. Later, in 2000, the State Department under Madeleine Albright midwifed the birth of the Community of Democracies, a global talking shop of democratic states. It is exactly this strategy that neoconservatives seem to find too nambypamby; far from enabling them, it offered them a target. The neocons in the Bush administration, for instance, have largely ignored the Community of Democracies. Although a democracy-based international institution would seem to appeal to neoconservatives in theory, it appears, perhaps tellingly, that their commitment to democracy promotion is not sufficient to overcome their low opinion of international institutions in general. The second supposed element of neoliberalism is a rejection of sequenced theories of democratic transitions in favor of the view that “great

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men plus great ideas at certain historical junctures can make history.”26 It is hard to know what to make of this claim. Smith offers an accurate and succinct account of the academic literature on developing democracy from the 1960s through the 1980s.27 But in describing the purported shift to the view that the patient process of building liberal democratic institutions was no longer necessary, Smith shifts to the passive: “And so the mood grew that ‘sequences’ and ‘preconditions’ for democracy were of bygone importance.”28 Where’s the evidence? Many of the former Soviet countries were able to make a peaceful and stable transition to democracy, but only within the context of NATO and promised EU membership. Others, most notably the countries of the former Yugoslavia, fell apart in violent and often horrific ethnic conflict. Boris Yeltsin made a mess of the Russian economy and rapidly lost support for democracy among ordinary Russians. In short, almost nothing in the 1990s supported a view that democracy could be conjured up by a wave of the hand of a great man with great ideas. Indeed, Larry Diamond, whom Smith cites repeatedly in support of a rejection of sequenced views of democracy building, excoriated the Bush administration for failing to appreciate the complexity and multiple dimensions of democratic transitions in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq.29 A third neoliberal argument, according to Smith, “came from international lawyers who began to redefine the meaning of ‘sovereignty.’ A ‘right to intervene’ became a ‘duty to intervene’ if a state’s ‘responsibility to protect’ were not honored.”30 The pedigree of this claim is worth parsing closely, because it illuminates the artificiality of Smith’s construct and because it demonstrates the true origins of the “responsibility to protect,” which are neither liberal nor conservative but humanitarian and supported by a broad cross-section of the developed and developing world. The responsibility to protect is a doctrine developed essentially at the behest of that noted unilateralist, Kofi Annan. At the opening of the General Assembly in September 1999, Annan challenged all UN members to “reach consensus—not only on the principle that massive and systematic violations of human rights must be checked, wherever they take place, but also on ways of deciding what action is necessary, and when, and by whom.”

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Annan had in mind two crises that occurred under his watch, first as director of the UN’s peacekeeping operations and later as secretarygeneral. In 1994 Rwandans killed eight hundred thousand of their countrymen in a matter of months while the world did nothing. Then, in 1999, NATO flouted the United Nations and, in the eyes of many, international law, and bombed Serbia in order to stop Serb aggression against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. As Annan wrote later, “The genocide in Rwanda showed us how terrible the consequences of inaction can be in the face of mass murder. But this year’s conflict in Kosovo raised equally important questions about the consequences of action without international consensus and clear legal authority.”31 Finding a way to prevent the former without sliding down the slippery path lurking in the latter is a major task for policymakers in the twenty-first century, as the crisis in Darfur illuminates. In response to this challenge, the Canadian government, together with a group of major foundations, established the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), headed by former Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans and Special Advisor to the UN Secretary-General Mohamed Sahnoun and composed of a distinguished global group of diplomats, politicians, scholars, and nongovernmental activists. In December 2001 the commission issued an important and influential report, titled “The Responsibility to Protect,” that essentially called for updating the UN Charter to incorporate a new understanding of sovereignty.32 The ICISS seeks to change the core meaning of UN membership from “the final symbol of independent sovereign statehood and thus the seal of acceptance into the community of nations,” to recognition of a state “as a responsible member of the community of nations.”33 Nations are free to choose whether or not to sign the Charter; if they do, however, they must accept the “responsibilities of membership” flowing from their signature. According to the commission, “There is no transfer or dilution of state sovereignty. But there is a necessary re-characterization involved: from sovereignty as control to sovereignty as responsibility in both internal functions and external duties” (emphasis in the original). Internally, a government has a responsibility to respect the dignity and basic rights of its citizens; externally, it has a responsibility to respect the sovereignty of other states.

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Further, the commission places the responsibility to protect on both the state and the international community as a whole. The commission insists that an individual state has the primary responsibility to protect the individuals within it. However, where the state fails in that responsibility, a secondary responsibility falls on the international community acting through the United Nations. Thus, “Where a population is suffering serious harm, as a result of internal war, insurgency, repression or state failure, and the state in question is unwilling or unable to halt or avert it, the principle of non-intervention yields to the international responsibility to protect.” In my view, the ICISS report outlines the most important shift in the nature of sovereignty since the Treaty of Westphalia. But the origins of this shift aren’t exactly neoliberal, at least in the sense that Smith uses the term. In the first place, far from being an American conspiracy, the ICISS was a genuinely international group, headed by former Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans and the Algerian diplomat Mohamed Sahnoun. It included experts from Canada, the United States, Russia, Germany, South Africa, the Philippines, Switzerland, Guatemala, and India. It conducted hearings in Ottawa, Geneva, London, Maputo, Washington, Santiago, Cairo, Paris, New Delhi, St. Petersburg, and Beijing. Subsequently, efforts to promote the responsibility to protect in the United Nations have even garnered the support of a number of African countries. These countries know full well that they could be targets of intervention on the basis of the responsibility to protect, but nevertheless recognize the critical importance of holding themselves and their neighbors to account for not turning on their own people. Their agreement was codified in the Ezulwini Consensus, the African Union’s official response to Kofi Annan’s High Level Panel Report outlining the responsibility to protect. Indeed, the African Union went one step further than the High Level Panel and suggested that regional intervention under the responsibility to protect even without Security Council authorization may at times be appropriate.34 The responsibility to protect does indeed have classical liberal roots, in the sense that it supports individual citizens against the state. It is in many ways a natural extension of the human rights movement as a whole, which is deeply compatible with liberal democracy, although it is worth noting

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that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was ratified in 1948 by forty-eight of the then fifty-eight members of the United Nations, earning abstentions only from Saudi Arabia, the Soviet Bloc, and apartheid South Africa.35 The entire human rights regime favors states that have relatively good human rights records over states that do not, as a matter of universally agreed international law. Above all, even the most expansive interpretation of the responsibility to protect would not have authorized the invasion of Iraq in 2003. If the responsibility to protect doctrine had been an established UN doctrine in 1988 when Saddam Hussein deliberately gassed Kurds in Halabja, or in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War when he killed thousands of Shi’ites in the South and destroyed the marshes, the Security Council could have relied on it to take action against the Iraqi government. But by 2003 the Iraqi human rights record, while dismal, was no worse than that of many other governments. Armed invasion on humanitarian grounds was not justifiable under any current version of the responsibility to protect doctrine; nor was it ever advanced as a rationale for the invasion by the Bush administration. The stated grounds were the violation of previous Security Council resolutions requiring the elimination of all of its weapons of mass destruction and free access to weapons sites for inspectors. The whispered grounds in Washington were to create a stable democracy that would provide a springboard for the democratic transformation of the Middle East. Supporters of the responsibility to protect are more comfortable with the use of force than are many traditional international lawyers. But these supporters are acutely aware of the potential for abuse of any exception to the basic rule of nonintervention. And indeed, in the United Nations itself the responsibility to protect was ultimately adopted only in a significantly hedged form. International intervention would require Security Council approval and only be permitted on a case-by-case basis and in cooperation with relevant regional organizations as appropriate, should peaceful means be inadequate and national authorities are manifestly failing to protect their “populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.”36 The more fundamental link between the responsibility to protect and the authorization of the use of force in situations other than the grave humanitarian crises encompassed by the doctrine lies in the extent to which

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serious, deliberate, and systematic human rights violations indicate a flaw in a particular government that should alert the international community to potential danger in other situations. Was it reasonable, for instance, to be more suspicious of Saddam Hussein’s denials of nuclear, biological, or chemical capacity given his previous record not only of seeking such weapons but actually being willing to use them? In a more contemporary example, suppose the intelligence services of multiple countries had credible evidence that the Sudanese government was developing biological weapons and that the issue was brought to the Security Council. In trying to assess the validity of the evidence and the gravity of the threat, is the Security Council justified in weighting the evidence against the regime more heavily in light of the regime’s conduct in Darfur? Two possible reasons justify answering yes to this question. The first is President Bush’s view that governments (or their leaders) can be categorized along the binary dimension of “good” or “evil.” Governments that are evil, in this view, warrant having all presumptions and inferences drawn against them; they are inherently suspect. Many of the atrocities committed by governments against their citizens and more generally by human beings against their fellow human beings are so horrifying that they reveal the very face of evil—think of the mutilation strategies by Charles Taylor’s troops in Sierra Leone or the abduction and brutalization of children forced to kill family members to make them soldiers in the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda. But “evil” is far too subjective and emotive a determination to serve as a foundation for decisions that can themselves loose the death and destruction that will accompany any use of force. The second reason that a horrific and systematic human rights record might justify giving greater credence to charges of dangerous behavior on the part of a particular government is not personal or moral but institutional. This view sees grave and systematic human rights violations as a symptom not necessarily of the character of a particular government but of its structure. They are a symptom of the near complete absence of any checks on the use of governmental power by other branches of government or by the people. The logic here is Madisonian; it underlies the basic principles of American government. “If men were angels,” Madison wrote, “no government would be necessary.” Far from assuming that some

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leaders are good and some are evil, Madison and his fellow framers assumed that all governors are open to temptation, and so must be checked and balanced. The corollary is that all governments commit some abuses of power, even grave abuses of power, but that healthy governments have a self-correcting mechanism.37 The necessity of checks on government power is at the core of political liberalism. To the extent that international law is evolving, however haltingly, toward an understanding of sovereignty and a system of collective security that is premised on the responsibility of governments to protect their own citizens and that gradually recognizes the value of institutional checks on individual power in helping ensure that governments live up to this responsibility, it is moving in a liberal direction. Note, however, that this evolution does not describe a teleology of virtue. Liberal democracies are not inherently good. They do not get some kind of free pass or presumption that they are complying with their international legal obligations. Rather, they have put the institutions in place to counter the dark side of human nature—the nature of all humans, wherever they may live. That is a premise not of neoliberalism or neoconservatism, but of the Enlightenment. In sum, Smith’s version of neoliberalism is an artificial and often polemical construct. However, he raises one point that all champions of human rights, liberal democracy, self-determination, and the international rule of law must confront.38 Is it in fact possible to legitimize the offensive use of force in any situation, however carefully hedged and limited and however well intentioned, without opening Pandora’s box? Is it inevitable, even if not intended, that endorsement of the use of force in the service of the responsibility to protect will inevitably be twisted into a justification of the use of force to democratize a country? Must the best always be the enemy of the good? More concretely, is it possible to construct a system of safeguards that would allow intervention to save eight hundred thousand Rwandans without enabling the use of force for multiple other less savory purposes, or even for benign but unacceptable purposes? David Rieff has addressed these questions in a version of Smith’s argument that is directly informed by his experience in the field in Bosnia and Africa, as well as by a lively critical sensibility.39 Rieff worries that liberals

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interested in preventing genocide in Rwanda and neoconservatives wanting to spread democracy in the Middle East share a misguided faith in the ability of strong states or the international community to help rather than harm. Although they may differ on means—multilateral versus unilateral, military force as first resort or last—both camps share, in Rieff’s view, a faith in their own ability to better the world that is as dangerous as it is naive. This argument must be answered directly and unflinchingly by all liberal internationalists who believe, as I do, that the origins of international conflict and cooperation lie in the political and economic microfoundations of individual societies. That is a deeply Wilsonian claim. An updated Wilsonianism must thus confront the question whether and under what circumstances the collective or even, in extreme circumstances, the unilateral use of “coercive measures,” in Kofi Annan’s phrase, is permissible to free a society from the iron grip of a government bent on the destruction or virtual suffocation of a significant portion of its own population— whether an ethnic group, as in Rwanda, or all women, as with the Taliban in Afghanistan.40 Such measures may do more harm than good either directly, in terms of the killing and destruction that results from the intervention itself, or indirectly, in terms of licensing other aggressive interventions and destroying the shaky edifice of self-restraint in the use of force that we have built up over the course of a century. In such cases, Rieff and others are right to condemn intervention no matter how altruistic or whatever the circumstances. But then the debate extends far beyond “neolibs” and “neocons.” It raises far deeper questions of how both domestic policy and international law should respond to a world in which the principal threats to individuals worldwide are emerging from within states rather than between them.

