Wilson’s Internationalism (1)

By Thomas J. Knock

As World War II drew to a close, several biographies of Woodrow Wilson and monographs on the League of Nations appeared as the question of an international organization once again became a crucial concern.

Then, intermittently throughout the Cold War, historians and political scientists debated whether containment and Cold War globalism represented the triumph or the negation of Wilsonian principles.

Finally, just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when President George Herbert Walker Bush prepared to eject Saddam Hussein from Kuwait and called for a ``New World Order,'' references to Wilson and his contemporary applicability became commonplace (for the while).

Robert McNamara and James Blight, in ``Wilson's Ghost'' (2001), held out as ``a historical mirror'' the tragedy of the 28th U.S. president as a parable for our own time.

The subtitle of their book is ``Reducing the Risk of Conflict, Killing, and Catastrophe in the 21st century.'' McNamara and Blight issued a summons for sweeping reductions in the world's nuclear arsenals; an end to unilateral interventions of any kind on the part of great powers; and for what they call ``a bottom-up reinvestment in the United Nations.''

Few could have anticipated the extent to which invocations (if not quite sustained analyses) of Wilson would multiply, however, but for the events that the Bush administration set in motion in early 2003.

Thereon, commentators began to allude to Wilson, or to quote him, in defense of the war in Iraq and in praise of President Bush for having declared ``liberty for the Iraqi people'' as a motivation behind the war.