A few weeks before the end of the war, Senator Henry Fountain Ashurst called at the White House and tried to persuade Wilson to demand an unconditional surrender from Germany. Wilson’s talk of a just peace was raising fears that he would be too generous to the enemy, Ashurst explained; Americans needed assurance that he would hold the Germans to account.
“Senator,” Wilson replied, “it would relieve a great many people of anxiety if they did not start with the assumption that I am a damned fool.” He asked Ashurst to take the floor of the Senate and declare that the American people had no reason to fear. The president had no intention of letting the Germans off scot-free, nor did the generals who would dictate the terms of the Armistice. Wilson also reported that with Germany’s defeat in the offing, he was thinking well beyond the end of the war. He was, he said, “playing for a hundred years hence.”
Wilson was playing for the whole world as well. Against long odds, he persuaded the victors to adopt his new world order, at the center of which was the League of Nations, a global alliance committed to peace. Senator J. William Fulbright, an Arkansas Democrat who chaired the Committee on Foreign Relations from 1959 to 1974, called it “the one great new idea of the century in the field of international relations.” The League was designed to prevent war by standing up to threats of international aggression—with discussion if possible, sanctions if necessary, and a collective military response if all else failed. Wilson was not fool enough to believe that there would never be another war, but he did believe that peace would bring prosperity, that prosperity would nurture Europe’s nine new democracies, and that the spread of democracy would make war less likely.
Wilson also believed that the United States could—and should—do more than any other nation to make the new world order a success. The United States was in a position to do more because of its unrivaled economic strength and because its government, however imperfect, was the most democratic on earth. Wilson assumed that longings for the democracy, liberty, and justice won in the American Revolution were universal and that Americans had a mission to share them with the rest of the world.
Unhappily for Wilson, the war had left many Americans wanting less foreign involvement, not more. He fought hard to change their minds, but he lost, and his liberal internationalism died four deaths—three in the Senate and one in the landslide that put the provincial Warren G. Harding in the White House. Harding had promised to put America first and return the country to “normalcy.”
Eight years before, on the eve of his own inauguration, Wilson had mused to a friend that it would be “the irony of fate” if foreign relations dominated his presidency. Fate had an even greater irony in store: despite the fact that Wilson’s fellow citizens rejected his idealistic internationalism, it remained at the heart of American debates on foreign policy for almost a hundred years after his conversation with Ashurst.
Harding had scarcely settled in when mainstream Republicans began looking for alternatives to Wilson’s internationalism, which they found vague and too sweeping. The question the Republicans were trying to answer was not “Should the United States be an internationalist or an isolationist power?” It was “What kind of internationalism would best serve American national interests?” Under the Republican presidents in office from 1921 to 1933 (Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover) the party’s internationalists pursued several items on Wilson’s agenda: the economic recovery of Europe, disarmament, and the establishment of a world court. Even Harding, who refused to reopen the question of U.S. membership in the League of Nations, allowed unofficial American observers to sit in on most of the League’s conferences on arms and on trade. The observers were also permitted to advise and assist in matters that were more humanitarian than political (curbing the opium trade, for example).
In 1921, Harding’s secretary of state, Charles Evans Hughes, chaired the world’s first disarmament conference. And in 1928, Republicans showed as much daring as Wilson in their search for a formal means of safeguarding the peace, offering the world a chance to outlaw war. Crafted by Coolidge’s secretary of state, Frank Kellogg, and his French counterpart, Aristide Briand, the Pact of Paris required signatories to submit their international disputes to arbitration. Sixty-two nations took the pledge. In form, the pact was a defeat for the League, but in spirit it was thoroughly Wilsonian. Kellogg and Briand (like Wilson) received a Nobel Peace Prize.
The outbreak of World War II seemed to prove that Wilson in particular and internationalism in general were colossal failures. But President Franklin D. Roosevelt saw Wilson’s plan for a new world order as a first draft worthy of revision. In 1943 the Allies agreed to establish a new global organization, the United Nations. Many of the aspirations in its charter were taken straight from the League’s covenant, and the decision to base the new organization in New York signaled the American intention to take the lead in stabilizing the postwar world—the course that Wilson had wanted to follow.
Determined to avoid Wilson’s mistakes, FDR cultivated bipartisan support for his plans. He also made certain that the U.N.’s charter would be separate from the peace treaty. And when he concluded that the League had been asked to shoulder too many responsibilities, he proposed that the U.N. be supplemented by other organizations. The suggestion led to the creation of the International Monetary Fund (1944), the World Bank (1945), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (1949), and many more.