Wilsonianism in the Twenty-first Century Woodrow Wilson lived in a world of states’ rights, not individual rights. At home, his racism and indifference to the plight of African Americans— indifference reflecting not only his Southern heritage but also political expediency—reveals his focus much more on the nature and quality of

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government than on individual civil and political rights. He thought much more in terms of the rights of an entire people, as in national self-determination, or the rights of groups of people, as in his beloved parliamentary party system. His emphasis on government through common counsel, for instance, envisioned a collective decision-making process among representatives of different interests in society. He was a political scientist rather than a lawyer, a reformer who turned to the larger forces of politics rather than the individual rights of the litigant. World War I was a war of nation-states and nations striving to be states. It was reasonable in its wake to imagine that if the geopolitical map could be better aligned with national aspirations and if the aggression of powers could be checked, peace and prosperity would flourish. After all, the dominant legal culture of Wilson’s era, exemplified by men like Elihu Root and William Howard Taft, firmly believed that states could be persuaded to settle most differences in The Hague rather than the battlefield.41 Even in this nation-state centered era, however, the League Covenant included guarantees of individual rights. Article 20 of the original Covenant that Wilson presented to a plenary session of the peace conference on 14 February 1919 provides: The High Contracting Parties will endeavor to secure and maintain fair and humane conditions of labor for men, women, and children both in their own countries and in all countries to which their commercial and industrial relations extend; and to that end agree to establish as part of the organization of the League a permanent Bureau of Labor.42 After World War II, this early focus on relations between governments and their citizens expanded well beyond labor. Hitler’s aggression and the horrors of Nazism in general brought three lessons home. First, that war could spring not simply from the ambitions of one state against another, but from the depravity and megalomania of a single leader. Second, that a government could wreak such horrors on its own people that “self-determination,” unchecked, could become a travesty. And third, that such horrors were often the symptom of either an ideology or an individual agenda that could readily spill across borders, transforming intrastate brutality into interstate war.43

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Reflecting these lessons, post–World War II Wilsonianism amended and amplified the basic notion of an international collective security system that would allow individual nations to determine their destinies in peace. The United Nations Security Council tempered aspirations for the League of Nations by acknowledging the necessity of giving great powers a special seat at the table and the reality that collective action would not be forthcoming absent their agreement. Each great power thus got a veto.44 But the Security Council came to coexist with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the “embedded liberalism” of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).45 The human rights movement was built on a Wilsonian platform, insisting that governments make specific pledges regarding their treatment of their citizens. Embedded liberalism similarly recognized that national governments would want and need to provide for the economic well-being of their citizens and thus that they needed some relief from pure economic liberalism. In effect, the social compromise championed domestically by Wilson and then, more fully, by FDR was recast at a global scale. The Great Depression and the New Deal demonstrated that freeing up the forces of economic competition and creating a supportive infrastructure for a healthy economy and sound government, as Wilson had done by creating the Federal Trade Commission, a progressive income tax, and a federal reserve, was not enough to ensure the well-being of individual citizens. World War II demonstrated that letting nations determine their destinies without regard to some specific relationships between governments and their citizens was not enough to secure either international peace or domestic well-being. After the end of the Cold War, the international system turned back in many ways to Wilson’s world: nationalism, ethnic conflict, violence of all kinds swirling around seemingly arbitrary state boundaries. Self-determination in the Balkans had never actually been achieved, but only deferred. But unlike World War I, it was violence taking place above all within states rather than between them. International institutions designed, however imperfectly, to stem interstate violence did not even have the legal technology to allow them to decide to act, much less the physical technology actually to enable them to implement the resulting decisions.

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Amid the escalating violence in multiple countries, the limits of a voluntary system of international human rights protection became all too evident. To the inevitable inertia and agonizing slowness of an expressly political decision-making process in the UN Security Council was added the inability of nations seeking to provide food to starving millions in Somalia, to stop Slobodan Milosevic’s determination to destroy a functioning multiethnic society in the former Yugoslavia, or, had anyone tried, to stop a hideous genocide in Rwanda, to find a language and a legal framework to argue against an absolute norm of nonintervention in the domestic affairs of any nation. Here, as described above, is the origin of the responsibility to protect. At the same time, the value of liberal democracy in the 1990s was understood in social and economic as much as political terms. When Francis Fukuyama wrote The End of History, he was referring as much to the seemingly universally acknowledged benefits of free (or relatively free) market capitalism as to the virtues of voting. And what impressed Western observers most about the fall of the Soviet Union and especially its proxy governments in Eastern Europe was the strength and centrality of civil society in effecting democratic change. Such a civil society is essential to individual self-determination as much as national self-determination. In this context, the responsibility to protect and the democratic peace came together in a vision of social and economic transformation rolling across poor and oppressed countries that was indeed Wilsonian. Not a vision of the forcible spread of liberal democracy, nor yet of a universal embrace of the United States, but rather of removing the obstacles to social development and economic growth internationally in much the same way that Wilson’s New Freedom or Franklin Roosevelt’s four freedoms had done domestically.46 After all, the 1990s was also the age of astonishingly rapid European integration after decades of stagnation. After the completion of the Single Market in 1992, Europe both deepened and widened, bringing an undeniable measure of prosperity and freedom to a growing region from the coast of Portugal to the forests of Poland. Tony Lake’s vision of “democratic enlargement” owed as much to the concrete example of an expanding European Union as to any political theory of a democratic peace.

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This vision was fueled by the optimism of a new age—a sunny stretch in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War. That optimism has been sadly and brutally tempered by Iraq, but the optimists refuse to give up entirely. That is why the current debate over the lessons of Iraq, even while the war continues, is so important. Smith is right to say that many strong supporters of the responsibility to protect, including me, saw Saddam Hussein through the lens of his horrific human rights violations, a view that in turn may have led us to be more willing to believe that he had nuclear or biological weapons without carefully scrutinizing the available evidence. We were wrong. In my view, that is exactly the situation in which multilateral processes should have been most valuable; in which it should have been incumbent on our government and the British government to convince not only Americans and Britons but also the citizens of other liberal democracies with an equal dislike for Saddam Hussein’s abuses that evidence of an imminent threat to international security justified the direct use of force against him. Wilson would have looked to Security Council deliberations as an international version of common counsel. But common counsel failed. The United States and Great Britain and a handful of other nations did not wait for authorization by the Security Council, or ever seriously contemplated not going to war if such authorization was not forthcoming. Hence the debate in this volume: given the weakness of any constraints on the use of force by the powerful against the less powerful, isn’t a doctrine like Wilsonianism that licenses the use of force for any purpose other than strict self-defense deeply dangerous? Isn’t it inevitably enabling, whether its proponents want it to be or not? My answer remains no. The twenty-first century, like the twentieth century, must be made safe for democracy. For Wilson, that meant a collective commitment to stop imperialist aggression and allow states to decide their destinies for themselves—a vision that he fought for but failed to achieve. For an American president in the first decade of the twentyfirst century, it means a collective commitment to create the economic and social conditions in which liberal democracy can flourish, including, in extreme circumstances, enforcement of a government’s responsibility to protect its own citizens.

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From Principles to Policy Translating the principles of Wilsonianism into a twenty-first-century context is the critical task facing scholars and foreign policy thinkers who continue to subscribe to and be inspired by the liberal internationalist tradition. The Princeton Project on National Security final report, which Tony Smith uses at the end of his essay to clinch his case that twenty-firstcentury liberal internationalism is closely aligned with the Bush Doctrine,47 does indeed contain many liberal internationalist elements. But it is not a creed or even a statement of principle, but rather a pragmatic document laying out a national security strategy that is based on over two years of bipartisan deliberations among foreign policy experts of every stripe. Further, Smith’s characterization of the report, titled “Forging a World of Liberty under Law,” equates U.S. leadership within a genuinely collective framework with U.S. hegemony and understands the report’s call for “military predominance of the world’s liberal democracies” as a quest for U.S. “primacy.”48 These distinctions actually make an enormous difference, but rather than rebutting Smith’s argument point by point, I will instead lay out my own view of the central principles and convictions of twenty-first-century Wilsonianism. • States derive their authority and legitimacy as the primary actors in the international system from their status as the protectors of and providers for their citizens. Any sovereign state must be presumed to have determined its own form of government. That presumption, however, can be overcome by a government’s behavior against its own citizens that so egregiously violates fundamental human rights as to amount to genocide or crimes against humanity. Such behavior cannot be chosen or self-determined in any meaningful way. • Human progress in any society requires economic, social, and political transformation from the bottom up. Liberal democratic institutions cannot be imposed or even established from without, but must instead be built from within. Other nations and international institutions can support and even advance this process through the creation of a stable and just international order, but cannot substitute for it.

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• Decisions about the use of force in the international system to repel aggression, to enforce international law, or to intervene to protect a population where its government has abdicated its responsibility to protect must be made collectively rather than individually. Multilateral processes are messy, frustrating, and political—just like pluralist government at home. But they are also indispensable, not only to deter and constrain governments that are either threatening international peace or their own people, but also to legitimize and improve the judgments of the governments seeking to uphold international order, including the United States. Team Leadership Translating these principles into U.S. policies requires a new understanding of leadership, a new conception of supporting democracy, and a new approach toward current multilateral institutions. Regarding leadership, one of the core assumptions that Smith makes about the group of thinkers he calls neoliberals is their purported attachment to U.S. “hegemony.” “These Democrats,” he writes, “would try to multilateralize American supremacy in world affairs.”49 Liberal internationalists do believe in American leadership, but not in supremacy or hegemony. And in the twentyfirst century both the substance and style of American leadership in world affairs will have to change. The United States will not lead as of right, as the unchallenged economic and military superpower. On the contrary, changes in the world economic and political system are bringing many new powers to the fore; not only the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), but also the European Union as an important civilian and economic power. Equally relevant, the global and deeply interdependent nature of many twenty-first-century problems require teams of nations to take the lead in tackling them—not one single voice. In the twenty-first-century world of global corporate networks, many business leaders are turning to “team leadership,” a mode of motivating others and working together toward a common purpose that assumes teamwork rather than hierarchy.50 In many areas, successful national leaders will have to follow suit.

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Building Liberal Democratic Institutions A new conception of supporting democracy is already burgeoning in many political quarters in the United States. The majority of the electorate heading into the 2008 presidential election was wondering why the United States is paying more attention to democracy building abroad rather than democracy strengthening at home. And even the most committed supporters of democratic transitions around the world question the wisdom of holding elections that brought Hamas to power in Palestine and that have fanned ethnic divisions in places like Iraq and Kenya. Liberal internationalists may not return to the sequenced developmental approach of academic theorists in the 1970s and 1980s, but many are focusing on the critical importance of building liberal democratic institutions to guarantee the rule of law, minority rights, and an economy that works for the broader society rather than only a pampered few.51 The Princeton Project on National Security deliberately emphasizes liberty under law rather than democracy; it portrays democracy as a means to the end of ordered liberty, much as the American founders saw it.52 A PAR index ranking governments worldwide, including developed countries, on their degree of Popular, Accountable, and Rights-Regarding government is hardly a farfetched idea. Indexes like the Freedom House index offer a ready model.53 A New View of International Institutions A new approach toward multilateral institutions would begin by reaffirming that treaty obligations are genuine restrictions on U.S. sovereignty— voluntarily accepted as the price of a greater benefit. The United States has accepted those obligations in the World Trade Organization, accepting that an international panel may strike down U.S. legislation for violating international trade rules, as the cost of imposing those same rules on all other WTO members. Indeed, the United States has long accepted that its obligations under NATO require it to come to the defense of any NATO member that is attacked, whether or not the United States would have chosen to go to war in the absence of such an obligation. Accepting treaty obligations only as long as they give us the results we seek at any one moment destroys U.S. credibility and undermines U.S. power over the long term.

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Woodrow Wilson understood this point all too well. As Thomas Knock demonstrates persuasively, Wilson did not flinch from presenting the American people with some hard truths and basic trade-offs. Knock opens his chapter with an excerpt from one of Wilson’s speeches on his western tour in which he told his audiences: “only those who are ignorant of the world can believe that any nation, even so great a nation as the United States, can stand alone and play a single part in the history of mankind.” Even more directly, he was prepared to tell members of Congress that some of our sovereignty would be surrendered. He pointed out that other nations would be prepared to make a similar sacrifice, and only thus could concerted action be achieved.54 Hard truths, but necessary ones. The real test of this commitment to live up to our international obligations comes in the Security Council. We are pledged under the UN Charter not to use force except in self-defense, an often-broad exception, without the authorization of the Security Council. Although that commitment was plainly understood when it was made,55 U.S. presidents since the end of the Cold War have been unwilling to give the United Nations a veto over the pursuit of its vital interests; during the 2004 presidential campaign President Bush accused his Democratic opponent John Kerry of requiring a “global test” before defending the United States (not that the UN Charter actually required him to do so), a charge the senator strenuously denied.56 From my perspective, a U.S. president should make absolutely clear what our actual obligations are under the Charter and then should pledge either to adhere to them or to work with other nations to adapt the interpretation of the Charter. That is exactly, in fact, what Secretary General Annan asked nations to do with respect to finding a legal basis in the Charter to authorize intervention in a situation like the Rwanda genocide. That is the genesis of the responsibility to protect. If Security Council authorization is still going to be essential to the use of force for purposes other than self-defense, however, then the Security Council must become more effective and more legitimate. Today’s Council—which is to say, the Council of 1945—does not score particularly well in either category, as can be seen perhaps most dramatically in its inability to end the humanitarian crisis in Darfur. A body that omits India’s billion people, that excludes major economic powers like Germany

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and Japan, that does not include even a single country from Africa, Latin America, or the Middle East in its permanent membership, and that allows the five victors of World War II to unilaterally block any action is not a good enough repository of collective action for the twenty-first century. But the answer is not, as the neocons believe and as Smith fears, to write off the Council. Rather, the response is to push very hard for meaningful Security Council reform. Only a Security Council that can act, and act with legitimacy, in the face of the world’s problems will earn the trust and compliance of member states, including ours. The American people are far more likely to accept constraints on American sovereignty if they are convinced that the multilateral processes we voluntarily subject ourselves to do not subject the collective judgment of liberal democracies to the specific interests of autocracies and dictatorships. But what if, after truly trying to reform the Security Council, we do not succeed? The answer is still not to abandon multilateralism. Rather, if the need for international action is great, the international community must turn to broadly representative regional institutions to authorize and implement interventions, a role NATO fulfilled in Kosovo in 1999 and a role the African Union is performing today in Darfur. Note that even these exceptional cases would not lower the threshold enough to sanction the neocon war in Iraq. No multilateral institution would have sanctioned that war in March 2003, thus the Bush administration’s reliance on an ad hoc coalition. Seeking the approval of a representative multilateral institution other than the United Nations, after first trying in the United Nations, would probably not be legal under the Charter, although many arguments would be advanced concerning the scope for action by regional organizations under Charter Article 53.57 And perhaps new interpretations of the Charter similar to the responsibility to protect might emerge. But the Wilsonian point here is a sustained and genuine commitment to the processes of common counsel; a refusal to engage in the use of force as of choice, rather than of necessity, without the benefit of multiple perspectives and the need to make a case to multiple judges. A final Wilsonian gloss on twenty-first-century multilateralism concerns the application of the responsibility to protect doctrine itself, interpreting it to take account of the full dimensions of that responsibility. Any

