In my contribution to our volume, I attempt to put Wilsonian internationalism in historical context in light of the war in Iraq and of the growing number of pundits who have compared George W. Bush to Woodrow Wilson or have invoked the latter's name in connection with the broader crisis in American foreign policy in the new century. Their commentaries are the latest in a series of writings reflecting on Wilson's centrality that stretch back to the period between the world wars. Like others before them, they are informed by some degree of ideology and partisanship and are freighted in the context of the times in which they were written.

But there's a problem of interpretation here, which is one of the major themes of the debate in our essays (particularly the one between Anne-Marie Slaughter and Tony Smith). The term "Wilsonianism," I suggest, is in danger of becoming what literary critics call a "free-floating signifier"--that is, a term constantly deployed, yet stripped of meaningful historical context. ("Nuclear Wilsonianism," "Realistic Wilsonianism," "Wilsonianism on steroids," are but a few examples.) And it had struck me that virtually all of the authors and foreign-policy practitioners who, in the early 2000s, had re-discovered the subject pretty much had declined to engage that crucial element of "Wilsonianism" to which Wilson himself attached the supreme importance. To be sure, no other president ever communicated more effectively to the peoples of the world the ideals of democracy. But whatever Wilson's claim to historical greatness, I myself would argue that, in the end, it rests upon his having set in motion what J. William Fulbright once characterized as "the one great new idea of [the 20th] century in the field of international relations, the idea of an international organization with permanent processes for the peaceful settlement of international disputes." And so, given the current debate, I explore what Wilson himself had to say about these matters. For the things that worried him the most, worry us, too--questions about proliferating armaments and the avoidance of war, about sovereignty as it relates to unilateralism and multilateralism, and, one way or another, the future of the United Nations and the United States' disposition toward it.

Wilson realized that such a fundamental restructuring of international relations could not be accomplished overnight. His view was that "the League must grow and not be made," by stages, on a case-by-case basis. One should begin, then, with simple covenants--for example, the obligation to submit disputes to arbitration. Then, as he explained to Ambassador Jusserand of France, "in the very process of carrying out these covenant . . . a machinery and practice of cooperation would naturally spring up which would . . . produce . . . a regularly constituted and employed concert of nations." As for military sanctions, Wilson did not believe that they would come into play very often in the postwar period, for several reasons. The deterrent manifest within the threat of collective force, the "cooling-off" provisions in the arbitration features of the League, and, especially, disarmament together would help to eliminate most potential problems from the start. (That was how he sometimes explained Article X on his western tour, incidentally, and by pointing out that about two-thirds of the Covenant's provisions dealt with what today we would call conflict resolution.) If the League would not prevent conflict in every instance, it could at least bring about some measure of tranquility for a few years in order to explore the potential for rationality and enlightened self-interest--that is, to see whether collective security, in tandem with arbitration and disarmament, stood a reasonable chance of acceptance in the conduct of international relations.

Very few of the Republican opponents of the Covenant of the League were isolationists, strictly speaking. Certainly, their leader, Henry Cabot Lodge, was not. But most of them believed that Wilson had consigned (or would consign) too many vital national interests to the will of an international authority. "[S]ome of our sovereignty would be surrendered," he had frankly told thirty-four members of the House and Senate, on February 24, 1919, during a momentous four-hour meeting in the White House. "[It is] inconceivable that any concert of action of the nations . . . [of] the world could be taken without some sacrifice." He made several statements along these lines by the time the ratification fight had played itself out; and it likely that, for most Republicans, sovereignty was the single gravest issue involved.

In the struggle of 1919-1920, then, two competing approaches to internationalism were at stake. As one Democratic senator said at the start of the parliamentary debate: "Internationalism has come, and we must choose what form the internationalism is to take." Indeed, this was a struggle between Wilson's and a more conservative form of internationalism. And therein lies the wedge in our own more recent foreign-policy politics. (In 1999, William Kristol and Robert Kagan observed about the then forthcoming presidential election, "The real debate in the coming year will be: What brand of internationalism? This is the debate between the internationalism of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.")

Of course, in all of this, Wilson had always been interested in democracy and in encouraging it; and one can find allusions to the broad concept of representative government in some of his preliminary reflections on the League. Even so, I cannot see how this can sustain serious comparison with President Bush's war in Iraq; or with any other feature of the latter's foreign policy, in light of the administration's fundamental hostility to the U. N. and to such things as the Kyoto Accords, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and so on. With regard to Iraq, one must recall the set of false propositions for war that the Bush administration foisted upon the Congress and the American people; then, once there proved to be no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that the administration began to emphasize a different rationalization for the war--that its purpose was to bring democracy to the Middle East. Woodrow Wilson, even as he led the United States into the most terrible and disastrous of all armed conflicts theretofore in history, had declared simply, "The world must be made safe for democracy." (About a year later, he said to a group of journalists, "Now, there isn't any one kind of government under which all nations ought to live. There isn't any one kind of government which we have the right to impose upon any nation. So that I am not fighting for democracy except for the peoples that want democracy.") Nor in circumstances otherwise did he go abroad in search of monsters to destroy in the manner in which the Bush administration has done, causing the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people and inflicting mass destruction upon a modern state located in the center of the most volatile region in the world. Let us hope that this is not, after all, what Wilsonianism has come to mean.