Roosevelt died in April 1945, two months before the delegates of fifty nations gathered in San Francisco to sign the U.N. charter. The new president, Harry S. Truman, spoke at the ceremony, paying tribute to Roosevelt and sounding a decidedly Wilsonian note in calling for self-restraint. The most powerful nations had no right to dominate the world, Truman said; they had a duty to use their power to lead the world to peace and justice.
Six weeks later, Truman authorized the use of the deadliest weapon the world had ever seen. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed more than 100,000 Japanese instantly, and 200,000 more would die later of radiation poison and other injuries inflicted in the bombings. The vast majority were civilians. Japan surrendered within days, and Truman would always maintain that the bombings had saved the United States from having to invade Japan, a project that might have upped American casualties by tens of thousands.
There is no way to know what Wilson would have made of the decision to drop the bombs, but it seems safe to say that after arguing in vain against the punitive peace made in Paris, he would have endorsed the Marshall Plan. Named for Secretary of State George C. Marshall, it epitomized Wilson’s conviction that if a nation did the morally right thing it would turn out to be the practical thing as well. As the beneficiaries of the Marshall Plan, most Western Europeans found American democracy more attractive than Soviet communism.
With its emphasis on containing the spread of communism after World War II, the diplomacy of the United States took on a hard edge, but Wilson’s idealism remained a staple of American Cold War rhetoric. When John F. Kennedy put the Soviet Union on notice in his inaugural address, he did it in a tone as lofty as Wilson’s declaration that the world must be made safe for democracy: “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” But the willingness to pay any price led Kennedy and his advisors to plunge the United States into the long, unwinnable war against communism in Vietnam. Protest of the war destroyed the presidency of Kennedy’s succesor, Lyndon B. Johnson, and brought about the election of Richard M. Nixon.
Nixon was a realist who did not put much stock in visions of world community. But even as he escalated the war in Vietnam and carpet-bombed Cambodia, he wrapped himself in the mantle of the great idealist in American foreign relations. In a 1969 address from the Oval Office, he said, “Fifty years ago, in this room and at this very desk, President Woodrow Wilson spoke words which caught the imagination of a war-weary world. He said, ‘This is the war to end war.’ ” (Wilson had never used the desk, nor had he ever given a major speech in his office.) Nixon went on to say that he was not promising that the war in Vietnam would end war but had embarked on a path that would bring the United States “closer to that great goal to which Woodrow Wilson and every American president in our history has been dedicated—the goal of a just and lasting peace.” On another occasion Nixon predicted that Wilson would be remembered “not as a man who tried and failed, but as one of those Americans who saw the truth before his time.” By following Wilson’s example, Nixon went on, “by not fearing to be idealists ourselves, we shall make the world safe for free men to live in peace.” Set against Nixon’s deeds, such words invited cynicism. His secretary of state, Henry A. Kissinger, tried to resolve the contradiction by explaining that Nixon understood the value of international cooperation but was skeptical of relying on the global community when national security was at stake.
Long an outspoken foe of communism, Nixon stunned the world in 1972 with trips to the Soviet Union and China. In Moscow he negotiated an arms control agreement, and in China he made the first moves to restore diplomatic ties severed in 1949, when the communists came to power. By courting both countries, he hoped to win their help in pressuring North Vietnam to negotiate an end to the war. At the same time, he was betting that the new friendship with China would cause the Soviets to think twice before seeking more territory by conquest. He made admiring mentions of Wilson in speeches to the Russians and the Chinese, but his divide-and-conquer strategy was a classic example of the balance-of-power realism that Wilson despised.
In 1990, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, President George H. W. Bush announced the end of the Cold War in deliberately Wilsonian terms, saying that humanity stood at the threshold of “a new world order,” with an opportunity “to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind—peace and security, freedom, and the rule of law.” Wilson’s ghost reappeared the following year, when Bush sought and won the U.N. Security Council’s approval for a multilateral war against Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait. The coalition of thirty-four nations was hailed as a prime example of the collective security advocated by Woodrow Wilson. After Iraq had been driven out of Kuwait, Bush echoed Wilson again, speaking of the war as a mission rooted in shared interests and shared ideals. And the ideals, Bush said, were boldly and clearly American.
