UNITED STATES: 'Wilsonianism' drives US policy abroad

[Oxford Analytica]

SUBJECT: The resilience of 'Wilsonianism' in US foreign policy -- what it means and why it matters.
SIGNIFICANCE: As President Barack Obama begins his first days in office, many academic and media commentators are urging him to close the supposedly wide partisan fissures over foreign policy. However, these apparent divisions are much less significant than they seem: US foreign policy has long been dominated by a sclerotic 'Wilsonian' consensus, which may have inhibited debate and contributed to recent strategic setbacks.
CONCLUSION: Wilsonianism will continue to be the worldview that shapes US foreign policy under Obama. While a Wilsonian approach is not inapposite, the new administration could opt deliberately to seek out strong dissenting voices that favour alternative policy frameworks, in order to avoid the dangers of unchallenged assumptions.
ANALYSIS: The intellectual framework for US foreign policy defined by former President Woodrow Wilson in 1917-18 ('Wilsoniansim') continues to hold a dominant position in official Washington. Therefore, while there is sometimes fierce debate over particular policy choices (eg the decision to invade Iraq without specific UN authorisation), US policymakers share a worldview that broadly supports the same long-term strategic objectives, values and sense of history. Although there is nothing inherently fallacious about Wilsonianism -- its basic assumptions may be correct -- the weakness or absence of alternative perspectives in Washington may have been a contributing factor in recent foreign policy setbacks.

• A single theoretical framework dominates foreign policy thinking in official Washington -- Wilsonianism.
• While liberal internationalists and neo-conservatives disagree over the utility of multilateralism, they mostly share a common Wilsonian perspective and assumptions.
• The only serious challenger to Wilsonianism as a US foreign policy-making framework is realism.
• However, the realist challenge has faded, producing a powerful Wilsonian consensus.
• This consensus may not be conducive to effective policy-making.

Deep foreign policy divide?

The conventional wisdom in the United States is that President George Bush's March 2003 invasion of Iraq destroyed the strong foreign policy consensus that had prevailed since the Second World War. According to this analysis, the notion that 'politics stops at the waters' edge' was replaced by a largely partisan divide: for example, most of those in Congress who voted in October 2002 to oppose authorising the use of military force in Iraq were Democrats. However, this contention is flawed:

• It does not acknowledge that there was considerable cross-party support for the initial decision to invade Iraq: a majority of Senate Democrats, and a substantial minority of those in the House, backed the administration's course.
• There was (and is) even greater consensus about the long-term objectives of US policy abroad -- such as the notion that promoting 'democratisation' is in the national interest
• It allows temporary party fissures over political or military tactics, such as the pace of withdrawal from Iraq, to obscure more profound areas of consensus (eg the view that removing former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein from power served US strategic interests).

The Wilsonian consensus.

This broad consensus is attributable to the fact that the two most influential frameworks for post-Cold War US foreign policy, 'liberal internationalism' and 'neo-conservatism' share a common intellectual ancestor -- Wilsonianism. Liberal internationalists and neo-conservatives disagree fiercely about certain US policy approaches, particularly the utility of multilateral diplomacy. However, the rancour of their clashes on such issues has disguised how much they have in common.
The Wilsonian creed. Wilsonianism took shape in a particular time and place (during and immediately after the First World War) in response to a specific problem (Wilson's attempt to define the US role on the global stage). Yet it was also couched in a much more profound belief in long-term historical 'progress', which critics then and now incorrectly label as naive:
1. New global role. Wilson's 1917 decision to enter the First World War on the side of the Allies was a major departure from precedent. Since George Washington's 1796 farewell address, which warned against "entangling alliances", the United States had generally avoided taking sides in
disputes between major European powers. It was content to influence global affairs through, asSecretary of State (and later President) John Quincy Adams observed in 1821, the "benignant sympathy of her example" rather than "go abroad in search of monsters to destroy".
Nevertheless, over the course of the 19th century, as industrialisation transformed the United States into one of the world's largest economies, it slowly assumed a weightier role in international affairs. However, most of these domestically controversial imperialist ventures -- with the exception of the overthrow of Hawaiian monarchy in 1893 (and later annexation of the islands) and the 1898 capture of the Philippines during the Spanish-American War -- took place in the Western Hemisphere, and did not envisage an expansive global US role. The crisis precipitated by the First World War convinced Wilson to abandon precedent, largely because he believed that US interests could no longer be safeguarded by neutrality. He also saw the 'democracy' (however flawed) practiced by the Allied powers as more conducive to a world of liberal trade and comity among nations that would allow US economic and political power to flourish. Thus, by intervening in Europe to make the world "safe for democracy", Wilson was also engaged in the pursuit of US power.
2. Wilson's view of history. Wilson's belief that the spread of democracy served the national interest was informed by the progressive view of history known as 'historicism'. The germ of the idea is usually ascribed to the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who suggested that the course of history was not static -- that it had a 'direction'. Hegel's 19th century successors went further, by inferring that history, like science, progressed towards ever-greater human achievement, better government and social harmony:

