Entering the Harold Pratt House always felt like attending a formal gala from a previous era, though the men now wear business suits than the morning suits. Once home to Standard Oil executive Harold Pratt, it now houses the Council on Foreign Relations, an organization that prides on its work for promoting liberal internationalism in American foreign policy (as well as its network of who’s who in the business and political world). Formed out of Woodrow Wilson’s brain trust known as the Inquiry, the Council sought to shape American foreign policy for over 100 years steering it towards engagement after the horrors of the First World War. Its impact remains undisputed as it produced a blueprint for a post-war world order after 1945, published Kennan’s piece on containing Soviet influence, funded Kissinger’s work on nuclear weapons, and conducted several studies on foreign policy that influenced politicians for decades. Nowadays, I see the Council declining in influence but we cannot deny their work that established, expanded, and possibly destroyed, Wilsonian supremacy in American foreign policy.
We cannot begin our special series without talking about the dominant school that shaped our country since 1941. With its belief of free trade, self-determination, and liberal democracy, Wilsonian thought has been prevalent in most think tanks, media outlets, Congress and the White House with almost no interruption. It is an ideology that seeks to have our foreign policy remain interventionist and with its largest bloc of supporters remaining the political elite in Washington DC and New York. Nowadays its supremacy in American foreign policy is in question as Donald Trump, in his 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton, usurped the status quo by promising a return to “America First.” Wilsonian doctrine is largely restored with Biden’s election though its prevalence in foreign policy is no longer guaranteed for future administrations. Looking into these series, we must begin with the essential question: should the Wilsonian school still impact foreign policy or should it be replaced by another school?
A Brief History of the Wilsonian School
The Wilsonian school is arguably the youngest of the four schools, though it can still trace its roots back to America’s founding. The first Wilsonians could arguably be Christian missionaries starting as early as 1806 spreading the word of Christ from Latin America to as far as China. They had little success in conversion, but they soon discovered that they may be disinterested in the word of God, their works were certainly welcomed. The foreign missions soon took a more secular turn as missionaries became teachers, doctors, journalists, and activists within the countries. Their secular success cannot be understated as they built institutions of higher learning (some of which still exist today), improved agriculture, fostered literacy, and developed a political consciousness that impacted many future statesmen all around the world. Many of these missionaries and their children eventually became ardent supporters of an interventionist foreign policy from Time magazine Henry Luce to Minnesota Representative Walter Judd. In time, their work became both the roots of the international aid community as well as an ideology that sought to use American power to export its values to the far reaches of the world.
Back at home, the United States was slowly exerting its influence abroad and taking an active role on the world stage. The election of Woodrow Wilson in 1912 marked the first president to embody what we now see as the Wilsonian school. While initially staying out of the Great War, Wilson started by flexing American might in Latin America even once touting that, “I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men." His successes were, at best, mixed, but it was in this spirit that Wilson eventually joined the Allies and established the Inquiry to develop a post-war order. The Inquiry developed what Wilson used as the 14 Points, calling for an end to secret treaties, freedom of navigation, free trade, and an “association of nations” that would become the League of Nations. Versailles is now remembered for its failure to stop the next war and America’s return to non-engagement, though the seeds of Wilsonian doctrine would eventually bear fruit in just two decades. By the time America entered the Second World War, Wilsonian internationalism effectively casted the country as a leader of the Western world, replacing (or taking over in some respects) the United Kingdom in the process. Since then, Wilsonians have controlled the levers of American foreign policy, with little interruption, throughout the Cold War and afterwards.
What is the Wilsonian School?
Wilsonian doctrine has largely remained the same at its core. It believes that American power doesn’t really come from its wealth, but from its ideals of elevating human dignity through a liberal democratic governance structure. As defined by Mead, Wilsonians have a desire towards engagement but, unlike their Hamiltonian counterparts, primarily engage in democracy promotion and an international system of laws. Wilsonians believe that democracies are inherently superior than autocracies in alliance making given their stability and in the Kantian notion of democratic peace. To make a world safe for democracy to flourish, Wilsonian foreign policy demands two key tenets: the first is a focus on promoting and encouraging democratic growth through both a mixture of hard and soft power. The other is in building internationally recognized institutions that can strengthen human rights worldwide and bolster American security from the World Bank to NATO. In short, the Wilsonian school of foreign policy has been the American toolkit on how we interact with the world for over 70 years.