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use of force against a society, no matter how well intentioned, requires a calculation in terms of the impact on the social and economic microfoundations of a society. This calculation must extend well beyond establishing the political forms of a liberal democracy. For Wilson, a healthy democracy required a healthy society and a healthy economy. That means that a removal of even a hateful tyranny will be ineffectual at best and counterproductive at worse if it destroys rather than transforms economic and social life in a society. As far as I know, this proposed addition to the responsibility to protect has not been articulated in these terms. It is an example of precisely how an understanding of the deep foundations of Wilsonianism can help shed light on contemporary dilemmas. The necessity of calculating the impact of forcible intervention on the ability of a society to reconstruct itself adds another bulwark against the reckless use of the responsibility to protect to license such intervention. It means, for instance, that many of the most ardent supporters of international intervention to stop the killing in Darfur are recognizing the need for a longer-term plan not only to keep whatever fragile peace may possibly be established, but also to allow Darfuris to return to their villages and their livelihoods unmolested. That is a far more difficult proposition, but without such a plan a temporary cessation of Janjaweed atrocities might only hold the Darfuris hostage to even more violent retribution after a pullout of international and regional forces. Iraq has given armed intervention in a country’s internal affairs a very bad name. The impact on the Iraqi economy and society has been disastrous. However, the right lesson to draw is not to return to the middle of the twentieth century, to Franklin Roosevelt’s improvement on Wilson’s initial effort. It is to turn back to Wilson’s original ideas and recognize the extent to which updated versions of them have become woven through the warp and woof of the international system. Wilson would look today at the expanded European Union and see his own vision of self-determination and democracy for so many countries finally realized. He would look at the United Nations and perhaps see an improvement on the League. He would look at the responsibility to protect and see an effort to update his principles to changing circumstances. As horrible as Iraq is, and as many mistakes as we have made, that is the way forward.

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Conclusion Tony Smith’s anger at the death and destruction that the United States has helped to wreak on Iraq and on our own soldiers is genuine and justified. He captures the frustration of a substantial swath of the Democratic Party, and indeed of many Americans regardless of party who see thousands of American lives, tens of thousands of Iraqi lives, and billions of American dollars being spent in a bungled war that should never have been started. Iraq is my generation’s Vietnam—a horrific lesson in the costs of trying to use force to create a particular kind of government, whether that was our original goal or not. But the moral of the story, in my view, is not to return to a post-Vietnam era in which Americans reject the use of force in all circumstances except clear self-defense and skirmishes involving very small countries. The lessons of the 1990s also still hold. For all its troubles, Kosovo is in far better shape than it would have been if it had suffered the full brunt of Slobodan Milosevic’s depredations. East Timor is in far better shape than it would have been if the United Nations had not authorized an intervention against Indonesian rampaging. The genocide in Rwanda should lie heavily on the world’s conscience, as today should the horrors of Darfur. The task today is not to apportion blame and return to a set of rules and institutions created for another world. It is to try to work out the dialectic of the thesis and antithesis of the conflicts of the 1990s and the war in Iraq. Perhaps the clearest conclusion is the value of prevention over cure— even if a reliable cure were available. Early intervention in a crisis—with diplomacy, funding, pressure, and carefully targeted sanctions—has proven results. Macedonia is the dog that didn’t bark—the clue to a strategy that worked without the use of force. The deployment of NATO troops and civilian observers from the EU and elsewhere in 2001 is widely credited with checking what would have been a fourth major ethnic war in the Balkans in a decade. Longer-term prevention strategies merge with the promotion of liberal democracy through induction and integration rather than imposition. Ironically for Smith’s argument, this vision—the most successful and costeffective version of neo-Wilsonianism—is not American at all, but European. Consider the following.

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When [historians] look at a map of the world, they will describe a zone of peace spreading like a blue oil slick . . . sucking in new members in its wake. And around this blue map of the European Union (covering 450 million citizens) they will describe another zone of 385 million people who share land and sea borders with the EU. Surrounding them another 900 million people are umbilically linked to a European Union that is their biggest trade partner and their biggest source of credit, foreign investment, and aid. These 2 billion people (one-third of the world’s population) live in the “Eurosphere.”58 Kant would endorse this vision immediately, as would Wilson. But its author is no neolib, at least in Tony Smith’s parlance. It is Mark Leonard, a former advisor to the British government, writing about “why Europe will run the twenty-first century.” Instead of engaging in sterile debates about whether “neolibs” enabled “neocons,” all Americans concerned with the future of our country and of the world would do well to find ways to forge a renewed partnership with Europe and like-minded countries across the globe. We must find ways to work together to achieve Wilson’s vision: a world made safe for democracy, prosperity, knowledge, beauty, and human flourishing.

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Notes

Notes to Introduction: Woodrow Wilson, the Bush Administration, and the Future of Liberal Internationalism 1. Various commentators have explored the connections between neoconservatism and the Wilsonian tradition. Some argue that neoconservatives are what Pierre Hassner has called “Wilsonians in boots.” See Hassner, “The United States: The Empire of Force or the Force of Empire,” EU-ISS Chaillot Papers, no. 54 (September 2002); David M. Kennedy, “What ‘W’ Owes to ‘WW’,” Atlantic Monthly (March 2005); and Lawrence F. Kaplan, “Regime Change: Bush, Closet Liberal,” New Republic, 3 March 2003. Max Boot described neoconservatives as “hard Wilsonians,” who embrace Woodrow Wilson’s “championing of American ideals but reject his reliance on international organizations and treaties to accomplish our objectives,” or what he calls “soft Wilsonians.” Boot, “What the Heck Is a ‘Neocon’?” Wall Street Journal, Opinion Journal, 30 December 2002. Others find that the connections are more apparent than real. See John B. Judis, The Folly of Empire: What George W. Bush Could Learn from Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson (New York: Scribner, 2004). For an exploration of neoconservatism’s relationship to liberalism, see Tod Lindberg, “Neoconservatism’s Liberal Legacy,” Policy Review (October 2004). 2. This book does not offer a systematic assessment of the historiographical debates on Woodrow Wilson or his foreign policy and legacy. For a survey of the historical literature and debates, see David Steigerwald, “Historiography: The Reclamation of Woodrow Wilson?” Diplomatic History 23, no. 1 (1999).

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3. Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), 773. 4. Tony Smith, America’s Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). 5. Kissinger, Diplomacy, 30. 6. Condoleezza Rice, “Campaign 2000: Promoting the National Interest,” Foreign Affairs (January/February 2000). 7. George W. Bush, 11 October 2000. 8. Bush affirmed his faith in the spread of democracy in a meeting with conservative journalists at the White House on 13 July 2007: “The other debate is whether or not it is a hopeless venture to encourage the spread of liberty. Most of you all around this table are much better historians than I am. And people have said, you know, this is Wilsonian, it’s hopelessly idealistic. One, it is idealistic, to this extent: It’s idealistic to believe people long to be free. And nothing will change my belief. I come at it many different ways. Really not primarily from a political science perspective, frankly; it’s more of a theological perspective. I do believe there is an Almighty, and I believe a gift of that Almighty to all is freedom. And I will tell you that is a principle that no one can convince me that doesn’t exist.” Quoted by National Review online, accessed at http://corner .nationalreview.com. 9. Charles Krauthammer, “The New Unilateralism,” Washington Post, 8 June 2001, A29. 10. President George W. Bush, commencement speech at West Point, June 2002. 11. These features of the Bush Doctrine are discussed in Ian Shapiro, Containment: Rebuilding a Strategy against Global Terror (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); and Ivo Daalder and James Lindsey, America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2003. 12. Fareed Zakaria, “Our Way: The Trouble with Being the World’s Only Superpower,” New Yorker, 14 October 2002. 13. George W. Bush, State of the Union address, 2 February 2005. 14. Robert Jervis, “The Remaking of a Unipolar World,” Washington Quarterly 29, no. 3 (2006): x. 15. Arthur S. Link, Wilson the Diplomatist: A Look at His Major Foreign Policies (New York: New Viewpoints, 1974), 4–5.

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16. Thomas Knock, To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 142. 17. Woodrow Wilson, “Address to the Senate,” 22 January 1917. 18. Knock, To End All Wars, 8. 19. See G. John Ikenberry, After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order after Major War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 155–60. 20. On the Paris peace conference’s treatment of smaller nations and colonies, and the wide gaps between enlightened rhetoric and actual practice, see Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); David A. Andelman, A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2008); and Margaret Macmillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2001). 21. Some historians argue that Wilson learned lessons from his Mexican intervention, concluding that democracy cannot be promoted through military intervention. See August Hechkscher, Woodrow Wilson (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1991); Kendrick A. Clements, The Presidency of Woodrow Wilson (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992); and Robert E. Quirk, An Affair of Honor: Woodrow Wilson and the Occupation of Veracruz (New York: Norton, 1967). For a contrary view, see L. E. Gelfand, “Where Ideals Confront SelfInterest: Wilsonian Foreign Policy,” Diplomatic History 18 (1994): 125–33. 22. Woodrow Wilson’s anti-imperialism is widely discussed by historians. Arno Mayer’s Political Origins of the New Diplomacy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959) casts Wilson as the only voice of anti-imperialist reason among Western leaders. Thomas Knock sees Wilson’s anti-imperialism emanating from his analysis of the causes of war, starting in 1914–15 and coming to a tentative culmination with the Peace without Victory address in January 1918, and then its reiteration in the Fourteen Points address. See his To End All Wars, 34–38, 145, 195, and 207. Lloyd Gardner argues that Wilson’s critique of imperialism predated World War I, and that it emanated from the Mexican experience and informed his thinking about the war. Gardner notes: Wilson’s “was the most thoroughgoing critique of imperialism made by a leader of a capitalist nation before World War I.” See Gardner, Safe for Democracy: The AngloAmerican Response to Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 62–63.

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23. See John Maynard Keynes’s prophetic 1920 book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920). Keynes’s thesis is the subject of an impressive historiography. The basic economic issue is the “transfer issue,” that is, the question of Germany’s ability to pay reparations. Keynes’s larger point was not about asking for too much from Germany (although he did make this claim) but rather that the peace did nothing to rehabilitate the shattered European economy or to reintegrate the defeated powers back into it, two things that were crucial to avert disaster. For a survey of this debate, see Donald Markwell, John Maynard Keynes and International Relations: Economic Paths to War and Peace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 24. Truman, “Address on Foreign Economic Policy,” Baylor University, 6 March 1947. 25. See John Gerard Ruggie, “International Regimes, Transactions, and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order,” in International Regimes, ed. Stephen D. Krasner (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 195–232. 26. See Ikenberry, After Victory, chap. 6. 27. Streit wrote: “These few democracies suffice to provide the nucleus of world government with the financial, monetary, economic and political power necessary both to assure peace to its members peacefully from the outset by sheer overwhelming preponderance and invulnerability, and practically to end the monetary insecurity and economic warfare now ravaging the whole world.” Clarence Streit, Union Now: A Proposal for a Federal Union of the Democracies of the North Atlantic (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1939). 28. See Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York: Random House, 2002). 29. Jack Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002). 30. Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 4. 31. These two impulses are explored in a recent biography of Dean Acheson. See Robert L. Beisner, Dean Acheson: A Life in the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 32. Secretary Rice, “Remarks to the United Nations General Assembly,” 17 September 2005.

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33. See G. John Ikenberry, “Is American Multilateralism in Decline?” Perspectives on Politics 1, no. 3 (2003).

Notes to Chapter One: “Playing for a Hundred Years Hence” 1. An address in the St. Louis Coliseum, 5 September 1919, in The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, ed. Arthur S. Link et al., 69 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966–96), 63: 43 (hereinafter cited as PWW). 2. George Bernard Shaw, Peace Conference Hints (London: Constable, 1919), 49–50. 3. Wicker and Smuts quoted in Thomas J. Knock, “Woodrow Wilson,” in The Reader’s Companion to the American Presidency, ed. Alan Brinkley and Davis Dyer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 317. 4. Lawrence F. Kaplan, “Regime Change: Bush, Closet Liberal,” New Republic, 3 March 2003, 21–22; Michael Barone, Wall Street Journal, 19 January 2005; David E. Sanger, New York Times, 23 January 2005; John B. Judis, The Folly of Empire: What George W. Bush Could Learn from Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson (New York: Scribner, 2004), 7 and 9. 5. Robert S. McNamara and James G. Blight, Wilson’s Ghost: Reducing the Risk of Conflict, Killing, and Catastrophe in the 21st Century (New York: Public Affairs, 2001). 6. Ibid., 152–67, 169–215, and 136 (italics added). 7. Michael Mandelbaum, The Ideas That Conquered the World: Peace, Democracy, and Free Markets in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Public Affairs, 2002), 17–44. 8. Ibid., 24–29 and 33–39. 9. Ibid., 42 and 47. Wilson in fact had publicly articulated all of his most salient principles by January 1917, before the United States declared war on Germany and long before the Paris Peace Conference. 10. Ibid., 230–37, for instance; quotation on page 235. 11. Ibid., 21–24. 12. Ibid., 388–39; see also 385. 13. Michael Hirsh, “Bush and the World,” Foreign Affairs (September/ October 2002): 18–43; quotations on pages 18, 22, and 35–36.

