The Trouble with Saving the World

The American President stood for those things that had come to define his nation. Its armed forces were the best equipped and most disciplined in the world; their fighting spirit had just been the decisive factor in ending a war. The American economy was the largest and most technologically advanced on the planet, brimming with broad-shouldered vitality. Perhaps above all, the President thought big; he had grand, expansive ideas of how the world might be ordered to increase human security and happiness, and he cast these thoughts not in terms of some narrow set of American interests but as universal truths applicable to all nations and all problems. In international affairs, he lived by a clear identification of what was good and what was evil, and he believed in inclining American policy so that it supported the former; he was a great believer in moral clarity.

All of which, to many of those who had to deal with him, made him a royal pain. The British Prime Minister thought the President behaved like a heathen come to rescue the missionaries. The French Prime Minister, exasperated by the President's airs, said that talking to him was like talking to Jesus Christ. Europeans found the President ignorant; he was, said the leading public intellectual of the time, not just "ill-informed" but "slow and unadaptable." The central problem, this observer believed, was that the President's "thought and his temperament were essentially theological not intellectual, with all the strength and the weakness of that manner of thought, feeling and expression."

It was not George W. Bush he was describing but Woodrow Wilson. When Wilson set off for the peace conference in Paris at the end of World War I, he was, said John Maynard Keynes (the source of the waspish comments above) endowed with a "prestige and a moral influence throughout the world unequaled in history." Conventional wisdom holds that he wasted these assets. As Margaret MacMillan documents in her new history, Paris 1919, Wilson's commitments to self-determination, democracy and nation building (although the phrase was not then in vogue) were frequently frustrated at the peace conference by Europeans interested mainly in land grabs. After he returned from Paris, writes Michael Mandelbaum in his recent book, The Ideas That Conquered the World, Wilson's negotiations with those Senators who thought that membership in the League of Nations would endanger American independence were "a masterpiece of political incompetence." Among the more hard-nosed realist practitioners of American statecraft--the sort of folk who have found a natural home in the Bush Administration--it has long been fashionable to deride Wilson as a fuzzy dreamer. In a January 2000 article in Foreign Affairs, Condoleezza Rice, who would become Bush's National Security Adviser, sniffed, with obvious disapproval, that there were "strong echoes" of "Wilsonian thought" in the Clinton Administration.