Wilsonianism, the bright side and the dark one

The Spring 2006 issue of Parameters has a book review by Andrew Bacevich. (It's the third review down, on journal page 124.) The book under review is Sands of Empire: Missionary Zeal, American Foreign Policy, and the Hazards of Global Ambition (2005) by Robert W. Merry. Bacevich comments there on "Wilsonism", which for isolationists is like a cuss word:

To put it another way, Merry bears a grudge against Woodrow Wilson and against Wilson's intellectual heirs still intent on casting the United States in the role of Crusader State. Wilsonians past and present tend to view the world through the prism of ideology, which persuades them that American values are universal and are destined to triumph everywhere. Merry sees the world through [Samuel] Huntington's prism of culture, which emphasizes the durability of identity and the persistence of conflict. For Wilsonians like today's neoconservatives, history is a tale of good versus evil in which a happy ending beckons if we have the will to seize it. According to Merry, history ought to be seen as an inconclusive and morally ambiguous story of us versus them.

The neocons are often described as "Wilsonian". But what kind of "Wilsonians" are they?

Woodrow Wilson is probably most remembered for his leadership in the First World War and his failed attempt to get the United States to join the League of Nations, the concept of which he believed was his greatest achievement. And that legacy of devotion to international law and international institutions have certainly not been reflected in the neocons pet projects like preventive war in Iraq and their Bircher-like hostility against the UN.

But there's another sense in which they can be seen as Wilsonian. The dark side of Wilson's idealism was his moral rigidity. He really tended to see the world in Good vs. Evil terms. It led his to reject early peace overtures from Lenin's new Bolshevik government in Russia, because to Wilson Communism was the embodiment of evil. And by dismissing the offer out of hand, he passed up a possible opportunity to make an early accomodation with the Soviets more favorable to his goals. Eventually, the US and Britain landed small military forces to fight the newly-installed Soviet government, an ill-conceived and short-lived adventure.

Even more consequentially, Wilson was so devoted to his League of Nations goals that the more cynical and less moralistic "statesman" of the Old World, who didn't much care about the League or the internationalist priciples underlying it, were able to use the League as a bargaining point to squeeze concession after concession out of Wilson in the peace negotiations.

The Versailles Treaty that emerged had an emasculated version of Wilson's League of Nations. But Wilson had wound up agreeing to a bandit's peace, which set the stage for the next world war.

That side of Wilson, the obsessive moralism, along with a utopian belief in the universal appeal of democracy and American values, without a corresponding sense of pragmatism and realism to balance them off, that kind of Wilsonism is very much evident among the neoconservatives and the Bush administration.

The author he's reviewing advocates a return to "realist" approaches to foreign policy as an antidote of neocon dark-side Wilsonianism:

In proposing his alternative to Wilsonian grandiosity, Merry takes care to protect himself from the charge of isolationism, devising his own policy of "conservative interventionism." Under the terms of this approach, rather than insisting on ideological conformity, the United States would permit nations to govern themselves according to their own lights "so long as they neither pose nor tolerate threats to America and the West." Any government disregarding that dictum would be severely punished—in essence, restoring the strategy of deterrence that served the United States well during the Cold War.

The following is interesting because Bacevich is defining his own outlook more specifically than he normally does:

If formulating foreign policy were simply a matter of choosing from among several alternative baskets of ideas, "conservative internationalism" would get this reader's vote.

But a major part of Bacevich's own academic work has been focused on the domestic underpinnings of foreign and military policy. So he's very skeptical about how ideologies, whether "internationalism" or "realism" or others, all to easily become window dressing for policies driven by other considerations. He concludes:

But of course that's not how foreign policy gets made. However much we might wish it were otherwise, policy derives from interests, ambitions, and aspirations. Ideas function as ornaments that statesmen - George W. Bush no less than Woodrow Wilson - deploy when and how it suits them to do so. To be meaningful, any critique of American statecraft needs to look beneath the ornaments at the structure that they conceal.

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