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14. G. John Ikenberry, “America’s Imperial Mission,” Foreign Affairs (September/October 2002): 44–60. 15. Ibid., 49–51 and 53. 16. Robert Kagan, “Power and Weakness,” Policy Review (June/July 2002): 1–21; Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (New York: Knopf, 2003). 17. Kagan, “Power and Weakness,” 1, 10–11, and 17. 18. For example, see David M. Kennedy, “What ‘W’ Owes to ‘WW’,” Atlantic Monthly (March 2005): 36–40; John Lewis Gaddis, Surprise, Security, and the American Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Francis Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006); and Walter Russell Mead, Power, Terror, Peace, and War: America’s Grand Strategy in a World at Risk (New York: Knopf, 2004). For a convenient overview of the new literature, see Lloyd E. Ambrosius, “Woodrow Wilson and George W. Bush: Historical Comparisons of Ends and Means in Their Foreign Policies,” Diplomatic History 30 (June 2006): 509–43. See also, Erez Manela, “A Man Ahead of His Time? Wilsonian Globalism and the Doctrine of Preemption,” International Journal 60 (August 2005): 1115–24. 19. Diary of Henry F. Ashurst, 14 October 1918, PWW, 51: 338–40. 20. This point is ably elucidated in seven test cases (including Mexico and Russia) in Frederick S. Calhoun, Power and Principle: Armed Intervention in Wilsonian Foreign Policy (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1986). 21. Fourth of July Address, 4 July 1914, PWW, 30: 255. 22. Quoted from Lloyd C. Gardner, “The Impact of the New Left,” paper delivered at American Historical Association convention, December 1984, 18. See also Gardner’s “Woodrow Wilson and the Mexican Revolution,” in Woodrow Wilson and a Revolutionary World, 1913–1921, ed. Arthur S. Link (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 3–48; and Safe for Democracy: The Anglo-American Response to Revolution, 1913–1923 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 25–69. 23. For a discussion of these events, see Kendrick Clements, “Woodrow Wilson’s Mexican Policy, 1913–1915,” Diplomatic History 4 (Spring 1980): 114–19; and Gardner, Safe for Democracy, 25 and 50–56; Mark Gilderhus, Diplomacy and Revolution: U.S.-Mexican Relations under Wilson and Carranza (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1977), 1–9; and Arthur S. Link, Wilson,

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vol. 2, The New Freedom (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1956), 365–75. 24. Clements, “Woodrow Wilson’s Mexican Policy,” 116–21; and Gardner, “Woodrow Wilson and the Mexican Revolution,” 17–21. 25. See Cecil Arthur Spring Rice to Edward Grey, 6 and 7 February 1914, and Memorandum by Thomas Hohler, 11 February 1914, Enclosure II, with Spring Rice to Grey, 14 February 1914, in PWW, 29: 228, 229–30, and 260. 26. The most detailed study of the incident is Robert E. Quirk, An Affair of Honor: Woodrow Wilson and the Occupation of Veracruz (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1962). 27. Gilderhus, Diplomacy and Revolution, 11–14. 28. William C. Widenor, Henry Cabot Lodge and the Search for an American Foreign Policy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 176–83; quotation on page 182. Lodge told the British ambassador that Huerta would “do sufficient throat-cutting to restore peace” (ibid., 178). 29. See Reed to William Phillips, 4 June 1914, enclosure with Phillips to Joseph P. Tumulty (Wilson’s private secretary), 6 June 1914, PWW, 30: 156–57, and Reed’s interview with Wilson enclosed with Reed to Tumlty, 30 June 1914, ibid., 30: 231–38; and Wilson to Lindley M. Garrison (Secretary of War), 8 August 1914, ibid., 30: 362. 30. See, for example, Ronald Steel’s review essay, “The Missionary,” New York Review of Books, 20 November 2003, and Francis Fukuyama’s “After Neoconservatism” (adapted from his book), New York Times Magazine, 19 February 2006. 31. Reed interview, PPW, 30: 231–38; Eastman editorial, The Masses 6, no. 3 (1914): 4 and 18; see also Reed, “What about Mexico,” The Masses, 5, no. 9 (1914): 11 and 14. Wilson quote in Burton J. Hendrick, The Life and Letters of Walter Hines Page, 3 vols. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Page, 1924–26), 1: 204. On this point, see also David Steigerwald, “The Reclamation of Woodrow Wilson?” Diplomatic History 23 (Winter 1999): 79–99. Not entirely without justification, Wilson’s role in the Allied intervention in Soviet Russia, beginning in August 1918, is often cited in the same connection. This was a multilateral wartime operation, however, that occurred in the wake of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk by which Germany had absorbed a third of Russia’s territory. Wilson was practically dragged into it only after a concerted campaign by the Allies to gain his consent. Ostensibly, the British and French needed to protect stores of

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munitions in Murmansk and Archangel against the Germans; the Japanese intended to secure control of the Trans-Siberian railroad terminus at Vladivostok. Wilson finally accepted their rationales, though with great misgivings; at the same time, he believed that a small-scale American participation would act as a restraint on Japanese ambitions in the region. Some historians maintain that anti-Bolshevism shaped his decision, while others argue that sentiment was only a minor factor. In any case, the Russian intervention turned out to be a dismal failure. According to Lloyd George, Wilson “had always been very much against” it but had gone along “only on account of the pressure which had been brought to bear” on him. The historiography is ably summarized in John W. Long, “American Intervention in Northern Russia, 1918–1919,” Diplomatic History (Winter 1982): 45–67; and Eugene P. Trani, “Woodrow Wilson and the Decision to Intervene in Russia: A Reconsideration,” Journal of Modern History (September 1976): 440–61, from which the Lloyd George quotation is drawn. See also Betty Miller Unterberger’s SHAFR presidential address, published as “Woodrow Wilson and the Bolsheviks: The ‘Acid Test’ of Soviet-American Relations,” in Diplomatic History (Spring 1987): 71–90. 32. Fulbright quoted in Randall Bennett Woods, Fulbright: A Biography (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 647 33. The Pan-American Pact is discussed in Thomas J. Knock, To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 39–44, 70–74, and 81–84; quotations on page 84. 34. Quoted in ibid., 229 (emphasis added); but see Congressional Record, 65th Cong., 3rd sess. (27 February 1919), 4414–18, for the Senate debate during which Hitchcock made this statement. See also Lloyd Ambrosius, Woodrow Wilson and the American Diplomatic Tradition: The Treaty Fight in Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 91–96. 35. For the complete text of the “Warrant from History,” see Ruhl J. Bartlett, The League to Enforce Peace (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944), 40–41; for more discussion of the origins of conservative internationalism, see Knock, To End All Wars, 55–58. 36. See Knock, To End All Wars, 50–55. 37. These matters are discussed in detail in ibid., 85–104; quotations on pages 98 and 104. 38. See Bartlett, The League to Enforce Peace, 56–60; and Widenor, Henry Cabot Lodge, 240–43; Knock, To End All Wars, 92 and 99–101.

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39. For the complete text, see PWW, 40: 533–39; for an exegesis and analysis, see Knock, To End All Wars, 111–15. 40. “The Modern Democratic State,” PWW, 5: 59, 63, 71, 84, and 92; and Lecture Notes (from Wilson’s course in international law) at Princeton University, 5 March 1894, in the Andrew Clark Imbrie Papers, Princeton University Library. 41. The quotations, respectively, are from Wilson to Edward Mandell House, 22 March 1918, PWW, 47: 105; J. J. Jusserand to French Foreign Ministry, 7 March 1917, PWW, 41: 356; F. L. Polk to Jusserand, 3 August 1917, PWW, 43: 362. The Damrosch quotations are from her paper, “Norms of Intervention: The Wilsonian Legacy,” 31–32, delivered at a Bard College conference, “Wilsonianism Resurgent,” November 1993. 42. J. J. Jusserand to French Foreign Ministry, 7 March 1917, PWW, 41: 356–57; and Hankey’s notes of a Meeting of the Council of Ten, 27 January 1919, PWW, 54: 296 (emphasis added). For Lippmann, see his The Stakes of Diplomacy (New York: H. Holt, 1917), xxi and xxii; and Knock, To End All Wars, 127. 43. Knock, To End All Wars, 167–69, 176, and 180. 44. Ibid., 184–89 and 252–56. 45. The foregoing is from an account of the meeting printed in PWW, 55: 268–76; Wilson’s preference for a two-thirds majority is discussed in Wolfgang J. Helbich, “American Liberals and the League of Nations Controversy,” Public Opinion Quarterly 31 (Winter 1967/68): 579. The Taft quote is in August Heckscher, Woodrow Wilson (New York: Scribner, 1991), 551. In October 1916, during his reelection campaign, he said in Chicago, “There is coming a time, unless I am very much mistaken, when nation shall agree with nation that the rights of humanity are greater than the rights of sovereignty.” See PWW, 38: 488.) 46. An address at Indianapolis, Indiana, 4 September, and at Billings, Montana, 11 September 1919, PWW, 63: 22 and 177 respectively. 47. For a discussion, see Knock, To End All Wars, 257–62 and 265–70. For further exegesis and interpretation, see Ambrosius, Woodrow Wilson and the American Diplomatic Tradition, 172–75 and 180–210; John Milton Cooper Jr., Breaking the Heart of the World: Woodrow Wilson and the Fight for the League of Nations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 123–57; and Widenor, Henry Cabot Lodge, 316–24.

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48. The quotations are from speeches in St. Louis, Kansas City, Sioux Falls, Portland, and Billings, in PWW, 63: 46–47, 69, 112, 279, and 173. For other examples, see addresses in Columbus, Denver, and Pueblo, in ibid., 11, 495, and 511. 49. Wilson to Gilbert Hitchcock, 8 March 1920, PWW, 65: 67–71; and Baker diary, 3 April 1919, ibid., 56: 577–78. The literature on the battle over ratification and its aftermath is enormous; but a good place to start is Cooper, Breaking the Heart of the World; Ambrosius, Woodrow Wilson and the American Diplomatic Tradition; as well as the latter portion of Knock, To End All Wars. See also G. John Ikenberry’s innovative After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order after Major Wars (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 117–62. Alexander and Juliette George, Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House: A Personality Study (New York: J. Day, 1956) and Edwin Weinstein, Woodrow Wilson: A Medical and Psychological Biography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981) engage medical and psychological factors affecting Wilson. 50. For a discussion, see Robert Divine, Second Chance: The Triumph of Internationalism in America during World War II (New York: Atheneum, 1967); and Thomas J. Knock, “‘History with Lighting’: The Forgotten Film Wilson,” American Quarterly 27 (Winter 1976/77): 523–43. 51. George Kennan, Memoirs, vol. 2, 1950–1963 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972), 71; and Robert E. Osgood, “Woodrow Wilson, Collective Security, and the Lessons of History,” Confluence (Winter 1957): 341–54. See also Kennan’s chapter, “World War I,” in his American Diplomacy, 1900–1950 (1951; expanded edition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 57–58 and 63–64; and Osgood’s Ideals and Self-Interest in America’s Foreign Relations: The Great Transformation of the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953). See Lippmann’s U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic (Boston: Little, Brown, 1943), 33–39 and 71–77; Niebuhr’s classic, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of Its Traditional Defence (New York: Scribner, 1944); and Morgenthau’s Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (New York: Knopf, 1948) and In Defense of the National Interest (New York: Knopf, 1951), 3–7 and 23–33. For a compelling updated version of the argument, see Robert W. Tucker, “The Triumph of Wilsonianism?” World Policy Journal (Winter 1993/94): 83–99.

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52. Lodge’s running commentary, in footnote form, is in the final section of John A. Garraty, Henry Cabot Lodge: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1953). For a succinct review of interpretations of FDR’s attitude, see William C. Widenor, “American Planning for the United Nations: Have We Been Asking the Right Questions?” Diplomatic History (Summer 1982): 11–31; and Warren F. Kimball, “‘The Family Circle’: Roosevelt’s Vision of the Postwar World,” in his The Juggler: Franklin Roosevelt as Wartime Statesman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 83–105. See also Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision of Human Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), and Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley, FDR and the Creation of the U.N. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997). 53. In November 1947, Secretary of State George C. Marshall summed it up for President Truman this way: “The object of our policy from this point of view would be the restoration of [a] balance of power in both Europe and Asia and . . . all actions would be viewed in light of that objective.” Quoted in John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 57; the Joint Chiefs’ quotation is on the same page. See also Thomas J. Knock, “Kennan versus Wilson,” in The Wilson Era: Essays in Honor of Arthur S. Link, ed. John Milton Cooper Jr. and Charles E. Neu (Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1991), 302–26, esp., 316–17. 54. Jeanne Kirkpatrick, “Law and Reciprocity,” quoted in Daniel Patrick Moynihan, On the Law of Nations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 133. 55. “Peace if possible,” quoted in Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 29; George Kennan, The Nuclear Delusion: Soviet-American Relations in the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon, 1982), xxvii and 246; and Kennan, “Comments on a Paper Entitled ‘Kennan versus Wilson’ by Professor Thomas J. Knock,” in Cooper and Neu, The Wilson Era, 328, 329, and 330. Kennan wrote his remarks in 1989; the volume was not published until 1991. 56. New York Times, 8 December 1988. 57. For a different perspective, see Judis, The Folly of Empire, 149–56; Urquhart quoted on page 153. 58. See Moynihan, On the Law of Nations, 80–82 and 97–100; Frank Ninkovich, The Wilsonian Century: American Foreign Policy since 1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), quoted in Hirsh, “Bush and the

