And Don’t Let the Door Hit You On Your Way Out

In her Washington Post column Anne Applebaum laments the loss of ascendancy of Wilsonianism:

In 1917, Wilson had called for the creation of an alliance, the world’s first to be based on democratic principles: He wanted the “free and self-governed peoples of the world” to oppose “selfish and autocratic power.” In 1918, he imagined a Europe without empires, a world in which “conquest and aggrandizement” had given way to open diplomacy, safe navigation and “the removal, so far as possible, of all economic barriers and the establishment of an equality of trade conditions.” Wilson also imagined a “general association of nations” that would offer “mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.”

Even the most amateur student of history knows what happened next. Wilson’s Fourteen Points raised skeptical eyebrows in Europe (the French prime minister allegedly muttered that “even the good Lord had only 10” points). His offer of friendship to “the German people,” as opposed to the Prussian aristocracy, was ignored by the authors of the subsequent Versailles peace treaty, who demanded punitive German reparations instead. Free trade was replaced by tariff barriers; Wilson’s “general association of nations” became the League of Nations, which the United States never joined and which failed spectacularly. The new nations of Europe fought bitterly over their new borders, Germany and Russia sought to reconquer their old colonies and a new world war broke out two decades later.

But take a longer view, and that speech looks rather different. A century has passed, and we now find ourselves living in a thoroughly Wilsonian world. Ideas that were dismissed as far-fetched and even silly in 1918 have become reality. We really have lifted many barriers to trade and commerce; the continent of Europe really is composed of nation-states that determine, more or less, their own fate, and the same is true at least some of the time on other continents, too. Many conflicts really are resolved by open diplomacy instead of secret treaties. Multiple “associations of nations” really do operate in different spheres and on different continents, helping to smooth international relations.

For the moment, U.S. diplomacy and even the U.S. military are operating within a Wilsonian framework, too. “For our own part,” Wilson declared in January 1918, “we see very clearly that unless justice be done to others it will not be done to us. The program of the world’s peace, therefore, is our program.” At least in theory, American soldiers and civil servants are not in the business of pursuing “conquest and aggrandizement” for their own sake. Their ultimate aim, whatever the policies of the moment, really is “the world’s peace” — or, to translate into less embarrassing language, a world in which genocide and mass murder are reduced to a minimum, in which prosperity and democracy are on the rise, in which Americans can travel and do business according to predictable rules.

We can only hope. Over the period of the last several decades Wilsonian adventurism has produced chaos and misery in Iraq, Libya, Somalia, and Syria. Keep in mind that both neoconservatives and liberal interventionists are Wilsonians. Neither advocate war for “conquest and aggrandizement”. Both want to make war to make the world safe for democracy.
But they both want war. Trillions have been spent on these projects and we should never lose track of the fact that money is fungible. The money spent on bombs dropped, inadvertently or deliberately, on Somali schoolchildren won’t be spent on education or immunizations.

The problem is that good intentions aren’t enough. A war in pursuit of goals that are beyond our power to achieve can never be just. And the sad reality is that many of the people of the world do not want their worlds made safe for liberal democracy and will fight to the death to prevent it.