Bill Clinton was the first president born after the creation of the United Nations and the first to enter office after the Cold War. Like Wilson, he was beset by a succession of foreign crises: the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, genocide in Rwanda, and Serbian aggression in Bosnia and Kosovo. Clinton was an internationalist, but he was an internationalist sobered by the morass of Vietnam. Unwilling to pay any price or bear any burden, he declined to send troops to support the U.N.’s forces in Rwanda. Condemned for his inaction, he expressed his regret on numerous occasions and took the lead in orchestrating NATO’s response to Serbia’s ethnic cleansing in the Balkans.
Clinton and his advisors shied away from calling themselves Wilsonians unless they preceded the term with modifiers such as neo and pragmatic. As Strobe Talbott, Clinton’s deputy secretary of state, explained, “we were often on the defensive against critics who used Wilsonian pejoratively, as a synonym for naïve.” Clinton practiced a tempered internationalism. His presidency coincided with the acceleration of climate change, globalization, and terrorism, all of which posed serious threats to national and international interests. He was willing to address such challenges, but not alone.
The first all-out American assault on the international order envisioned by Woodrow Wilson and realized by FDR came from Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush, who entered the White House in 2001. His world was not a community but a battleground where the forces of good and evil were locked in perpetual struggle. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, confirmed this view and led him to adopt a foreign policy that divided the world into two hostile camps. “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,” he declared nine days after the attacks. “From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.” He claimed a right to “pre-emptive” war, and he declared that U.S. forces were prepared to act without the approval of the international community. He also rejected Wilson’s idea that liberty was America’s gift to the world. It was, said Bush, “God’s gift to humanity.”
But even as Bush marched the United States down the path to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, his supporters hailed him as an heir to Woodrow Wilson. Bush was out to “finish the job that Woodrow Wilson started,” wrote the diplomatic historian John Gaddis. “The world, quite literally, is to be made safe for democracy, even those parts of it, like the Muslim Middle East, that have so far resisted that tendency.” Wilson might have agreed before his chastening in revolutionary Mexico, but by the time revolutionary Russia descended into chaos, he thought it better to let revolutionaries work out their own destiny.
Reflecting on the catastrophes that followed in Afghanistan and Iraq, Tony Smith, an authority on Wilsonianism, noted that Bush and his supporters had appropriated Wilson’s rhetoric to camouflage “change as continuity in American practice, war as peace, a bid for world supremacy as a continuation of American exceptionalism exercised for the common good.” In Smith’s judgment, Bush pursued “an aggressively imperialistic aim that threatened to discredit the United States as a champion of world stability, the role that Wilson had seen for it in 1919.”
Barack Obama, who had no interest in Bush’s pursuit of world domination, put a high priority on avoiding what he called “stupid” mistakes. But Obama’s rejection of his predecessor’s overambition did not herald a return to the broad internationalism of Wilson or Roosevelt. Like Clinton and the first President Bush, Obama was a proponent of multilateralism, seeing it as a brake on the hubris built into Americans’ image of themselves as exceptional. He shared Wilson’s view that American power imposed a responsibility to address threats to world order, but he also shared Clinton’s idea that the United States was unable to bear any burden or pay any price.
In 2018, as Woodrow Wilson’s hundred years came to an end, the peaceful world order of his dreams was nowhere in sight. Nationalism and autocracy were on the rise, and democracy was under attack in some of the most democratic countries on earth, including the United States. In its 2017 survey of political rights and civil liberties around the world, Freedom House, a nonpartisan advocate of human rights and democratic change, noted a disturbing new trend: setbacks to democracy were concentrated in countries ranked as Free (as opposed to Partly Free or Not Free) in the organization’s ratings system. The pronounced nationalism of the new U.S. president raised questions about the stability of the global order in place since the end of World War II, as did Britain’s vote to leave the European Union and the growing popularity of xenophobic political candidates in Europe. The authors of the report glumly concluded that it was “no longer possible to speak with confidence about the long-term durability of the EU; the incorporation of democracy and human rights priorities into American foreign policy; the resilience of democratic institutions in central Europe, Brazil, or South Africa; or even the expectation that [atrocities] will draw international criticism from democratic governments and U.N. human rights bodies.”
Despite the setbacks, the world of the twenty-first century is still more democratic than it was before Wilson threw his moral force against imperialism, militarism, and autocracy. And he turned out to be right about the central fact of life in a world of global markets, global finance, instant communication, and the possibility of instant annihilation: withdrawal is impossible.