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World,” 42; Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), 30, 44–45, and 810 (emphasis added). For a critique of Kissinger’s analysis of Wilson, see McNamara and Blight, Wilson’s Ghost, 34–36. For an unusually incisive study indicative of the resurgence of interest in Wilson during the 1990s, see Tony Smith, America’s Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). 59. McNamara and Blight, Wilson’s Ghost, 133–35; Hirsh, “Bush and the World,” 21 and 32–35, and his “Calling All Regio-Cops,” Foreign Affairs (November/December 2000): 4–5; and Judis, The Folly of Empire, 156–62 (on Clinton) and 165–79. Sidney Blumenthal provocatively called into question the humanitarian motivations ostensibly behind the benighted mission to the Horn of Africa in the early 1990s; the Bush administration and Colin Powell’s Pentagon, he asserted, had seized upon Somalia as much as a way of staving off deeper defense cuts (which they expected from Congress at the time) as for any other reason. Then, too, President Clinton, in addition to the matter of back dues, remained ambivalent about peacekeeping missions and highly selective about the use of international military force, virtually ignoring the United Nations in the case of Kosovo in 1998–99. 60. Robert Kagan and William Kristol, “Reject the Global Buddy System,” New York Times, 25 October 1999; Kagan, “History Repeating Itself: Liberalism and Foreign Policy,” New Criterion (April 1999); and Kristol, quoted in a symposium, “American Power—For What?” in Commentary (January 2000); quoted in Judis, The Folly of Empire, 169; see also 168–72. 61. Condoleezza Rice, “Promoting the National Interest,” Foreign Affairs (January/February 2000): 62 (emphasis added); quotations on Bolton in the New Yorker, 12 December 2006, 37; see also New York Times, editorial, 9 March 2005. See Judis, The Folly of Empire, 204–12 for further discussion of Bush. 62. McNamara and Blight, Wilson’s Ghost, 9 (emphasis added); Wilson quotation from his address in St. Louis, 5 September 1919, PWW, 63: 43. 63. Wilson’s quotation from his address at Pueblo, Colorado, 25 September 1919, in PWW, 63: 512–13. Many of the studies cited in this essay offer variations of some of these observations; in addition to them, see Paul Kennedy, The Parliament of Man: The Past, Present, and Future of the United Nations (New York: Random House, 2006), especially part 3; Anne-Marie Slaughter, A New World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); and a very

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interesting pair of magazine articles by James Traub, “The Next Resolution,” New York Times Magazine, 13 April 2003, and Parag Khana, “United They Fall: Why Only Bill Clinton Can Save the U.N.,” Harper’s Magazine, January 2006, 31–40; see also the review essay by Tony Judt, “Is the UN Doomed?” in New York Review of Books, 15 February 2007. 64. George Kennan, “The War to End War,” New York Times, 11 November 1984, reprinted in Kennan, At a Century’s Ending: Reflections, 1982–1995 (New York: Norton, 1996), 19.

Notes to Chapter Two: Wilsonianism after Iraq 1. President George W. Bush’s public statements can be retrieved through early 2009 at www.whitehouse.gov. Many of the arguments in this essay have been developed at greater length in Tony Smith, A Pact with the Devil: Washington’s Bid for World Supremacy and the Betrayal of the American Promise (New York: Routledge, 2007). 2. William Kristol and Robert Kagan, “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs 75 (July/August 1996); Kagan and Kristol, Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2000); Kristol and Kagan, contributions to “American Power for What: A Symposium,” Commentary (January 2000); Thomas Donnelly et al., “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” a Report of the Project for a New American Century, 2000. 3. On Wilsonianism in terms of its historical origins, see John Milton Cooper, Breaking the Heart of the World: Woodrow Wilson and the Fight for the League of Nations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Thomas J. Knock, To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Tony Smith, America’s Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), chaps. 3 and 4. 4. See the discussion later in this chapter on Ikenberry and Slaughter’s Princeton Project, “Forging a World of Liberty under Law.” 5. For an extended discussion of these stages, see my A Pact with the Devil, chap. 3.

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6. G. John Ikenberry, After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order after Major Wars (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Ikenberry, Liberal Order and Imperial Ambition: Essays on American Power and International Order (Malden, MA: Polity, 2006). 7. Francis Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 21ff.; Steven B. Smith, Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), chap. 8. 8. Smith, A Pact with the Devil, chaps. 4–6. 9. Jack S. Levy, “Domestic Politics and War: Realism, Liberalism, and Socialism,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 18, no. 4 (1988): 622. 10. Three different approaches to international relations have endorsed democratic peace theory. On the basis of empirical evidence, see Bruce Russett and John Oneal, Triangulating Peace: Democracy, Interdependence, and International Organizations (New York: Norton, 2001), 30. On a theoretical level, see Andrew Moravcsik, “Taking Preferences Seriously: A Liberal Theory of International Politics,” International Organization 51, no. 4 (1997). On a philosophic level, see John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), chap. 5 and 127f.; citation on 14f. 11. Probably the best-known series of mainstream books on the topic appeared during the 1960s and 1970s, published by Princeton University Press. See, for example, Leonard Binder et al., Crises and Sequences in Political Development (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971). 12. Robert Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1971), 203, 214; Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 317. 13. See Giuseppe Di Palma, To Craft Democracies: An Essay on Democratic Transitions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). See also Larry Diamond, “The Global Imperative: Building a Democratic World Order,” Current History (January 1994); Diamond, “Building a World of Liberal Democracies,” in Foreign Policy for America in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Thomas H. Henriksen (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2001); Diamond, “Can the Whole World Become Democratic? Democracy, Development, and International Politicies,” paper presented at the University of California, Irvine, March 2005. For an example of how neoconservatives could easily borrow these ideas, see, for example, Natan Sharansky with Ron Dermer, The Case for Democracy:

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The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror (New York: Public Affairs, 2004. 14. For critics of this development, see David Rieff, At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005); Michael Barnett, “Humanitarianism Transformed,” Perspectives on Politics 3, no. 4 (2005). 15. Mario Bettati, Le droit d’ingérence: Mutation de l’ordre international (Paris: O. Jacob, 1996); Thomas M. Franck, “The Emerging Right to Democratic Governance,” American Journal of International Law 86, no. 1 (1992); International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, “The Responsibility to Protect,” 2001. 16. Lee Feinstein and Anne-Marie Slaughter, “A Duty to Prevent,” Foreign Affairs 83, no. 1 (2004). 17. See, for example, Russett and Oneal, Triangulating Peace, chap. 8. 18. Joshua Muravchik, “The Neoconservative Cabal,” Commentary (September 2003), reprinted in Irwin Stelzer, ed., The Neocon Reader (New York: Grove Press, 2004). See Muravchik’s later affirmation of seriousness in “How to Save the Neocons,” Foreign Policy (November/December 2006). 19. Max Boot, “Myths about Neoconservatism,” Foreign Policy (2004), reprinted in Stelzer, The Neocon Reader. 20. Charles Krauthammer, “The Neoconservative Convergence,” Commentary (July/August 2005). 21. Al Gore, The Assault on Reason (New York: Penguin, 2007). 22. Michael Ignatieff, “The Burden,” New York Times, 5 January 2003. 23. Michael Ignatieff, “Who Are Americans That Think That Freedom Is Theirs to Spread?” New York Times, 6 June 2005. 24. Will Marshall ed., With All Our Might: A Progressive Strategy for Defeating Jihadism and Defending Liberty (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006). 25. Peter Beinart, The Good Fight: Why Liberals—and Only Liberals—Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again (New York: HarperCollins, 2006). 26. Larry Diamond, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq (New York: Times Books, 2005). 27. Rahm Emanuel and Bruce Reed, The Plan: Big Ideas for America (New York: Public Affairs, 2006), 152ff., 192f.

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28. See Ronald Steel, Temptations of a Superpower (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). 29. G. John Ikenberry and Anne-Marie Slaughter, co-directors, “Forging a World of Liberty under Law: U.S. National Security in the 21st Century,” final paper of the Princeton Project on National Security, The Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University, September 2006. Citations here are from pages 4–32. 30. On this point, the Project cites, appropriately, Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder, Electing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005); and Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (New York: Norton, 2003).

Notes to Chapter Three: Wilsonianism in the Twenty-first Century 1. Francis Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006); Philip Zelikow, “Practical Idealism,” speech given at Stanford University, 6 May 2005. Available at http://www.state.gov/s/c/rls/rm/45851.htm; G. John Ikenberry and Anne-Marie Slaughter, “Forging a World of Liberty under Law: U.S. National Security in the 21st Century,” final report of the Princeton Project on National Security, 27 September 2007. Available at www.princeton .edu/~ppns. 2. George Washington, “Farewell Address,” 1796. Available at http://www .yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/washing.htm. 3. Ikenberry has written most eloquently on this score. See G. John Ikenberry, Liberal Order and Imperial Ambition: Essays on American Power and World Politics (Malden, MA: Polity, 2006). 4. Ikenberry and Slaughter, “Forging a World of Liberty under Law.” The report recommends: “The United States should work to sustain the military predominance of liberal democracies and encourage the development of military capabilities by like-minded democracies in a way that is consistent with their security interests,” p. 29. Thus when Smith argues that both neoconservatives and neoliberals “expect continued American military primacy,” referring specifically

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to the Princeton Project report, he misses a very important distinction. See Smith, 86, this volume. 5. Arthur S. Link et al., eds., The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 69 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966–1996), 45: 534–39 (hereinafter cited as PWW). 6. Wilson to Lindley M. Garrison, 8 August 1914, in PWW, 30: 367, quoted in John Milton Cooper, “Making a Case for Wilson,” ms. of October 2006, 11. See Kendrick Clements, “Woodrow Wilson’s Mexican Policy, 1913–1915,” Diplomatic History 4 (Spring 1980): 116–21; Lloyd C. Gardner, “Woodrow Wilson and the Mexican Revolution,” in Woodrow Wilson and a Revolutionary World, 1913–1921, ed. Arthur S. Link (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 3–48; and Gardner, Safe for Democracy: The AngloAmerican Response to Revolution, 1913–1923 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 25–69. See also Thomas Knock’s contribution in this volume. 7. Smith disputes my claim here, citing as evidence Wilson’s support for the American conquest of the Philippines in 1898 and the invasions of Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic during his presidency. Yet as the analysis above makes clear, Wilson’s position changed over the course of his presidency as a direct result of his experience in Mexico. See Smith, 56, this volume. 8. Smith, 58, this volume. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 11. Cooper, “Making a Case for Wilson,” 26. 12. Ibid., 14. 13. Fourteen Points speech, 8 January 1918, in PWW, 45: 536. 14. Trygve Throntveit, “‘Common Counsel’: Woodrow Wilson’s Pragmatic Progressivism, 1885–1913,” in Reconsidering Woodrow Wilson: Progressivism, Internationalism, War, and Peace, ed. John Milton Cooper Jr. (forthcoming in August 2008 from Woodrow Wilson Center Press/Johns Hopkins University Press), by permission of the author, p. 3. 15. Ibid, 2–3. 16. Article 10 of the League Covenant states, “The Members of the League undertake to respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of all Members of the League,” while Article 11 continues, “Any war or threat of war, whether immediately affecting any of the Members of the League or not, is hereby declared a matter of

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concern to the whole League, and the League shall take any action that may be deemed wise and effectual to safeguard the peace of nations.” The Covenant of the League of Nations, 1919. Available from the Avalon Project at http://www .yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/leagov.htm. 17. For a full exegesis, see Thomas Knock, To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 201–26. 18. Smith, 59, this volume. 19. Ibid, 60. 20. Project for the New American Century, “Statement of Principles,” 3 June 1997. Available at http://www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples .htm. 21. Neoliberal is a term familiar to international relations theorists, but only when coupled with institutionalism. Robert Keohane originally described his seminal approach to theorizing the demand for multilateral institutions as “modified structural realism,” but by the late 1980s had switched to the term neoliberal institutionalism. See, for example, Robert O. Keohane, Institutions and State Power (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1989). 22. Michael Doyle, “Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Policy,” parts 1 and 2, Philosophy and Public Affairs 12 (1983): 205–35 and 323–53. 23. Michael W. Doyle, “Kant’s Perpetual Peace,” American Political Science Review 80 (December 1986): 1115–69. 24. Many of the key works in this debate are collected in Michael Brown, Sean Lynn-Jones, and Stephen Miller, eds., Debating the Democratic Peace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). 25. Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder, “Democratization and the Danger of War,” International Security 20 (Summer 1995): 5–38. 26. Smith, 72, this volume. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 29. Larry Diamond, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq (New York: Times Books, 2006). 30. Smith, 72, this volume. 31. Kofi Annan, “Two Concepts of Sovereignty,” The Economist, 18 September 1999. Available at http://www.un.org/News/ossg/sg/stories/ articleFull.asp?TID=33&Type=Article.