• Victorian 'historicists'. In the United Kingdom, historians such as the Whig politician Thomas Babington Macaulay promulgated the notion that English government had progressed gradually from despotism to just, efficient constitutional monarchy through the increasing brilliance of a succession of liberal statesmen (ie Whigs).
• Marxists. Hegel also shaped the views of Karl Marx, who believed that the march of historical 'progress' ended in Communism.

As a political scientist and former president of Princeton University, Wilson was familiar with these theories. For him, a US-style democratic republic was the ideal state towards which other nations were moving.
3. Rise and collapse. The specific tenets of Wilson's new approach to foreign affairs were embodied in the 'Fourteen Points' -- a list of US principles that he wished to incorporate into the post-war settlement in 1918. These included a number of objectives that remain US policy today, such as:

• removing economic barriers (ie trade liberalisation);
• gradual disarmament; and
• self-determination (the freedom of a people to chose their status within, or independence from, a state).

The most important principle of all for Wilson was the establishment of a League of Nations. By appealing directly to the people in a new community of democracies ('world opinion'), Wilson hoped that future large-scale conflicts could be avoided, thereby validating his progressive vision of history. However, most of the European Allies, who retained large colonial empires, were primarily interested in extracting large monetary reparations from the defeated Central Powers (particularly Germany), and stipulated a punitive peace in the 1919 Versailles Treaty. They were also intent on retaining their closed imperial trading systems. Wilson was forced to abandon most of his Points, in exchange for an Allied commitment to form the League. While this came to pass, the Senate refused to ratify the Treaty without major amendments, which the president rejected. Wilson then suffered a disabling stroke, and the United States never joined the League.
4. Re-emergence and growth. Wilson's approach went dormant 1920, and the country was propelled by war weariness and the Great Depression to embrace isolationist policies during the 1930s. However, President Franklin Roosevelt had served as Wilson's assistant secretary of the Navy, and revived his ideas when growing alarm over war in Europe weakened the isolationists' political influence:

• They formed the basis of the 1941 US-UK Atlantic Charter, which laid out Washington and London's war aims.
• After the defeat of the Axis Powers, Wilson's call for an organisation to preserve collective security was realised through the 1945 UN Charter.

During the Cold War, Wilsonianism became essentially the default US approach to foreign policy. The 1947 'Truman Doctrine' institutionalised Wilsonianism, by indicating that the United States would intervene to protect 'free peoples' threatened by Communist or perceived Communist-inspired insurgencies. This stimulated numerous US interventions abroad during the subsequent 40 years, including the Vietnam War and various Central American conflicts in the 1980s.
5. Neo-con/liberal internationalist schism. During the 1970s a small group of US philosophers and political scientists began to disparage Wilsonian multilateralism, which they viewed as unduly cumbersome. Some policymakers followed suit, suggesting that the emphasis on multilateral diplomacy -- and Wilson's focus on rallying a community of nations (world opinion) -- facilitatedmoral relativism. Since the United States was at the vanguard of the 'free world', there was no need for Washington to tie its hands when it could not rally the world behind it. These individuals became known as neo-conservatives. Those who retained Wilson's faith in multilateralism and world opinion, on both the Left and Right, were termed liberal internationalists. The latter continued to dominate US policy, except for a brief period under the second Bush presidency.
6. Wilsonian hybrids. In the late-1970s the liberal internationalists adapted their theoretical frameworks to incorporate aspects of globalisation. For example, Robert Keohane of Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School and Joseph Nye of Harvard developed the notion of 'complex interdependence', which emphasised the growing importance of non-state actors and networks in international relations. Nye used this later as the basis for his idea of 'soft power' -- that a country's culture or ideology could affect the behaviour of other states.
Competing 'realist' framework. Although US politicians often raise the spectre of a return to isolationism -- as former President George Bush did last year a speech to the Israeli Knesset -- the
policies of the 1930s remain thoroughly discredited. Wilsonianism and its offshoots have only one rival as a framework for US policy in official Washington -- 'realism':
1. Origins. Realism as an organising approach to foreign policy is ancient. In the Western world, realism's founding text is the History of the Peloponnesian War by the Athenian general Thucydides (460-395 BCE). His account describes the bankruptcy and defeat of an expansive imperial power (Athens) at the hands of a coalition of much smaller rivals. Although Athens was easily the strongest Greek city-state, imperial overstretch and a counter-balancing coalition that grew among its antagonists eventually led to its collapse.
2. Modern realism. Realism as an approach to modern statecraft focuses on heavily on the 'balance of power' principle: the idea that strong states create counter-balancing rivals, and that the maintenance of peace requires maintaining rough power parity between rivals (or rival coalitions). It
focuses almost exclusively on state military and economic power in ordering world affairs; realist statecraft is less concerned with other forms of influence (soft power) and the role of non-state actors such as terrorist groups (which it views as extensions of state military power). Modern realism owes much to Austrian Prince Klemens von Metternich (1773-1859) who created the Concert of Europe framework during the Congress of Vienna, which realists credit with maintaining the balance of power and peace in Europe for decades after the end of the Napoleonic wars.
3. Realist view of history. Realist thinkers perceive human nature as self-interested and immutable. Unlike progressive historicists such as Wilson, who saw history as an upward curve, realists see it as circular, where individuals, leaders and states are always subject to the same foibles, weaknesses and mistakes. Although contemporary neo-realists such as political scientist Hedley Bull acknowledge that an 'international community' exists, it is only an "anarchical society" focused on the accretion of power and the preservation of:

