Time to End Wilsonian Foreign Policy

In his magnificent post-Cold War book Diplomacy (1994), the late Henry Kissinger identified and explained the competing strains of American foreign policy since the dawn of the 20^th century: realism as typified by Theodore Roosevelt, and Wilsonianism as typified by Woodrow Wilson. Kissinger noted that realism was U.S. foreign policy throughout the late 18^th century and all of the 19^th century. “In the early years of the Republic,” he wrote, “American foreign policy was in fact a sophisticated reflection of the American national interest.” Wilsonianism, Kissinger wrote, marked a “revolutionary departure” from the Old World diplomacy practiced by previous American statesmen because it “held that peace depends on the spread of democracy,” that nations “should be judged by the same ethical criteria as individuals,” and “that the national interest consists of adhering to a universal system of law.” Realism served the nation well for more than a century. Wilsonianism threatens to mire the American republic in endless crusades on behalf of “humanity.”

The failures of Wilsonianism in practice, however, did not diminish its impact on the minds of future leaders, policymakers, and shapers of elite opinion.

American foreign policy had gained a “moral” component that led to ill-advised crusades for democracy and human rights, bouts of destructive self-flagellation over America’s “sins,” unrealizable goals that wasted lives and resources, and expansive views of what constitutes the “national interest.” And as Robert Nisbet pointed out in The Present Age, Wilsonianism also led to the growth of what President Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex” and the national security state: agencies, organizations, and businesses that profit from wars.

Patrick Buchanan in A Republic Not an Empire (1999) and Day of Reckoning (2007) criticized the “arrogance and hubris” of America’s foreign policy establishment which led the nation to “imperial overstretch,” piling on commitments in every corner of the globe, including expanding NATO to the very borders of Russia after defeating Russia in the Cold War. It was that consummate realist George Kennan who had prophetically warned that expanding NATO would be the “most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold war era.” But instead of admitting their error, the foreign policy establishment doubled-down and the predictable result was a more assertive Russia and war in Eastern Europe.

Wilson’s greatest disciple was George W. Bush, a Texas Governor with little foreign policy experience or knowledge who, after becoming president, reacted to the attacks of September 11, 2001 by launching a crusade to spread democracy to the entire Middle East and beyond. Bush tried to remake Afghanistan and Iraq in America’s image, a futile and disastrous policy that wasted the lives of American military personnel in two colossal defeats and distracted America’s attention from the growing power of Communist China. Bush also expanded NATO and publicly urged NATO to admit Ukraine and Georgia in 2008. President Obama compounded Bush’s mistakes and added a few of his own when he embraced the so-called “Arab Spring,” an idea that only a Wilsonian could believe. Even President Trump continued the expansion of NATO, though at least he rejected the Wilsonian worldview and sought to steer the country towards an “America First” foreign policy. And, he met huge resistance from the foreign policy establishment.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the Gaza War have re-energized the Wilsonians in and out of government. The military-industrial complex has shifted into high gear. Step by step, our leaders and their media chorus, get us closer and closer to war. “War,” Randolph Bourne said during World War I, “is the health of the state.” It is also the health of the defense industry, and makes for popular headlines and top stories in print, electronic, and television media. Some of the very same opinion-shapers who promoted the Afghan and Iraq wars are front and center in urging our deeper involvement in the Russia-Ukraine war. For the first time in U.S. history, the freedom and independence of Ukrainians are deemed by the foreign policy establishment as important, if not vital, to American national interests.

The Wilsonian strain of American foreign policy would astound George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and John Quincy Adams: three of our nation’s greatest foreign policy practitioners. As Angelo Codevilla explained so brilliantly in his last book America’s Rise and Fall Among Nations (2022), Washington, Hamilton, and Quincy Adams all pursued “America First” foreign policies. They eschewed sentimental attachments to other nations and sought to avoid foreign entanglements that could lead the country to war. America’s early “ruling class” promoted America’s true national interests instead of global crusades for democracy and human rights. With Woodrow Wilson’s presidency, America’s new ruling class, “the Progressives,” premised foreign policy on the idea that America’s “primary concern must be with mankind as a whole, and with America only incidentally and derivatively.” Looking only after America’s interests would be too parochial for progressives who appear to view themselves as “citizens of the world” rather than American citizens.

The failures of Wilsonianism populate the history books and America’s military cemeteries. At the end of the Cold War, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, one of that war’s intellectual heroes, urged the United States to savor its Cold War victory and become once again a “normal country in a normal time.” She wrote that “there is no mystical American mission or purposes to be found independently of the U.S. Constitution and government.” She denounced the “globalist attitude” of so many of our foreign policy elites. She opined that “it is not within the United States’ power to democratize the world.” Kirkpatrick called, in other words, for an end to foreign policy crusades; an end to needless interventions abroad in the name of abstract ideals; an end to democracy promotion; an end to efforts to remake the world in America’s image; and an end to Wilsonianism. 

Francis P. Sempa writes on foreign policy and geopolitics. His Best Defense columns appear at the beginning of each month.