Yet, there are two strands of Wilsonian thought present that - until recently - was established between Democrats and Republicans. On the Democratic side, you have the liberal internationalists who state that America must promote democracy through a multilateral approach leveraging alliances and international institutions to further liberal aims from NATO to the World Bank. On the Republican side, the Wilsonians embraced the liberal imperialism of the former president, taking a more unilateral approach to spreading democracy - though some practitioners such as Kirkpatrick had some hesitancy over universally encouraging democracy - as was seen through the Reagan and W. Bush doctrine emphasizing peace through strength. These two strands have significant differences over their methods and in specific policy issues such as Libya or Cuba yet both still are at their center different sides of the same liberalism that Wilson espoused.
Its Laudable Achievements
The Wilsonian school has had many achievements over the past 80 years and credit has to be due for their work. For starters they helped build out the foreign policy institutions we now take for granted professionalizing (mostly) the Foreign Service, establishing the National Security Council, and the numerous think tanks that focus on foreign policy (including CFR). When the U.S. became the undisputed leader of the West, its institutions were underdeveloped and any foreign policy decision making was rather ad hoc. By virtue of Congress, and by the work of Harry S. Truman, the foreign policy community took shape providing America with a vastly streamlined bureaucracy that was manned by Wilsonian diplomats. Of course there are flaws within the system that have grown over time - most notably the National Security Council as noted by John Gans - but the fact that we have a system at all are due to the internationalists on both sides that have constructed it over decades.
We must also respect how Wilsonians, at their best, embody the innate desire for America to be a “city on a hill." There is something innately human about wanting self-determination that liberalism captures, even if liberalism is imperfect. One great example of this is Hasselhoff’s New Year celebration singing “Looking for Freedom” to a Berlin crowd where half could enjoy such ability to fulfill their desire and potential. America embodies this desire - sometimes to a fault - to have the freedom in choosing our government, where to work, and how to think with little limitations. Is it any shock that Americans, at some level, do want to have their approach to foreign policy match our values? Granted, many can be skeptical whether such pursuit of a moral foreign policy is truly authentic, yet as Joseph Nye pointed out, many American presidents in the Cold War believed in these ideals as they created a post-war order twice in the 20th century. While there were imperfections as to how they pursued moral ends while preserving the national interest, the ability for presidents to use morality in foreign policy and succeeding isn’t a small feat by any means.
Realists like me can find faults with Wilsonians for their failures, but we must acknowledge that it was their thought that led us to victory against both the Axis powers and the Soviets. Those two conflicts were ones that were driven by a desire of self-defense but they were at their core an ideological one where liberal democracy stood against totalitarianism at its worst. Ideological conflicts are ones where Wilsonians tend to thrive building a willing coalition that was bound by common interests and values. They were even able to develop arms control of nuclear and chemical weapons ensuring that the world doesn’t discover the horrors of a nuclear war. These foreign policy experts have defied expectations of their continental counterparts and the world veered into an American hegemony into the 1990s.
And its Fatal Flaws
Sadly, since the end of the Cold War, Wilsonian doctrine appears to underwent institutional decay we’ve seen within the Beltway. Without a great rival, Wilsonians have committed endless blunders in the pursuit of hegemony that has left America poorer, less secure and internally divided. Wilsonians have also failed to further their goals for a more peaceful world as China and Russia are now best placed to establish a multipolar world that America sought to avoid. Even their attempts of non-proliferation is coming apart on the seams as Iran edges closer to nuclear weapons and North Korea continues its own program. Because of their failures, Wilsonians have been discredited within the Republican party as Donald Trump and his populist usurpers exiled the neoconservatives and broke the foreign policy consensus that marked American foreign policy for decades. The world, and their own country, has transformed from a once-familiar garden into a jungle that foreign policy practitioners are incapable of navigating.
How did this happen? Mead goes into detail how this occur, but overall, I find three flaws that Wilsonian foreign policy magnified over time.
