Editors note: This piece will appear in the May 8 issue of The Weekly Standard.
Tony Smith, political science professor at Tufts, is a man on a mission. His mission: save Wilsonianism from its perversions by post-Cold War social scientists, military strategists like General David Petraeus, the RAND Corporationand especially the neocons and neoliberals of the Bush and Obama years. To do so, Smith spends half of Why Wilson Matters in an effort to rescue Wilson by giving his readers a more complete account of Woodrow Wilsons views of history and statecraft. The other half he devotes to an account of how this truer Wilsonianism has been left behind in favor of a more assertive, even imperialist, version reflected in the policies of the last two administrations.
As Smith somewhat backhandedly admits, his first task is complicated by the fact that Wilson never spelled out his grand strategy in a fully coherent manner. And indeed, even in Smiths retelling of Wilson, one is struck by the tensions and contradictions in Wilsons own evolving understanding of both political life and international affairs. In short, Woodrow Wilson is a hard man to pin down.
Nevertheless, from the confusing mass of Wilsons writings, speeches, and policies as our 28th president, Smith argues that Wilsons Wilsonianism can be seen as consisting of four interrelated elements: democracy promotion, open markets, collective security arrangements, and American leadership to push and pull the other three into some sort of consistent vision. But Smith also wants to qualify this far-reaching agenda with a significant addendum: Wilson possessed a Burkean and Darwinian sensibility that such matters cant be rushed. As he told a group of reporters in 1918, if a people dont want democracy, that is none of my business. That was the principle I acted on in dealing with Mexico after invading it in 1914.
Yet Wilsons evolutionary views were no less informed by his progressive sense of history: Monarchies, he believed, were increasingly a thing of the past, the spirit of the times was headed in democracys direction, and equally important, it is surely the manifest destiny of the United States to lead in the attempt to make this spirit prevail. Smith calls George W. Bush far more assertive in this regardand surely Bush was assertive in setting an American goal of ending tyranny in the worldbut it was Wilson who said that upon becoming a great power, the task of the United States would be to teach the South American Republics to elect good men and to extend self-government to Puerto Rico and the Philippines, and asserted even more broadly, when properly directed, there is no people not fitted for self-government. And it was Wilson who, with the conclusion of World War I in mind and the League of Nations to defend, asserted: The goal is not only the destruction of every arbitrary power anywhere but also to redeem the world by giving it liberty and justice.
Putting aside the issue of how best to understand Woodrow Wilson for the moment, Tony Smiths real target, is his fellow academics who, through the promulgation of the democratic peace theory and the democratic transition theory, have (to his mind) offered up a jiffy-quick formula justifying a more activist use of power to expand the liberal international order. Its these concepts, combined with an expanded notion of the right to intervene where gross violations of human rights are occurring, that have fueled, he believes, such disastrous overreaches as in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya.
Yet Smiths problem is that the democratic peace theory has proven to be quite strong: Liberal democracies dont go to war with each other. There might be some small exceptions that can be conjured up, but they are so much the exception to the rule that they actually confirm that it is in Americas (and its democratic allies) interest to promote the establishment of democratic regimes when it can. In addition, the old development maxim that liberal democracy could only take root in countries with specific economic and cultural preconditions has been put into question by the huge expansion of democratic states over the past centuryan expansion that has included countries of various economic levels, in every continent, and with diverse religious and cultural backgrounds, including Muslim. In short, politicians and policymakers looking at these trends had good reason to be optimistic.
Smith, whose Americas Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggles for Democracy in the Twentieth Century (1994) was very much in sync with this optimism, is now driven by his desire to disassociate his version of Wilsonianism or liberal internationalism from the interventionist policies of the Bush and Obama administrations. The problem, however, is that in none of the three casesAfghanistan, Iraq, or Libyawas military intervention done principally with an eye to democracy promotion. In the first two, regimes were toppled for reasons of national security and in the last, Libya, to prevent what was becoming a humanitarian disaster that (like the Balkans in the 1990s) held significant security implications for our European allies if not addressed.
Of course, in the case of Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States and the international community have been interested in helping establish a form of representative government in each. The question Smith never asks, and which policymakers must confront, is this: Once a decision was made to remove Saddam Hussein and the Taliban from power, what form of government should have been put in place? Individuals can certainly argue about the initial decision for regime change, but can any democratic leader in this day and age argue that the policy to follow should be well replace that thug with our thug?
Nor can it be assumed, as Smith and a host of others do, that the effort to build stable democracies in such states is an impossible task. The United States certainly didnt come prepared to deal with a post-Saddam Iraq, and when it finally did begin to provide the kind of stability necessary to start the process in a serious fashion, the Obama team pulled the plug on that effort. Its an open question what Iraq might look like today if Washington had stayed the course. And while post-Qaddafi Libya is a bloody messone hardly helped by Barack Obamas post-Iraq, hands-off approach to his military interventionLibyas neighbor, Muslim Tunisia, continues to plug away at moving from autocratic rule to representative government.
If there is a central distinction to be made between Woodrow Wilsons vision of liberal internationalism and the views of those Smith takes aim at today, it lies in what place nation-state powerespecially American powerplays in that orders promotion and sustainment. Wilsons postwar vision centered on a League of Nations in which collective security would be animated by the common will of mankind [that] has been substituted for the particular purposes of individual states. But as internationalists like William Howard Taft and Elihu Root correctly complained, this left the league without an effective enforcement mechanism to address violations of the international order. It lacked the power that only states can bring.
In this respect, Smith is right to say that Wilsons Wilsonianism is different from that of many of the Wilsonians of todaybut not for the reasons he puts forward. Liberal internationalism must rely on the very exercise of national power that it hopes to moderate and direct. In turn, this means living for the foreseeable future with presidents and administrations who understand that the United States remains the indispensible nation, mistakes and all.
Gary Schmitt is co-director of the Marilyn Ware Center for Security Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
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Safe for Democracy - American Enterprise Institute