This is an excellent discussion - and I want to respond to both Tony Smith and Michael Lind, offering my own version of liberal internationalism's intellectual family tree.

First, Tony argues that "democracy promotion" is at the heart of Wilsonianism. But I simply do not think this is true. Yes, as Michael Lind indicates, Wilson did argue that a peaceful order would best to be built on a community of democratic states. War was the product of antiquated social systems. Accountable governments that respect the rule of law are essential building blocks of a peaceful and just world order. But the world that Wilson envisaged in 1918 was not one where the United States - alone or with other states -- would equip itself to go out and democratized the world. Rather, the Wilsonian vision was of an international order organized around a global collective security body in which sovereign states would act together to uphold a system of territorial peace. Open trade, national self-determination, and a belief in progressive global change also undergirded the Wilsonian world view. It was a "one world" vision of nation-states that trade and interact in a multilateral system of laws creating an orderly international community.

To be sure, there is some tension in the Wilsonian notion of a universal liberal order. On the one hand, Wilson did hold the view that a stable and peaceful international order should to be built around liberal democratic states. But, on the other hand, Wilson also understood that the architecture of a liberal world order would need to be universal and open in scope and membership. All states could join the League of Nations regardless of regime type.

The Wilsonian vision reconciled this apparent contradiction with the understanding that all aggressive states could be brought to heel within a collective security system and that, in the long run, non-democratic states would make democratic transitions and eventually come to embrace liberal international rules and norms. Wilson did believe that a world democratic revolution was underway. Beyond this, Wilson tended to emphasize the democratic bases for peace in his war speeches but less so in his peace settlement speeches. Wilson did not think the League had to be only composed of democracies for it to succeed. In neither his original proposal for the League or in the version adopted some months later in the spring of 1919 does the word democracy appear. The important point is this: the spread of democracy was seen more as a consequence of an effective League than an essential source of that effectiveness. Hence the universalist architecture.

Wilson's commitment to national sovereignty and self-determination (however selectively applied in practice) further reinforced this view that the world would not be organized around a leading state using coercive force to usher in democratic transitions.

Where I think Tony goes wrong is in equating Wilson's and liberal internationalism's embrace of democracy as a desired component of a stable and peaceful world order with "democracy promotion." The idea was to build an open system of rules and institutions - and states themselves would develop and modernize and move in a democratic direction. Yes, as Tony suggestions, there are many liberals who are also democracy promoters. But my claim is that democracy promotion is not at the heart of the vision. As Wilson believed, it would be more a consequence than a cause of a liberal world order. And this is generally my own view today. This is why Wilson (and yours truly) are not neo-cons.

Regarding Michael Lind's argument about FDR, I agree that he brought more of a realist sensibility to his liberal vision. Roosevelt wanted to inject a bit more realism into the operation of liberal international order by building a more formal role for the great powers. Like Wilson's version, it would be a "one world" system in which the major powers would cooperate to enforce peace. The United States would take the lead in creating the order, but the order would be collectively run. If Wilson's liberal vision was liberal internationalism 1.0, FDR's vision was liberal internationalism 1.5. It was not a fundamental shift, and it certainly was not a realist balance of power system. Wilson's League would be open to all states and FDR's United Nations would be run by the major powers, regardless of their regime type. Both Wilson and FDR thought that over the long run non-democratic states would move in the direction of liberal democracy. Both had liberal modernization world views, and this allowed both - perhaps FDR more than Wilson - to see that working with non-democracies (after all, that was the world he lived in) was part of building an order that biases historical change in "our" direction.

Finally, it was really Truman and the coming of the Cold War that led to the reinvention of liberal internationalism, creating what I would call liberal internationalism 2.0. This involved a more direct role for the United States as a hegemon - working with Europe and other allies, running the system, etc. The United States found itself not just the sponsor and leading participant in a new liberal international order - it was also owner and operator of it. The vision of liberal order turned into liberal hegemony. (And today the debate is whether the United States can renegotiate its old hegemonic order and create liberal internationalism 2.5, or whether we are moving to 3.0 or something entirely new and different).

So there is some tension in the liberal vision between universalism and democratic community. Each generation of liberal thinkers and doers have offered its own way of reconciling these aspects. Liberals do think that democracies have special capacities to cooperate. But they do not, generally, think that democratic cooperation needs to be pursued at the expense of universal institutions that integrate the "one world" system and generate the grand modernizing processes that move the system in a liberal-progressive direction.