The first great flaw of the Wilsonian school is its “simplistic view of the historical process.” I mentioned in my special piece introduction that many are unaware of our history dabbling in foreign policy. Unfortunately, this seems to be very prevalent among Wilsonians today which can be seen through the recent pieces of right-Wilsonian David Brooks and Max Boot as well as the left-Wilsonian view of America as an “indispensable nation.” Wilsonians have long praised America’s engagement in the world as a force for good and have spent much of the last four years bemoaning how, as Ikenberry wrote, our country is no longer “championing ‘free world’ values.” Yet Wilsonians have conveniently (or perhaps unknowingly) forgotten how they undermined democracy - from Guatemala to Iran - and developed strong ties with despots and rebel groups as needed to fight Soviet influence. Even their intellectual founder failed to demand self-determination to the colonized - including one Ho Chi Minh - solely of the basis of their skin leaving Wilsonian foreign policy to be empty for many around the world. Yes, the United States did win the Cold War, but our liberal victory was brought by very illiberal means outside of Europe with consequences that we fail to truly appreciate today. Such myopia, no matter the value that foreign policy experts place on morality, cannot erase the failures of the past 30 years.
This myopia feeds into another great flaw that is very present in Washington foreign policy: American exceptionalism. Wilsonians have certainly been guilty of believing we are exceptional, especially around the 1990s where foreign policy became less restrained without the balance of the Soviet Union. While President Clinton was somewhat restrained given his domestic focus as president, his successors became committed to proving American exceptionalism with little restraint. President Bush made those mistakes starting a war with poor decision making and flawed intelligence while prolonging what should have been a punitive expedition into the start of a 20 year effort trying to “turn this into Kansas.” President Obama had his failure with Libya as a multilateral intervention in its civil war, though at least he admits as his biggest mistake in office as the country descended into chaos it is just ascending from.
Americans have long seen themselves as exceptional given our unique history and if laden with the right amount of humility and foresight, it can mobilize millions towards fighting a just cause as it had throughout the Cold War. However, if such exceptionalism becomes unmoored from reality, it can lead us to embrace an imperial arrogance and down the road to ruin. Such has been the case among the Wilsonians who let exceptionalism turn to arrogance that America can change the world. In a fitting way, it proved to be that the world changed us before we changed the world.
As bad as their flaws of myopia and false sense of exceptionalism, nothing is as bad as the third fatal flaw: being out of touch with the public demands. This isn’t a problem exclusive with Wilsonians but it has strongly manifested within the school in the post-Cold War era. There were already warning signs in the 1990s as Americans were skeptical of intervening in Bosnia even when every night came news of civilian deaths, concentration camps, and ethnic cleansing while the foreign policy elite were calling for a more active foreign policy. By doing so, they ran against the national instinct of Americans who have shown as early as 2001 that they wanted a more entrenched foreign policy. Yet as Emma Ashford argued, the homogeneity of Washington couldn’t entertain those ideas of not intervening in foreign conflicts such as Syria as isolationist. All the while as America faced a financial crisis and protracted recovery, politicians continue to demand further international engagement at the expense of the taxpayer causing many to see proponents of liberal interventionism as out of touch or even part of the “deep state.” Eventually the Wilsonian elites were thrown out of the Republican Party for beliefs that are no longer seen as conservative while the Democrats maintain most of their liberal internationalism, at least for now.
Time to End
The Wilsonian school was overall successful in the Cold War era in containing the Soviet Union and in diffusing American values in certain parts of the world. They are certainly correct that the United States cannot afford to retreat behind the oceans in this day and age. Yet pursuing the Wilsonian end of democracy promotion and human rights are, at best, out of place in a world where multipolar power struggles are the norm instead of the ideological conflicts of the 20th century. Wilsonians are also hobbled by the fact that Americans, for all their support for democracy, are no longer willing to support democracy promotion but instead favor a more economic and restrained approach. Even Mead, who wrote approvingly of the school in Special Providence, wrote in Foreign Affairs that, “the centrifugal forces tearing at the Wilsonian order are so deeply rooted in the nature of the contemporary world that not even the end of the Trump era can revive the Wilsonian project in its most ambitious form.”
I almost pity their decline as their fall is a poetic injustice as they destroyed the world order they so desired to protect. These practitioners of liberalism in foreign policy fell into the hubris that laid waste to empires countless times only to see our country be changed by history before we were able to change history. It could have been possible that they may have used the fleeting time of unipolarity to change the world, but they would needed to have changed America first. Could they have turned America, which long had an isolationist character in its political development, into the liberal empire that Wilson dreamed of? I doubt it as they would have to evangelize America into being imperialists and that is one conversion they could never have pulled off.