What Would Wilson Do? [Archive.org URL]

After the Peace of Westphalia ended Europe’s religious wars in 1648, the principle of sovereignty came to dominate the theory and practice of international relations. Sovereignty was trumps. States had no right to intervene in the internal affairs of other states. Yet no “higher authority,” papal, Protestant, or otherwise, stood above them. Only the ceaseless exercise of power, especially by the weighty “great powers,” might hold contentious states in tenuous equilibrium.

That concept was eventually accepted as the foundation of the international system, forming the bedrock on which the foreign-policy school of realism has ever after rested its case.

American diplomacy has proved most successful when it has tempered its idealistic aspirations with that canonical realist precept: the importance of limits. Balancing ambition with feasibility, ideational goals with material costs, has been perhaps the highest realist doctrine. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams gave it classic formulation in a Fourth of July address in 1821:

What has America done for the benefit of mankind? Let our answer be this […] wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy […] She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own […] she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.

Wilson’s simple declarative sentence—”The world must be made safe for democracy”—constituted a realistic as well as an idealistic lodestar for American foreign policy.

More clearly than his critics, Wilson recognized that the world now bristled with dangers that no single state could contain, even as it shimmered with prospects that could be seized only by states acting together—that it presented threats incubated by emerging technologies, and opportunities generated by the gathering momentum of the Industrial Revolution. Making such a world safe for democracy required more than the comforting counsels of isolation, and more than taking the inherited international order as a given and conducting the business of great-power diplomacy as usual. It required, rather, active engagement with other states to muzzle the dogs of war, suppress weapons of mass destruction, and improve both standards of living and international comity through economic liberalization. Most urgently, it required new institutions that would import into the international arena at least a modicum of the trust, habits of reciprocity, and rule of law that obtained in well-ordered national polities. These were ambitious goals, but they were also realizable, as time would tell.

America’s power at the end of World War II was exponentially greater than the power Wilson had wielded in 1918. The United States possessed the only intact large-scale advanced industrial economy on the globe. It held a monopoly, for the moment, on nuclear weapons. It boasted the world’s largest navy and massive long-range strategic air capability. It commanded fully half the planet’s manufacturing capacity. It held half of the world’s gold stocks and foreign-currency reserves. It was the leading petroleum producer and a leading exporter.

On the occasion of the first gathering of the United Nations, in San Francisco on April 25, 1945, President Harry S. Truman used words that could have been Wilson’s—or Paine’s: “The responsibility of great states is to serve and not to dominate the peoples of the world.”

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