Barack Obama and Woodrow Wilson
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Posted: 07/30/08
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Barack Obama and Woodrow Wilson
By Thomas E. Brewton
There is a striking parallel between the naivete of Senator Obama and
President Woodrow Wilson in their expectation of imposing a liberal-
progressive model of peace upon a fractious world.
Senator Obama's faith that his personal diplomacy with our sworn
enemies will transform them into reasonable and peaceful partners is
as old as American liberal-progressivism. Its most celebrated
expression was in the policy of the Democratic Party's progressive
president Woodrow Wilson, pronounced in his April 2, 1917, message to
a special session of Congress.
President Wilson, responding to Germany's resumption of unrestricted
submarine warfare and the sinking without warning of three American
ships the previous month, declared:
"The world must be made safe for democracy...we shall fight...for a
universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as
shall bring peace and justice to all nations and make the world
itself at last free..."
That universal dominion of right and freedom was to be implemented,
in President Wilson's expectation, by the post-war League of
Nations. Wilson went to Paris after the war to negotiate the Treaty
of Versailles, confident that his great personal popularity in the
United States and in Europe would convert the world to his vision of
peace through civilized diplomatic negotiation of foreign policy
conflicts.
Inevitably, the League of Nations was a dismal failure that could
only protest fecklessly when the Japanese invaded Manchuria in 1931
and when Fascist Italy attacked Ethiopia in 1935, setting the stage
for World War II. The root problem, of course, was that the League
had no military forces of its own to enforce its resolutions (nor
does the UN today).
The UN's few successes in stopping aggression have only come when the
United States took the lead and committed large military forces to
the effort. Diplomacy alone in the UN General Assembly and Security
Council results at best in unenforceable resolutions condemning
aggression or build-up of nuclear arms.
Aside from the fact that Woodrow Wilson's rhetoric sounded not unlike
that of President George W. Bush with regard to Iraq and that Wilson
was promoting entry of the United States into World War I, rather
than surrender in Iraq, his sentiment was fully congruent with the
liberal-progressive policy espoused by Senator Obama in his primary
campaign speeches and in his recent speech to socialist throngs in
Berlin.
Underlying liberal-progressive views about human nature and foreign
policy, despite differing circumstance, are the same for Senator
Obama and his liberal-progressive supporters as were the views that
supported President Wilson's naive policy.
Both based their faith upon an unrealistic assessment of human nature
and upon their abilities to effect world peace through popularity and
personal negotiation with antagonists, without regard to the harsh
realities of conflicting national interests.
In the liberal-progressive paradigm, all peoples are benevolent and
governed by reason. This implies, dangerously unrealistically in
practice, that the Axis powers in World War I, and Islamic jihadists
today in Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East, truly desired peace
and stable relations with the United States and Israel.
Seeing themselves as supremely intelligent and rational, liberals
find it inconceivable that other people might not willingly and
happily accept their conclusions and their leadership. Therefore,
they believe, the world's problems can be solved simply by reasoned
discussions in the halls of the League of Nations or the UN. Resort
to military force, by the same token, is irrational and
reprehensible, even in response to mortal threats to national interests.
In his 1920 "Human Nature in Politics," Graham Wallas, a major
theorist in the British socialist party, called this the rationalist
fallacy: the assumption that human beings will act in domestic
politics and foreign affairs on purely rational motives and only upon
logical trains of reasoning.
If Senator Obama wins the election this Fall, we can only hope that
he will be mugged by reality before allowing Iran to dominate the
Middle East and seize control of the world's major sources of oil.
{ExtendedText}
Senator Obama's faith that his personal diplomacy with our sworn
enemies will transform them into reasonable and peaceful partners is
as old as American liberal-progressivism. Its most celebrated
expression was in the policy of the Democratic Party's progressive
president Woodrow Wilson, pronounced in his April 2, 1917, message to
a special session of Congress.
President Wilson, responding to Germany's resumption of unrestricted
submarine warfare and the sinking without warning of three American
ships the previous month, declared:
"The world must be made safe for democracy...we shall fight...for a
universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as
shall bring peace and justice to all nations and make the world
itself at last free..."
That universal dominion of right and freedom was to be implemented,
in President Wilson's expectation, by the post-war League of
Nations. Wilson went to Paris after the war to negotiate the Treaty
of Versailles, confident that his great personal popularity in the
United States and in Europe would convert the world to his vision of
peace through civilized diplomatic negotiation of foreign policy
conflicts.
Inevitably, the League of Nations was a dismal failure that could
only protest fecklessly when the Japanese invaded Manchuria in 1931
and when Fascist Italy attacked Ethiopia in 1935 , setting the stage
for World War II. The root problem, of course, was that the League
had no military forces of its own to enforce its resolutions (nor
does the UN today).
The UN's few successes in stopping aggression have only come when the
United States took the lead and committed large military forces to
the effort. Diplomacy alone in the UN General Assembly and Security
Council results at best in unenforceable resolutions condemning
aggression or build-up of nuclear arms.
Aside from the fact that Woodrow Wilson's rhetoric sounded not unlike
that of President George W. Bush with regard to Iraq and that Wilson
was promoting entry of the United States into World War I, rather
than surrender in Iraq, his sentiment was fully congruent with the
liberal-progressive policy espoused by Senator Obama in his primary
campaign speeches and in his recent speech to socialist throngs in
Berlin.
Underlying liberal-progressive views about human nature and foreign
policy, despite differing circumstance, are the same for Senator
Obama and his liberal-progressive supporters as were the views that
supported President Wilson's naive policy.
Both based their faith upon an unrealistic assessment of human nature
and upon their abilities to effect world peace through popularity and
personal negotiation with antagonists, without regard to the harsh
realities of conflicting national interests.
In the liberal-progressive paradigm, all peoples are fundamentally
benevolent and governed by reason. This implies, dangerously
unrealistically in practice, that the Axis powers in World War I, and
Islamic jihadists today in Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East,
truly desired peace and stable relations with the United States and
Israel.
Seeing themselves as supremely intelligent and rational, liberals
find it inconceivable that other people might not willingly and
happily accept their conclusions and their leadership. Therefore,
they believe, the world's problems can be solved simply by reasoned
discussions in the halls of the League of Nations or the UN. Resort
to military force, by the same token, is irrational and
reprehensible, even in response to mortal threats to national interests.
In his 1920 "Human Nature in Politics," Graham Wallas, a major
theorist in the British socialist party, called this the rationalist
fallacy: the assumption that human beings will act in domestic
politics and foreign affairs on purely rational motives and only upon
logical trains of reasoning.
If Senator Obama wins the election this Fall, we can only hope that
he will be mugged by reality before allowing Iran to dominate the
Middle East and seize control of the world's major sources of oil.
Thomas E. Brewton is a staff writer for the New Media Alliance, Inc.
The New Media Alliance is a non-profit (501c3) national coalition of
writers, journalists and grass-roots media outlets.
His weblog is THE VIEW FROM 1776
http://www.thomasbrewton.com/
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