Wilsonians vs. Hamiltonians

In his Washington Post column Michael Gerson is outraged that the Tillerson State Department isn’t pursuing an agenda of promoting justice and democracy abroad:

If Cabinet members are to be judged by the gap between expectation and performance, Rex Tillerson is among the worst. He was supposed to be one of the adults in the room, a steadying force. But Tillerson has managed to be both ineffectual and destabilizing — unfamiliar with the workings of government, unwilling to provide inspirational leadership, disconnected from American values and seemingly hostile to the department in his care.

Who would want to be known as the secretary of state who retreated from the promotion of justice and democracy? Yet this is exactly what Tillerson seems to desire.

To a certain kind of corporate mind, a statement of organizational purpose — following a bottom-up, 360-degree, consultant-driven review process — is a big deal. The one currently under consideration at the State Department (according to an internal email obtained by my fellow Post columnist Josh Rogin): “We promote the security, prosperity and interests of the American people globally.” In contrast, the previous version called for “a peaceful, prosperous, just and democratic world.”

He doesn’t seem to be fazed at all over how big a flop our efforts in that direction have been over the period of the last couple of decades. That’s the position of the dead-ender Wilsonians.

Wilsonians (referred to that way from Wilson’s 1917 speech asking Congress to enter the First World War) come in two varieties. On the right they’re called “neoconservatives”; on the left they’re called “liberal interventionists”. Their efforts to spread peace, justice, and democracy at the point of a gun over the last generation have been complete flops. The world is less safe for democracy today than it was a generation ago and far from prospering abroad democracy is actually in trouble at home.

Hamiltonians in contrast see America’s primary interests as mercantile and it appears to me that’s Sec. Tillerson’s attitude. It has a certain logic to it even for Wilsonians. We’re more likely to attract people to justice and democracy from the base of a prosperous and successful United States than we are by overthrowing their governments and replacing them with corrupt regimes or, worse, chaos.

Left unanswered by Mr. Gerson is how the United States can make a credible case for human rights and democracy without confronting the World’s Heavyweight Champion Human Rights Abuser, China. That’s something the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations have all decline to do. Or even the middleweight champ, Saudi Arabia? Complaining about the flyweights isn’t merely hypocritical; it’s ineffective.