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32. The ICISS began from the premise that “in key respects . . . the mandates and capacities of international institutions have not kept pace with international needs or modern expectations” (paragraph 1.11). More specifically, the Commission argued that the intense debate over military protection for humanitarian purposes flowed from a “critical gap” between the immense and unavoidable reality of mass human suffering and the existing rules and mechanisms for managing world order. At the same time, it noted a widening gap between the rules and the principles of the Charter regarding noninterference in the domestic affairs of member nations and actual state practice as it has evolved since 1945. It frames the “responsibility to protect” as an “emerging principle” of customary international law—not yet existing as law but already supported both by state practice and a wide variety of legal sources. 33. International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, “The Responsibility to Protect,” 2001. Available at http://www.iciss.ca/report-en.asp. 34. African Union, “The Common African Position on the Proposed Reform of the United Nations,” 8 March 2005. 35. Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York: Random House, 2001). 36. UN General Assembly, “World Summit 2005 Outcome,” 24 October 2005, UN Doc. A/Res/60/1, p. 30. 37. James Madison, Federalist Papers No. 51, 1788. Available from the Avalon Project at http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/federal/fed51.htm. 38. To take only one example of Smith’s lack of support for his claims, consider his sources for his assertion: “Regimes that did not have legitimacy based on the consent of the governed might find themselves stripped of the protections normally associated with membership in the international community if they were unable to protect their subjects or were themselves guilty of gross and systematic human rights violations. While the United Nations was most certainly seen as the appropriate body to decide which states should enjoy sovereign immunity and which should not, other multilateral groups such as NATO, or perhaps eventually the hoped-for Community of Democracies, could, and should, take on the challenge.” Smith, 72, this volume. His citations here include the ICISS report “The Responsibility to Protect,” which makes absolutely clear that only the United Nations can authorize intervention on behalf of a nation’s people and only in stringently specified circumstances; Thomas Franck’s seminal article “The Emerging Right to Democratic Governance,” an article published

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in the American Journal of International Law in 1992, four years before UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros Ghali issued his “Agenda for Democracy”; and an article by French scholar Mario Bettati published in 1996 titled the right of intervention, mutation of the international order (this is my loose translation from the original French). None of these sources actually support the claim that any body other than the United Nations could authorize intervention; all were published before the existence of a community of democracies even existed; and none have anything to do with the individuals Smith identifies as neoliberals. 39. David Rieff, posting on the America Abroad blog, 26 October 2005 and subsequent responses. Available at http://americaabroad.tpmcafe.com/story/ 2005/10/26/81621/852. 40. Kofi Annan, “Speech to the General Assembly,” 23 September 2003. Available at http://www.un.org/webcast/ga/58/statements/sg2eng030923.htm. 41. See Jonathan Zasloff, “Law and the Shaping of American Foreign Policy: From the Gilded Age to the New Era,” New York University Law Review 78, no. 1 (2002): 239–373. 42. PWW, 60: 172. See also Article 23 of the League Covenant, available at http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/leagcov.htm#art23. 43. See, for example, Glendon, A World Made New. 44. Although the League did include an “Executive Council” of the great powers, it operated purely by consensus, according great powers no special privileges and allowing minor powers to block any decision. See Article 4 of the Covenant, available at http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/leagcov.htm#art4. 45. John Gerard Ruggie. “International Regimes, Transactions, and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order,” International Organization 36 (1982): 379–415. 46. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “The Four Freedoms,” address to Congress, 6 January 1941. 47. Smith, 84, this volume. 48. See note 4 above. 49. Smith, 85, this volume. 50. See, for example, George Barna, The Power of Team Leadership: Achieving Success through Shared Responsibility (Colorado Springs, CO: WaterBrook Press, 2001). 51. See, for example, Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (New York: Norton, 2003); consider also the

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Mo Ibrahim Foundation’s broad-based index for good governance indicators in Africa, which includes a range of liberal as well as democratic criteria. Available at http://www.moibrahimfoundation.org/. 52. See Ikenberry and Slaughter, “Forging a World of Liberty under Law.” On the attitude of the American Founders, see Anne-Marie Slaughter, The Idea That Is America: Keeping Faith with Our Values in a Dangerous World (New York: Basic Books, 2006). 53. For details, see the Freedom House Web site, www.freedomhouse.org. 54. “Any Nation May Withdraw,” New York Times, 27 February 1919. 55. Stephen Schlesinger, Act of Creation: The Founding of the United Nations: A Story of Superpowers, Secret Agents, Wartime Allies and Enemies, and Their Quest for a Peaceful World (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2003). 56. See Dana Milbank, “Bush Says Kerry Will Allow Foreign Vetoes,” Washington Post, 3 October 2004. 57. Article 53 of the UN Charter reads: “The Security Council shall, where appropriate, utilize such regional arrangements or agencies for enforcement action under its authority. But no enforcement action shall be taken under regional arrangements or by regional agencies without the authorization of the Security Council, with the exception of measures against any enemy state, as defined in paragraph 2 of this Article, provided for pursuant to Article 107 or in regional arrangements directed against renewal of aggressive policy on the part of any such state, until such time as the Organization may, on request of the Governments concerned, be charged with the responsibility for preventing further aggression by such a state.” Available at http://www.un.org/aboutun/charter/ chapter8.htm. 58. Mark Leonard, Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century (London: Fourth Estate, 2005).

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Contributors

G. John Ikenberry is Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs in the Politics Department and Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. Among his books are After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order after Major War (Princeton, 2001), and Liberal Order and Imperial Ambition (Polity, 2006). Thomas J. Knock teaches courses on the history of twentieth-century American politics and foreign policy at Southern Methodist University. In addition to numerous articles in leading scholarly journals, he is the author of To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order (Oxford, 1992; Princeton paperback, 1995), which won the Warren F. Kuehl Prize awarded by the Society of Historian of American Foreign Relations. He is currently writing a biography of George McGovern. Anne-Marie Slaughter is Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the Bert G. Kerstetter ’66 University Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. She is the author of A New World Order (Princeton University Press, 2004) and The Idea That Is America: Keeping Faith with Our Values in a Dangerous World (Basic Books, 2007). She is also the co-director, with John Ikenberry, of the Princeton Project on National Security and co-author of its final report, “Forging a World of Liberty under Law: U.S. National Security in the 21st Century.”

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Tony Smith is Cornelia M. Jackson Professor of Political Science at Tufts University. He is the author of two books on the Wilsonian project in American foreign policy: America’s Mission: The United States and the Struggle for Democracy Worldwide in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, 1994), and A Pact with the Devil: Washington’s Bid for World Supremacy and the Betrayal of the American Promise (Routledge, 2007), as well as some seventeen articles on various aspects of Wilsonianism.

Index

Adams, John, 95 Addams, Jane, 38 Afghanistan, 76, 105 Africa, 104, 114 African Americans, 105 African Union, 101, 114 Albright, Madeleine, 60, 63, 82, 98 American Revolution, 64, 72, 77 American Union Against Militarism, 38 Amnesty International, 67, 72 Annan, Kofi, 98, 99–100, 101, 105, 113 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972, 7, 51 arbitration, 37, 38, 40, 41, 45, 47 Argentina, 33 arms control/disarmament: and Bush, 7; Gorbachev on, 49; and internationalism, 52; and Wilson, 12, 40, 47, 56; and Wilson’s idea for League of Nations, 41. See also military; nuclear weapons Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), 20 Asmus, Ronald, 77 Atlantic Charter, 15, 16, 18, 19

Atlantic Community, 15 Austro-Hungarian empire, 58 authoritarianism, 53, 73, 87. See also despotism; totalitarianism; tyranny autocracy, 11, 12

Bailey, Thomas A.: Woodrow Wilson and the Great Betrayal, 46; Woodrow Wilson and the Lost Peace, 46 Baker, James, 82 Baker, Ray Stannard, 46 Balkans, 19, 67, 74, 116. See also Kosovo; Serbia; Yugoslavia, former Barone, Michael, 27 Beinart, Peter: “A Fighting Faith,” 79; The Good Fight, 79–80 Berlin Wall, fall of, 50, 67, 71 Biological Weapons Convention, 7, 51 Blair, Tony, 62 Blight, James, Wilson’s Ghost, 27–28, 31, 50 Blumenthal, Sidney, 130n59 Bolsheviks, 42, 45, 65 Bolton, John, 51

144

Index

Boot, Max, 75 Borgwardt, Elizabeth, 19 Bosnia, 104 Brandeis, Louis D., 39 Brazil, 33, 71, 111 Bretton Woods system, 16–17, 23, 63 Bush, George H. W., 55, 82 Bush, George W.: address on USS Abraham Lincoln, 30; and democracy, 2–3, 9, 53, 54, 120n8; and Emanuel, 82; foreign policy of, 4, 5–10; and freedom, 2–3, 8–9, 54; and global hegemony, 29; and good vs. evil governments, 103; Hirsh on, 29; Ikenberry on, 29; and imperialism, 85; and International Criminal Court, 7, 51, 62; and Iraq war, 3, 8–9, 54; and Kerry, 113; and Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change, 7, 51, 62; and liberal internationalism, 22; Mandelbaum on, 29; and Middle East, 3; and military force, 31; and multilateralism, 6–7; and national interest, 51; and nation-building, 6; and neoconservatives, 55–56; and power, 54, 56; and purpose, 54, 56; and Reed, 82; Second Inaugural address, 1, 9, 54; security doctrine of, 7–8; and sovereignty, 113; State of the Union address, 2 February 2005, 9; and unilateralism, 8, 60, 85; and Wilson, 1, 4, 8, 9, 21, 22, 27, 34, 35, 39, 46, 50, 57–63 Bush administration: lessons drawn from, 90; mistakes of, 88; and national interest, 51; and new security threats, 21; Pollack on, 79;

and September 11 attacks, 27; Smith on, 2; and unilateralism, 86 Bush Doctrine, 54–63, 64; and coalition of the willing, 7; and Democratic Party, 57, 75, 84–85; and Diamond, 80–81; and liberal internationalism, 91; and multilateralism, 59; and neoconservatives, 74–76, 84; and neoliberalism, 4, 56–57, 73–74, 76–77, 84, 90; pillar of power in, 54, 56, 84; pillar of purpose in, 54, 56, 76, 84; and Princeton Project on National Security, 83, 84, 85–86, 110; and Republican Party, 85; and Wilson, 59; and Wilsonianism, 82, 96

Cambodia, 67 Canada, 100 capitalism, 15, 21, 60, 108 Carranza, Venustiano, 32, 33 Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, 76 Central Asia, 67 Cheney, Richard, 55 Chile, 33, 36, 48, 71, 72 China, 31, 32, 67, 71, 73, 87, 91, 111 Chirac, Jacques, 62 Churchill, Winston, 16 civil tolerance, 70 Clark, John H., 39 Clayton Antitrust Act, 39 Clinton, Bill, 5, 6, 50, 77, 130n59 Clinton administration, 2, 50, 74 Cold War: and containment, 47, 48, 65, 87; end of, 20–21, 71, 73, 107; and Gorbachev, 49; and international security alliances, 17; and liberal

Index international hegemonism, 65, 73; and liberal internationalism, 3; multilateralism after, 63; multilateralism as cloak for American hegemony during, 61; promotion of freedom and democracy after, 6; and sovereignty, 19; and Western democracies, 20 Cold War globalism, 47 collective deliberation, 96, 106, 111. See also common counsel collective force, 41 collective security: and League of Nations, 2, 12, 60, 96; and multilateralism as cloak for American hegemony, 61–62; and Pan-American Pact, 36; post–World War II arrangements for, 15, 17, 18, 107; and progressive internationalism, 38; and responsibility to protect, 104; and Wilson, 3, 12, 14, 40, 56, 58 colonialism, 19, 40 common counsel, 4, 95, 106, 109, 114. See also collective deliberation; multilateralism communism, 87 Community of Democracies, 60, 63, 66, 72, 98 community of power, 12 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, 51 Concert of Democracies, 60–61, 62, 83, 87 containment, 47, 48, 65, 66, 87 Cooper, John Milton, 93, 94 Covenant of League of Nations, 106; Article 10, 36, 41, 44, 45, 135n15; Article 11, 135n15. See also League of Nations

145

Creel, George, 43 crimes against humanity, 102, 110 Croly, Herbert, 39 Cuba, 14, 64 Czech Republic, 72 Czechs, 71

Dahl, Robert, Polyarchy, 70–71 Damrosch, Lori Fisler, 41 Darfur, 100, 103, 113, 114, 115 Debs, Eugene, 42–43 democracy: and accountability, 23; and Bush, 2–3, 9, 53, 54, 120n8; and checks and balances, 70, 104; and coercive regime change, 91; and democratic peace theory, 68; and economy, 69; and former Soviet countries, 99; and Fourteen Points, 92; importance of, 60, 61, 63; imposition of, 59, 110; and Iraq war, 35; and League of Nations, 58; and liberal internationalism, 5, 20, 57, 58, 112; and liberalism, 88; and liberty under law, 112; and limited government, 69, 70; Mandelbaum on, 28; as means and as end, 40; and Mexico, 32; and Middle East, 9, 35, 53, 57, 102; and national security, 73; and National Security Doctrine of 2002, 55; and neoconservatives, 74; and neoliberalism, 74, 78; organic maturation of, 40; and peace, 10, 98, 108; Pollack on, 79; and post–World War II policy, 65; preconditions for, 69–72, 99; and Princeton Project on National Security, 83, 84; promotion of, 2, 90, 92; and self-determination,

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Index

democracy (cont.) 97; and Slaughter, 57, 59; spread of, 69–73, 97; support for, 112; transition to, 73; universal appeal of, 72, 73; and war, 11; and Wilson, 2, 3, 12, 13, 32, 35, 40, 53, 57–58, 59, 60, 92, 94, 95 Democratic Leadership Council, 77 Democratic Party: and Bush Doctrine, 57, 75, 84–85; and Iraq war, 57; and military, 85; and multilateralism, 78, 85; and neoliberalism, 76–82; and 1916 election, 38; and 1918 elections, 43; and Republican Party, 86; and 2006 elections, 80, 85; and Wilson, 38 democratic peace theory, 67–68, 97, 98 democratization, 69–73; and neoliberalism, 90; rejection of, 91; and spreading democracy, 97; and use of force, 104 despotism, 7, 12. See also authoritarianism Diamond, Larry, 77, 79, 99; “Lessons from Iraq,” 80; Squandered Victory, 80–81 disarmament. See arms control/disarmament Dominican Republic, 14, 56, 59, 135n7 Donnelly, Tom, 78, 82 Doyle, Michael, 98 Dulles, John Foster, 48