• order; and
• the current global system of sovereign states.

To a realist like Bull (or Thucydides), the only worthy moral aim achievable through statecraft is the preservation of peace through maintaining the balance of power. Democracy may be an able system of government, but realists do not generally believe that promoting democratisation serves any useful policy objective.
4. Realism in US policy. Realism was introduced to the United States as a framework for foreign policy by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who used it as the guiding principle for former President Richard Nixon's opening to China, and his policy of detente towards the Soviet Union. Although Kissinger's departure from State in 1976 diminished realist influence at the highest levels, one of his former National Security Council deputies, Brent Scowcroft, went on to become national security advisor under the first President George Bush. Scowcroft helped convince the president to avoid moves that might be seen as aggressive in Moscow while the Soviet Union began to collapse, and to eschew sending US troops to Baghdad to 'liberate' Iraq during the first Gulf War. However, with Scowcroft's departure in 1991, realist thinking no longer shaped policy. While former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was regarded as a Scowcroft protegee, she largely embraced the younger Bush's approach and emphasis on democratisation. Wilsonianism versus realism. Contemporary Wilsonian thinking (as practiced by liberal internationalists or neo-cons) has several distinct political advantages, in a US context, over realism:

• It embodies the notion that US political and economic principles have universal appeal and relevance, which helps secure public support for an active US role in global affairs.
• It proved to be a much more adaptable framework than realism, in the face of changes wrought by globalisation.

However, it has problematic policy implications:

• Wilsonianism is not easily exportable or explicable to other powers; it has often caused other states (including US allies) to assume that Washington's policies are either naive or duplicitous, when in fact Wilson's approach combines both altruism and self-interest.
• Its moralist tone can inhibit constructive engagement with non-democratic states (eg China prior to Kissinger).
• In the post-Cold War context, it may have contributed to an unhealthy degree of US triumphalism.

Dangers of Wilsonian consensus.

His appointments and rhetoric (eg frequent references to the 'arc of history') suggest that President Barack Obama is a liberal internationalist. This is not an inapposite approach, but it there are several potential policy pitfalls:

• Unchallenged assumptions. Wilsonian dominance in Washington can lead to 'groupthink', where consensus allows weak analytical assumptions to go unchallenged. This risk might be reduced were the Obama administration deliberately to include people who favour different frameworks (such as realism) in policy discussions.
• Unpleasant democratic 'surprises'. The assumption that democratisation will invariably produce outcomes congenial to the United States leaves policymakers unprepared when this is not the case. For example, the 2006 Palestinian Legislative Council elections resulted in a clear mandate for Hamas, which Washington regards as a terrorist organisation.
• Susceptibility to manipulation. Foreign governments, political parties and exile movements are aware of the dominance of Wilsonian thinking in Washington, and policymakers' preference for historicist language. Therefore, they often couch their appeals to US policymakers in similar terms, even when their intentions, or the political or social systems in their countries, are far from conducive to the growth of liberal democracy. Policymakers tend to place too much store in such individuals' views, a tendency that was particularly egregious in 2002-03, prior to the Iraq War.
• Knowledge shortfalls obscured. Wilsonianism is a general policy framework and worldview, not a specific guide to short-term political and economic developments in particular societies. It is striking that in both the Vietnam and Iraq Wars, policy decisions sometimes appeared to rely on Wilsonian assumptions, when empirical knowledge of the particular society, culture and political environment was lacking.