What a pleasure to see my good friend Michael Lind is mellowing with age! He doesn't take sides or swat us all down as in days of yore, but instead tries to bring us together, and more, he does a pretty good job of it.

I agree with Lind that Roosevelt was far more realistic than Wilson and hence would sup with the devil were it necessary. Even Wilson was open to compromise, however. The League as it emerged in late April 1919 was not the League that Wilson hoped for in several key respects for he abandoned his insistence that democracies dominate it in favor of a pledge from those states that joined that they would abide by the peace keeping regulations of the organization and that 2/3 of those already members would accept such a pledge as convincing. But it was FDR who decided that the Occupations of Japan and Germany should change them in fundamental ways internally (democratic regime change linked to economic openness), and called for the meeting at Bretton Woods--developments that were quintessentially Wilsonian. The result as John Ikenberry has argued in other books and articles was a "two track" Cold War, where the US sought to promote a Wilsonian order within the "free world" while containing communism without.

I also agree with Lind that Ikenberry and Slaughter are the purest of Wilsonians when they argued in late 2006 that a Concert of Democracies should be created outside of the UN, not to replace it but so as to provide military muscle to promote the expansion of democracy worldwide. But it should be noted that despite what they say (Slaughter likes to say in a very Wilsonian manner that America will have to sacrifice some of its sovereignty to international agreements), in fact it is the USA that would necessarily lead such a Concert. Could that not be a slippery slope by which American unilateralism is rather automatically backed by the concert? If so, then the difference with neoconservative thinking is one of means, not ends. Ikenberry and Slaughter have improved the neocon approach much more than they have changed it. It is instructive in this respect that John McCain picked up the Ikenberry/Slaughter idea in his campaign, renaming it the League of Democracies, a development approved by the neoconservatives in his camp.

All of which brings us back to the nature of Wilsonianism. In my thinking, Lind is not "ideologically correct." One may distinguish Wilson from Roosevelt, but by the 1990s in the hands of neoliberals like Ikenberry and Slaughter (and my book A Pact with the Devil names many more, chapters 4-6) liberal internationalism had become more theoretically coherent, thanks in large part to democratic peace theory. Hence it becomes increasingly difficult to pick and choose among the constituent elements of Wilsonianism--its call for an open economic door, its democracy promotion, its multilateralism, and its call for American leadership of such a system. They all fit neatly together but with pride of place going to democracy promotion (without which the other elements are unlikely to operate easily).

But this does not disqualify Bush from being a Wilsonian because he spurned multilateralism. His belief (or at least that of the neocons who correctly I believe claim authorship of the Bush Doctrine) was that American leadership could replace multilateralism's "tying down Gulliver by the Lilliputians" but that once successful in reforming not just Iraq but "the Broader Middle East" such leadership would engender a new form of multilateralism minus the genuflections in the direction of the US sacrificing some of its sovereignty. It was Krauthammer, I think, who coined the telling phrase "unilateralism is the high road to multilateralism," or in other words nothing succeeds like success and those in the Old Europe who criticize us will soon be ashamed of themselves. In Wilson's time too, I would maintain, all his talk of multilateralism would in fact have amounted to an American hegemonic order, which might have been a good thing to be sure, but would not have been an egalitarian structure with some kind of majority voting when decisions to use force had to be made. Here is a principal reason the Latin American states turned down Wilson's overtures for a Pan American Union or Treaty in 1915/1916. They saw well enough where it was headed--to a blank check for Washington to intervene when it would in the name of preserving democratic governments. Multilateralism was thus a fig leaf over American hegemony--not a bad thing necessarily, I repeat, but not the kind of multilateralism we see today in the European Union where no hegemon presides (perhaps unfortunately).

Bush was therefore not, as Lind puts it, "half Wilsonian" because a) he rightly insisted on the primacy of democracy promotion in invading Iraq; and b) he blew the cover of multilateralism as a combination of equals and stepped forth as a "leader" who expected that with success his followers would be legion--that is multilateralism would be reinvigorated but now with American hegemony broadly recognized and respected. The point is important for today because with so many of those in the Obama administration the call for multilateralism is being shouted from the rooftops as if it were a basic contradiction of the Bush administration. But is it? For me the test case will be relations with Russia. If and when we start to hear more and more about that country as an autocracy and a threat, combined with calls to bring "democratic" Georgia and Ukraine into NATO then we will know that the Wilsonian moment is far from over.