Eastern Europe, 66–67, 108 Eastman, Max, 34–35, 39 East Timor, 116 economy: American, 87; and Atlantic Charter, 19; and democracy, 69; and democratic peace theory, 67; and

embedded liberalism, 107; foundations of, 57; and globalization, 71, 87–88; and international community, 11, 105; Keynes on, 16; and liberal internationalism, 112; of Mexico, 34; post–World War II, 15–17, 18, 20; and Princeton Project on National Security, 84; and United States domestic market, 17; United States in international, 15; and Versailles settlement, 16; and Wilson, 42, 58, 95, 115 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 47, 48 Emanuel, Rahm, 81 embedded liberalism, 107 employment/jobs, 23 Enlightenment, 66, 104 environment, 88, 91 ethnic cleansing, 102 Europe: Ignatieff on, 77; integration of, 108; and Pan-American Pact, 36; and postwar cooperative security, 17; and spread of democracy and freedom, 20 European Community, 70 European Union: and American leadership, 111; and Balkans, 116; and democratic enlargement, 108; and former Soviet countries, 99; and liberal hegemonism, 65; and NATO, 87; success of, 68; and Wilson, 58, 115 Evans, Gareth, 100, 101 Ezulwini Consensus, 101

Federal Reserve Act, 39, 89, 95, 107 Federal Trade Commission Act, 39, 107

Index Ford, Gerald, 82 Four Freedoms, 18, 108 Fourteen Points: Hirsh on, 29; ideas in, 10–11, 92; and liberal internationalism, 14; and Taft, 42; and Treaty of Versailles, 43 France, 62 freedom: and Atlantic Charter, 19; as birthright, 72; and Bush, 2–3, 8–9, 54; and democracy, 112; and liberal internationalism, 20; and Middle East, 9; and National Security Doctrine of 2002, 55; and Princeton Project on National Security, 83–84; of the seas, 12, 19, 40; and Wilson, 13 Freedom House, 67, 72, 112 free markets, 35, 56 free trade: and post-1945 liberal order, 15, 16; and progressive internationalism, 38; and Wilson, 11, 12, 13, 35, 60. See also open markets Fukuyama, Francis, 30–31, 66, 89; The End of History, 108 Fulbright, J. William, 35, 96

Gardner, Lloyd, 32, 121n22 Garraty, John, 47 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), 107 genocide, 4, 19, 22, 72, 102, 110, 113 Germany: and European Union, 68; integration of, 20, 65; and Security Council, 113; and Wilson, 10, 94; and World War II, 15. See also West Germany

147

globalization, 20, 71, 87–88 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 49 Gore, Al, 76 Great Britain, 32, 33, 62 Great Depression, 65, 107 great men, influence of, 72, 97, 98–99 Greek Civil War, 87 Guatemala, 48

Haiti, 14 Hamas, 112 Havel, Vaclav, 72 Helms, Jesse, 50 Hirsh, Michael, 29, 50 Hitchcock, Gilbert, 37, 45 Hitler, Adolf, 106 Honduras, 14 House, Edward M., 11 Huerta, Victoriano, 32 humanitarian crises, 4, 22, 102 human rights: and Annan, 99; and coercive regime change, 91; and democratic peace theory, 68; and end of Cold War, 20; and international law, 102; Lake on, 50; and liberal internationalism, 3, 5, 88; and neoconservatism, 93; and neoliberalism, 78; organizations for, 71–72; postwar movement for, 15, 18–19; and responsibility to protect, 93, 101–2, 103; and Saddam Hussein, 102, 109; and selfdetermination, 110; and United Nations, 18, 99, 137n37; voluntary system of, 108; and Wilsonianism, 107; and World War II, 106 Human Rights Watch, 67, 72

148

Index

Hungary, 71, 72 Hussein, Saddam, 102, 103, 109

Ignatieff, Michael, 76–77 Ikenberry, G. John, 29, 60–61, 86, 90, 91; “Forging a World of Liberty under Law,” 82–83, 110 imperialism: and Bush, 85; and fall of Berlin Wall, 67; and Ignatieff, 76–77; and intervention, 23–24; liberal, 13–14; and liberal internationalism, 4; and neoliberalism, 73; progressive, 64, 66, 73, 86, 87; and Wilson, 34, 40, 59, 73, 93, 109, 121n22; and World War II, 15–16 India, 70, 91, 111, 113 International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), 137nn31, 37; “The Responsibility to Protect,” 100–101 international community: and economy, 11, 105; and human rights and security norms, 22; need for concerted action of, 51; and Wilson, 11 International Criminal Court (ICC), 7, 51, 62 internationalism: conservative, 37–38, 42, 43; Kagan on, 50; progressive, 37–39, 42, 43, 52; proletarian, 66; and Wilson, 37, 39, 40, 42, 43. See also liberal internationalism International Labor Organization, 45 international law: American violations of, 48; and human rights, 102; and internationalism, 52; Kagan on, 30; and League to Enforce Peace, 37;

and responsibility to protect, 104; and Wilson, 3, 11–12, 40 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 107 international order: cooperative, 2, 11–12; and Gorbachev, 49; rule-based, 2; and United States, 13; and Wilson, 2, 3, 14. See also liberal international order international security, 45, 52 intervention: and coercive regime change, 91; and imperialism, 23–24; legitimacy of, 4; lessons of outcomes from, 115, 116; and liberal internationalism, 3; in Middle East, 75; Rieff on, 105; and Saddam Hussein’s abuses, 109; Security Council approval for, 102; and sovereignty, 72, 99; and United Nations, 137n37; and Wilson, 92, 93. See also military Iran, 48 Iraq, 67, 112 Iraq war: backlash from, 4; and Bush, 3, 8–9, 54; and democracy, 35; and Democratic Party, 57; false propositions for, 35; and Gore, 76; grounds for, 102; and Ignatieff, 76–77; Kagan on, 30; lessons from, 115, 116; and multilateralism, 114; and neoconservatives, 75; neoliberal support for, 79; and progressive imperialism, 87; responsibility for, 1–2; and responsibility to protect, 102; social and economic effects of, 115; and unilateralism, 59, 60; and United Nations, 59, 96; and Wilson, 35, 59 Islam, 79

Index Jamaica, 71 James, William, 95 Japan, 15, 20, 71, 114 Jervis, Robert, 9 John Paul II, 72 Johnson, Lyndon, 26, 31 Judis, John B., 27 Jusserand, Jean Jules, 41, 42

Kagan, Robert, 50–51; Of Paradise and Power, 30; “Power and Weakness,” 29–30 Kant, Immanuel, 58, 60, 69, 73, 117; Perpetual Peace, 98 Kaplan, Lawrence F., 27 Kennan, George, 47, 48–49, 52 Kennedy, John F., 1, 5–6 Kenya, 112 Kerry, John, 113 Keynes, John Maynard, 16 Kim Dae Jung, 72 Kirkpatrick, Jeanne, 48, 51 Kissinger, Henry, 3, 6, 48; Diplomacy, 50 Knock, Thomas, 89, 121n22; and Bush Doctrine, 56; and common counsel, 4; and international law, 12; and international order, 2; and multilateralism, 23, 59, 76, 97 Kosovo, 100, 114, 116, 130n59. See also Balkans Krauthammer, Charles, 75 Kristol, William, 50, 51, 74 Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change, 7, 51, 62

149

Lake, Anthony, 50, 82–83, 108 landmine treaty, 7, 51 Latin America, 14, 36, 65, 66–67, 114 League of Nations: as bulwark of peace, 96; and collective security, 2, 12, 60, 96; and conflict resolution, 2; conservative opposition to, 43–46; and democracy, 58; failure of, 14, 63; and Fourteen Points, 92; Fulbright on, 35–36; and international institutions, 60; Kennan on, 49; Mandelbaum on, 28–29; and 1918 elections, 43; organic maturation of, 40–41; and peace, 60; and progressive internationalism, 38; and reactionary interests, 43; and Republican Party, 39–40, 44–45; and selfdetermination, 96; and Theodore Roosevelt, 39; and trade, 45; and Wilson, 13, 26, 35–36, 39, 59–60, 87, 94; Wilson’s conception of, 3, 37, 40–42, 95–96. See also Covenant of League of Nations League to Enforce Peace (LEP), 37–38, 39 Leonard, Mark, 117 Levy, Jack, 68 liberal internationalism: and American leadership, 111; and Bush, 22; and Bush Doctrine, 91; and Bush foreign policy, 4, 5–10; and constitutional government, 88; and democracy, 5, 20, 57, 58, 112; and economy, 112; and European Union, 68; evolution of, 3–4, 14–20, 64; and fall of Soviet Union, 66; and Fourteen Points, 14; and freedom, 20; as global order, 20; and hegemony, 65, 66, 73; and

150

Index

liberal internationalism (cont.) human rights, 3, 5, 88; and imperialism, 4; influence of, 87; and multilateralism, 58, 76, 91; and peace, 88; and United Nations, 3; and Wilson, 13. See also internationalism liberal international order, 4, 14–20, 91. See also international order Lincoln, Abraham, 39, 88 Lippmann, Walter, 41, 47 Lodge, Henry Cabot, 34, 38, 39, 42, 43, 44, 47 Lodge Reservations, 44–45, 47, 48 Lord’s Resistance Army, 103

Macedonia, 116 Madero, Francisco, 32, 33 Madison, James, 103–4 Malone, Dudley Field, 43 Mandela, Nelson, 72 Mandelbaum, Michael, The Ideas That Conquered the World, 28–29 Manifest Destiny, 64 Mansfield, Edward, 98 market democracies, 54, 56, 57, 59, 60, 63, 65, 77, 82, 86 Marshall, Will, With All Our Might, 77–78, 81 Marshall Plan, 20, 65, 70 Mayer, Arno, 121n22 McFaul, Michael, 77, 79 McKinley, William, 56 McNamara, Robert S., Wilson’s Ghost, 27–28, 31, 50, 51 Mead, Walter Russell, 31 Melville, Herman, 77

Mexican Revolution, 31, 32–35, 36, 93 Mexico, 14, 71, 72, 92, 135n7 middle class, 69–70, 71 Middle East, 114; and Bush, 3; and democracy, 9, 35, 53, 57, 102; intervention in, 75; and military, 79 militarism: decline of, 12; Eastman on, 39; and Wilson, 40 military: and American Cold War policy, 48; defeat of American, 87; and Democratic Party, 85; Hirsh on, 29; and Lodge Reservations, 45; and Middle East, 79; and National Security Doctrine of 2002, 7–8; and neoconservatives, 55, 56; post–World War II, 47; primacy of American, 55–56, 78, 84, 86, 87, 88, 90, 91, 110, 134n4; and Princeton Project on National Security, 84; and progressive internationalism, 38; and Wilson, 45, 56. See also arms control/disarmament; intervention; nuclear weapons military force: and Bush, 31; calculation of effects of, 115; and collective deliberation, 111; dangers of using, 109; and Johnson, 31; Kagan on, 30; limitation of, 104–5; and multilateralism, 111; Security Council authorization for, 113; and Wilson, 3, 31, 32, 33, 34; and Wilson’s idea for League of Nations, 41 Milosevic, Slobodan, 74, 108, 116 minority rights, 112 Moore, Barrington, 70 Morgenthau, Hans J., 47 Morris, Errol, The Fog of War, 27

Index Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, On the Law of Nations, 49 multilateralism: and American dominance, 22–23; and American leadership, 96–97; and Bush, 6–7; and Bush Doctrine, 59; as cloak for American hegemony, 61–62, 63; and Democratic Party, 78, 85; and democratic peace theory, 67; development of, 5; importance of, 60, 61, 63; and intervention in Iraq, 109; and Iraq war, 114; Kagan on, 30; and liberal internationalism, 58, 76, 91; McNamara and Blight on, 28; and military force, 111; and National Security Doctrine of 2002, 62; and NATO, 48, 61; and neoliberalism, 78, 90; and post-1945 liberal order, 16; and postwar American dominance, 63; and Princeton Project on National Security, 83, 84, 85–86; and Slaughter, 23, 59, 61, 62, 76, 86, 91, 97; and sovereignty, 23, 61, 112; and unilateralism, 63; and Wilson, 2, 3, 23, 47, 58, 59, 60, 63, 95–96; and World Trade Organization, 61. See also common counsel Muravchik, Joshua, 74 Murtha, John, 81

National Security Doctrine of 2002, 7, 8, 55, 62, 75 National Security Strategy (NSS) 2002, 54 NATO: and Balkans, 19, 100, 116; and collective security, 96; and European Union, 87; and former Soviet

151

countries, 99; and Iraq war, 59; and Kosovo, 114; and liberal international hegemonism, 65; and multilateralism, 48, 61; and postwar American dominance, 63; and Princeton Project on National Security, 83; and security, 60; and sovereignty, 72, 112; and West Germany, 70; and Wilson, 58 Nazism, 65, 106 neoconservatism: and American dominance, 22–23; and Bush Doctrine, 74–76, 84; and Community of Democracies, 98; and democracy, 74; and George H. W. Bush, 55; and human rights, 93; and Iraq war, 75; and military, 55, 56; and neoliberalism, 23, 86; and Project for the New American Century, 77; and regime change, 93; and Security Council, 114; and unilateralism, 76; and Wilson, 34; and Wilsonianism, 91 neoliberalism, 66–74; and Bush Doctrine, 4, 56–57, 73–74, 76–77, 84, 90; as concept, 97–105; and democracy, 74, 78; and Democratic Party, 76–82; and democratic peace theory, 68; development of, 64; and global markets, 78; and human rights, 78; and imperialism, 73; and Iraq war, 79; and market democracies, 77; and multilateralism, 78, 90; and neoconservatives, 23, 86; and progressive imperialism, 66; and self-determination, 93; Smith on, 3–4, 90; and sovereignty, 72–73, 99; as term, 136n20

152

Index

New Deal, 88, 107 New Deal liberalism, 16 New Diplomacy, 38 New Freedom, 108 Nicaragua, 14, 56, 59, 135n7 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 47 Ninkovich, Frank, The Wilsonian Century, 49–50 Nixon, Richard, 31, 48, 81 nondemocratic states, 72–73 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 20 nuclear weapons, 7, 28, 29, 48, 49, 51, 52, 91, 109. See also arms control/ disarmament; military; weapons of mass destruction

oligopoly, 11 Oneal, John, 68–69 open markets, 15, 28, 58, 62, 65, 71, 86. See also free trade Open Society Institute, 67, 72 Osgood, Robert E., 47 Ottoman empire, 58 outlaw states, 69

