In response to Tony's post, I'd like to emphasize something that John wrote:

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).

I think this gets to the heart of the matter, particularly in the case of the neocons. They are influenced more by their idealized image of Truman and the Cold War liberal internationalism of 1949-1989--John's liberal internationalism 2.0--than by Wilson in 1919 or FDR in 1945. Truman (along with Churchill), rather than Wilson or Roosevelt, is the hero of the neocons and like-minded liberal hawks--witness the Truman National Security Project.

As my friend the late John P. Diggins argued, neoconservatism needs to be understood at its origins as a kind of counter-communism, dominated by ex-Trotskyists and other anticommunist leftists and liberals who sought to fight fire with fire by using methods of propaganda pioneered, not by the rather genteel Wilson-Roosevelt internationalists, but by the Soviets and various sects of international Marxism. The very structure of the neoconservative movement, with its front groups and little magazines and committees for this or that, is based on the structure of the anti-Stalinist left in the 1940s and 1950s, which sought to neutralize the global pro-Stalinist left by copying its organizational and propaganda methods. Neocon rhetoric also owes more to the revolutionary left than to old-fashioned progressive reformers. Change "the global socialist revolution" to "the global democratic capitalist revolution" and you have the militant, ideological "democratism" of former radicals like Michael Harrington and Joshua Muravchik.

In answer to Tony, then, I think that there are diminishing returns in trying to establish Wilson's paternity in the case of the neocons, as distinct from the more truly Wilsonian liberal internationalists who found common ground with them sometimes during the Bush years. I think that neoconservatism looks less like Wilsonianism than like Trotskyism-Trumanism (something that would have appalled both Trotsky and Truman). And the post-Cold War neocon project, shared in some respects by some neoliberals, was--is?--to universalize what John calls the hegemonic Truman System of 1949 as "liberal internationalism 2.5," rather than to try to create a contemporary version of Roosevelt's System of 1945 or Wilson's System of 1919, each of which was a version of a concert of power system, with the U.S. as first among equals but not global military hegemon and market of first resort.