Campaigning for History

Reflections on the American Presidency in a Political Season

The Flawed Wilsonian Dream
By Margaret MacMillan
The New York Times

"Today’s presidential candidates are understandably cautious when it comes to foreign policy, especially about stepping into the minefields of Iraq. But in their remarks, it is possible to discern an assumption about the rightness of American leadership in world affairs – a notion that is the legacy of Woodrow Wilson.

In January, when Hillary Clinton spoke at an event to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, she warned, “We cannot lead the rest of the world if we do not have a vision of where we are headed and if we do not summon our leadership, not just based on our military strength, but on the strength of our values and our ideals as well.”

Barack Obama accepts that mission, too, as well as the Wilsonian view that the United States is more secure in a prosperous and peaceful world. But he is more aware of the dangers of such thinking. Quoted in a profile in this week’s New Yorker, he says: “The same idealism can express itself in a sense that we can remake the world any way we want by flipping a switch, because we’re technologically superior or we’re wealthier or we’re morally superior. And when our idealism spills into that kind of naïveté and an unwillingness to acknowledge history and the weight of other cultures, then we get ourselves into trouble, as we did in Vietnam.”

Since Wilson was president, the United States has positioned itself as the keeper of the world’s conscience and as the model for other nations to emulate. Over the years foreigners like me have both shared that view and resented it, because what looks like leadership from Washington can feel like bullying elsewhere.

The tendency was there long before Wilson, of course. “We shall be as a city upon a hill,” the Puritan John Winthrop remarked in 1630 as he sailed toward the New World. “The eyes of all people are upon us.” Well, actually, they weren’t then, and for a long time the 13 colonies and then the United States, preoccupied with the business of daily life and the building of their own nation, played very little part in the world. Even at the end of the 19th century, the United States had only a rudimentary foreign service, an army smaller than Italy’s and virtually no navy at all. But its economic power was growing and so was a sense of American nationalism. By the 1890s a new generation of thinkers and politicians was talking about “manifest destiny” and the need for the United States to exert its strength in the world as a force for good.

Its goodness, however, was not always evident to those peoples and nations at the receiving end of American policies, especially as an increasingly self-righteous United States also showed a willingness to use force, from economic to military, to get its way. In the years before the First World War, President Theodore Roosevelt repeatedly sent American troops into countries around the Caribbean. Wilson’s immediate predecessor, President William Howard Taft, talked about a new way of organizing international relations through “dollar diplomacy,” by which the United States would use its economic power to encourage more trade and investment, and so bind nations closer together.

It was Wilson, though, who took that paradox — of using American power to spread liberty and democracy — to a new level and who claimed for the United States the right to speak for the peoples of the world. Secure in his own righteousness, convinced that he spoke for the voiceless masses, he was blind to the inconsistencies in his own behavior. When he sent troops into Caribbean countries, Wilson famously said, “I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men!”

In 1914 and again in 1916, when he intervened in Mexico, on very flimsy grounds, because he believed that the leaders who had emerged there after a complicated power struggle did not represent the Mexican people, he was surprised when the Mexicans resisted. He went to the Paris Peace Conference at the end of World War I convinced that the United States was the only truly disinterested power there. Yet at the same time he happily contemplated the spread of American investment and trade.

Wilson still arouses strong reactions around the world. In the United States, he is widely regarded as one of the great foreign policy presidents, a visionary who bore the gift of a better, fairer world to the Europeans, who reacted with jeers and contempt. Even American statesmen who fall on the realist end of the spectrum admire Wilson’s vision and his attempt to build a new international order. President Richard Nixon hung Wilson’s portrait on the wall of the Cabinet Room. George W. Bush sounds positively Wilsonian when he talks of spreading democracy worldwide and encouraging free trade among nations as ways to promote stability.

The view among Europeans is quite different. There Wilson is often seen as a meddlesome and self-righteous pedant, even, in John Maynard Keynes’s word, “a booby.” His idea of building an international system based on a League of Nations and collective security has been attacked over the decades as unworkable or, worse, a cover for American hegemony. Europeans on the right have tended to see Wilsonianism as dangerously naïve; peace is kept rather by being strong yourself and working for a balance of power. Lenin and left-wing Europeans since him, in contrast, have argued that the League of Nations was simply a society of imperialists who would do their best to keep the oppressed of the world under control.

On the other hand, there were also many, perhaps a majority, in Europe well as in my own country, Canada, who looked on Wilson as a noble idealist. And Wilson’s impact was wider still than Europe. His Fourteen Points, with their promise of a new world order, were translated into a host of languages, from Kurdish to Arabic to Chinese, almost as soon as they were issued. As the world remembered the dreadful destruction of the Great War (and when the next generation saw the even greater disaster of World War II), it was hard not to agree that humanity must find other ways of settling its disputes than through modern warfare. Because the League of Nations ultimately failed, we tend to forget how much international support there was for it, and later for the United Nations.

Although he died disappointed, his dreams of an international system with the United States at its heart shattered, Wilson’s ideals have permeated American thinking ever since. Think of Franklin Roosevelt holding out his Four Freedoms to the world, with his support for the United Nations and the Bretton Woods economic system, which includes the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the GATT (the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, now replaced by the World Trade Organization).

If the Cold War, for a time, divided the world into two opposing camps, the hope never entirely died that international politics could be organized in a better way. And certainly the propensity of American leaders to look on the American system as the best one was enhanced by the country’s great ideological struggle with the Soviet Union. President Reagan meant it when he called the Soviet Union “evil.”

A French diplomat of Wilson’s time believed that if the president had lived in a different, less democratic era he would have been a tyrant “because he does not seem to have the slightest conception that he can ever be wrong.” There have been times when that assertion could apply to the United States itself. Wilson’s influence has done much good, but, as Obama warns, it can lead American presidents and their administrations to see the world as they would like it to be and not as it is."

Photo Credit: Margaret MacMillan, a professor of history and provost of Trinity College in the University of Toronto, is the author of “Women of the Raj” and “Paris 1919.” Her most recent book is “Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World.” (The New York Times)

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