Palestine, 112 Pan-American Pact, 36 PAR (Popular, Accountable, and Rights-Regarding), 84, 87, 112 peace: and American security, 64; and Bush Doctrine, 54; and democracy, 10, 98, 108; and global markets, 78; Hirsh on, 29; Kennan on, 48–49; and League of Nations, 60; and liberal internationalism, 88; Mandelbaum

on, 28; and Pan-American Pact, 36; and Wilson, 10, 13, 53, 54, 95 peacekeeping, 52 Perle, Richard, 81 Persian Gulf War, 49, 102 Peru, 36 Philippines, 56, 59, 64, 135n7 Pinchot, Amos, 39, 43 Poland, 71, 72 Pollack, Kenneth, 77; The Threatening Storm, 79 preemption, 51, 55, 90 Princeton Project on National Security, 82–84; and Bush Doctrine, 83, 84, 85–86, 110; and Concert of Democracies, 87; and liberty under law, 112; and multilateralism, 83–84, 85–86 Progressive Era, 88, 95 Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), 77 Project for the New American Century (PNAC), 55, 77, 78, 97 protect, responsibility to, 72, 93, 97, 99, 101–3, 108, 109, 110, 114, 115 Puerto Rico, 56, 64

racism, 19 Rawls, John, 69 Reagan, Ronald, 5, 6, 48, 51 Reed, Bruce, The Plan, 81–82 Reed, John, 34 Republican Party: and Bush Doctrine, 85; and Democratic Party, 86; and League of Nations, 39–40, 44–45; and military primacy, 56; and 1916 election, 38–39; and 1918 elections, 42

Index Rice, Condoleezza, 6, 21, 51 Rieff, David, 104–5 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 18 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 65, 115; accomplishments of, 26; and Atlantic Charter, 15, 16, 18; domestic policy of, 107; and Eastman, 35; Four Freedoms speech, 18, 108; and Lodge, 47; and postwar international order, 14, 16; promotion of freedom and democracy by, 5; reform under, 88; and Theodore Roosevelt, 47; and Wilson, 14, 15, 18 Roosevelt, Theodore, 95; and FDR, 47; and internationalism, 38, 42; Kagan on, 50, 51; Kristol on, 51; and League of Nations, 39; and Mexico, 34 Root, Elihu, 106 Rosner, Jeremy, 77, 78 Rove, Karl, 81 rule-based order, 71 rule of law, 12, 13, 69, 112 Rumsfeld, Donald, 55 Russett, Bruce, 68–69 Russia, 71, 72, 87, 99, 111. See also Soviet Russia Russian Revolution, 13, 31, 58, 65, 92 Rwanda, 72, 100, 105, 108, 113, 116

Sahnoun, Mohamed, 100, 101 Sanger, David E., 27 Sarkozy, Nicholas, 62 Schell, Jonathan, 30–31 Scowcroft, Brent, 82 Security Council, 96; approval for intervention by, 102; and common counsel, 109; decision-making

153

process of, 108; and great powers, 107; legitimacy of, 113; McNamara and Blight on, 28; and sovereignty, 113; and Sudan, 103. See also United Nations self-determination: and Atlantic Charter, 19; and Balkans, 107; and civil society, 108; and democracy, 97; and human rights, 110; and League of Nations, 96; and neoliberalism, 93; and progressive internationalism, 38; and Wilson, 12, 14, 40, 58, 60, 92–93, 94, 106; and World War II, 106 September 11 attacks, 7, 26, 27, 54, 74 Serbia, 19, 72, 100. See also Balkans Shaw, George Bernard, Peace Conference Hints, 25, 26 Shultz, George, 83 Sierra Leone, 103 Slaughter, Anne-Marie, 5; and Bush Doctrine, 56; and common counsel, 4; and Concert of Democracies, 60–61; and democracy, 57, 59; “Forging a World of Liberty under Law,” 82–83, 110; and international order, 2, 14; on intervention, 22; on intervention vs. imperialism, 23–24; and Marshall’s With All Our Might, 77; and multilateralism, 23, 59, 61, 62, 76, 86, 91, 97; and neoliberalism, 90; and United Nations, 79 Slovenia, 71, 72 Smith, Tony, 90; on Bush as heir to Wilson, 2; and frustration over Iraq, 116; and intervention, 22; on intervention vs. imperialism, 23; and

154

Index

Smith, Tony (cont.) leadership, 111; and multilateralism, 22–23; on neoliberalism, 3–4, 90; and responsibility to protect, 109; and Security Council, 114; and Wilsonianism and Bush Doctrine, 96 Smoot-Hawley tariff, 15 Smuts, Jan, 26 Snyder, Jack, 98 social contract, 70 social democracy, 38 socialism, 38, 42 Socialist Party of America, 38 social welfare, 16, 19 Solarz, Stephen, 77, 79 Somalia, 108, 130n59 South Africa, 71, 72 South Asia, 67 South Korea, 71, 72 sovereignty: and Atlantic Charter, 19; and Bush, 113; and Cold War, 19; conditional, 91; and Fourteen Points, 92; Ikenberry on, 29; and International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, 100; and internationalism, 38; and intervention, 72, 99; and liberal internationalism, 3; and multilateralism, 23, 61, 112; and neoliberalism, 99; and responsibility to protect, 104; and United Nations, 72, 137n37; and Wilson, 29, 43–46, 56, 93, 113 Soviet bloc, 21 Soviet countries, 99 Soviet Russia, 125n31. See also Russia Soviet Union, 79; and American imperialism, 73; collapse of, 65,

66, 108; and postwar collective security, 15; and postwar cooperative security, 17 Spanish American War, 64 Spargo, John, 43 Strauss, Leo, 66, 74 Streit, Clarence, 18 sub-Saharan Africa, 67 Sudan, 100, 103 Supreme Court, 39

Taft, William Howard, 37, 38, 39, 42, 106 Taliban, 105 Tampico affair, 33, 34 Taylor, Charles, 103 team leadership, 111 terrorism, 7, 8–9, 21, 91 Throntveit, Trygve, 95 totalitarianism, 55. See also authoritarianism Treaty of Westphalia, 101 Truman, Harry, 65; and postwar international order, 14, 16; and spread of freedom and democracy, 5, 20; and United Nations, 15; and Wilson, 1, 14, 15, 18, 46 Truman Doctrine, 20 Turkey, 71, 72 tyranny, 11. See also authoritarianism

Uganda, 103 unilateralism: and American Cold War policy, 48; and Bush, 8, 60, 85; Hirsh on, 29; and Iraq war, 59, 60; Kagan on, 30; and League of Nations, 41;

Index and multilateralism, 63; and neoconservatives, 55, 76; and neoliberalism, 90; and Wilson, 31, 36, 41, 51–52 unipolarity, 7, 22, 23, 29, 68 United Nations: and Bush administration, 51; and Clinton, 130n59; and Clinton administration, 50; and Concert of Democracies, 61; Damrosch on, 41; and human rights, 18, 99, 137n37; and human rights and security norms, 22; and International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, 100, 101; and intervention, 137n37; and Iraq war, 59, 96; and liberal internationalism, 3; McNamara and Blight on, 28; peacekeeping by, 100; and postwar American dominance, 63; and Princeton Project on National Security, 83; and Reagan, 48; and Roosevelt, 47; and security, 60; and Slaughter, 79; and sovereignty, 72, 137n37; and Truman, 15; and Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 102, 107; and use of force, 21, 96; and Wilson, 58, 115. See also Security Council United Nations Charter, 46, 47, 48; Article 53, 114 United States: Cold War policy of, 48; domestic market of, 17; dominance of, 7, 10; economy of, 42, 87; and hegemony, 13, 17, 21, 29, 58–59, 63, 83, 86, 110, 111; as indispensable, 3, 63, 82; and international economy, 15; and international law, 48; and international system, 13; leadership

155

of, 13, 31–32, 58–59, 63, 65, 83, 110, 111; and liberty under law, 83, 89; limits of power of, 62; and military defeat, 87; military policy of, 48; military power of, 7, 8, 22–23, 29; military primacy of, 55–56, 78, 84, 86, 87, 88, 90, 91, 110, 134n4; as moral agent, 13; and multilateralism, 22–23, 96–97; national interest of, 37; national security of, 73, 82; and postwar cooperative security, 17; postwar dominance of, 17; post– World War II military of, 47; and United Nations Charter, 48; Wilson’s vision for, 13, 58–59; and world peace, 64 United States Constitution, 72 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 18, 102, 107 Urquhart, Brian, 49

Versailles Conference/Treaty of Versailles, 16, 38, 43, 93 Vietnam, 48, 81 Villa, Pancho, 32, 33, 34, 36 Villard, Oswald Garrison, 43

war: and democracy, 11; Eastman on, 39; Kennan on, 48–49; preemptive, 51, 90; and Wilson, 10 war crimes, 102 Warsaw Pact, 48 Washington, George, 90 weak/failing states, 22 weapons of mass destruction, 72, 102, 109. See also nuclear weapons

156

Index

welfare state, 16 Western democracies, 15, 17, 18, 19–20 West Germany, 17, 70. See also Germany Wicker, Tom, 26 Willkie, Wendell, One World, 46 Wilson (film), 46 Wilson, Woodrow: accomplishments of, 26, 89, 94, 95; address in Pueblo, Colorado, 25 September 1919, 13; and American leadership, 31–32, 58–59, 63; and arbitration, 40, 41, 47; and arms control/disarmament, 12, 40, 47, 56; and balance-of-power politics, 40; and Bush, 1, 4, 8, 9, 21, 22, 27, 34, 35, 39, 46, 50, 57–63; and Bush Doctrine, 54, 59; and centralized government, 42; and child labor, 39, 89; and China, 31, 32; and Clinton, 50; and collective deliberation, 96; and collective security, 3, 12, 14, 40, 56, 58; and colonialism, 40; and common counsel, 95, 96, 106, 109, 114; and contemporary revolutions, 31; and democracy, 2, 3, 12, 13, 32, 35, 40, 53, 57–58, 59, 60, 92, 94, 95; and democratic peace theory, 68; domestic policy of, 26, 89, 94, 95, 107, 108; and Dominican Republic, 56, 59, 135n7; and economy, 42, 58, 95, 115; and eight-hour day, 39, 89; essential vision of, 3; and European Union, 58, 115; and FDR, 14, 15, 18; and Fourteen Points, 10–11, 14, 29, 42, 43, 92; and freedom, 13; and free markets, 35; and free trade, 11, 12, 13, 35, 60; Fukuyama on, 31; and

Germany, 10, 94; Gorbachev on, 49; historical context of, 31; illness of, 45; and imperialism, 34, 40, 59, 73, 93, 109, 121n22; and income tax, 39, 89, 107; and international community, 11; and internationalism, 37, 39, 40, 42, 43; and international law, 3, 11–12, 40; and international order, 2, 3, 14; and international security, 45, 52; and intervention, 92, 93; and Iraq war, 59; Kagan on, 29–30; Kennan on, 47, 49; Kissinger on, 50; and Latin America, 14, 36, 65; and League of Nations, 3, 13, 26, 35–36, 37, 39, 40–42, 59–60, 87, 94, 95–96; and liberal internationalism vs. imperialism, 13–14; Mandelbaum on, 28–29; and McKinley, 56; and Mexican Revolution, 31, 32–35, 36, 93; and Mexico, 14, 92, 135n7; and military, 31, 40, 45, 56; and military force, 3, 31, 32, 33, 34; “The Modern Democratic State,” 40; Moynihan on, 49; and multilateralism, 2, 3, 23, 47, 58, 59, 60, 63, 95–96; and neoconservatives, 34; and Nicaragua, 14, 56, 59, 135n7; and 1916 election, 38–39; Ninkovich on, 49–50; and open markets, 58; and peace, 10, 13, 53, 54, 95; and Philippines, 56, 59, 135n7; as pragmatic conservative, 95; and Princeton Project on National Security, 83; and Progressive Era, 95; and Puerto Rico, 56; and reform, 88; and regime change, 3; reputation of, 25–26, 46–47, 49–50; and rule of law, 12, 13; Schell on, 30–31; and

Index self-determination, 12, 14, 40, 58, 60, 92–93, 94, 106; and social change, 95; and social justice, 39; and sovereignty, 29, 43–46, 56, 93, 113; and Soviet Russia, 125n31; and states’ rights, 105–6; suppression of civil liberties by, 42–43; and Supreme Court, 39; and Truman, 1, 14, 15, 18, 46; and unilateralism, 31, 36, 41, 51–52; and United Nations, 58, 115; and Versailles Conference, 93; and vision for United States, 13; and war, 10; War Message to the Congress, 2 April 1917, 53–54; and World War I, 10, 13, 36, 37–38, 40, 93, 94 Wilsonian internationalism, 28, 92 Wilsonianism, 20–24; and Bush Doctrine, 82, 96; crisis of, 87; excesses of, 4; and neoconservatism, 91; tradition of, 10–14 Wolfowitz, Paul, 62 women, 105

157

Women’s Peace Party, 38 Woodward, Bob, 82 World Trade Organization (WTO), 20, 58, 61, 112 World War I, 106; end of, 42; and Wilson, 10, 13, 36, 37–38, 40, 93, 94 World War II: American imperialist impulse after, 73; and American influence, 63; collective security after, 107; and economy, 15; and liberal internationalism, 3; and state-citizen relations, 93, 106; Wilson’s reputation after, 46

Yeltsin, Boris, 99 Yugoslavia, former, 99, 108. See also Balkans

Zakaria, Fareed, 8 Zanuck, Darryl F., 46 Zelikow, Philip, 89