Wilsonianism: Making the World Safe for America

It is no small irony that Theodore Roosevelt’s nemesis, Woodrow Wilson, carried forward the banner of progressive imperialism. Whereas Roosevelt added to the American imperium incrementally, piecemeal in Asia and Latin America, Wilson made it global.

Despite pledging that the United States “will never again seek an additional foot of territory by conquest,” Wilson took Roosevelt’s police power doctrine seri­ously, and it became the foundation for an unprecedented wave of American mili­tary interventions and occupations throughout the Caribbean basin.^[2826] Though the United States did not formally annex any more territory during the Wilson presi­dency, it acted more imperially than it had under Roosevelt or Taft. Wilson deployed US troops to Mexico twice: in 1913, amidst tensions over the isolation of Victoriano Huerta’s regime, when Marines seized the port of Veracruz; and in 1916- 1917, when the army pushed the Mexican rebel Pancho Villa out of New Mexico after he had raided American towns in the Southwest. However, Wilson’s other interventions in the hemisphere went even further by resulting in indefinite military occupations of sovereign nation-states.

Yet there was much more to Wilson's worldview than brute force. Wilson combined this commitment to territorial domination with a vast expansion of the Open Door concept. The resulting doctrine, Wilsonianism, was at that point the most ambitious system of international openness ever attempted. Like many ideologies, Wilsonianism was never codified as such, at least not as an explicitly unified theory, but its main tenets are clear enough from Wilson's most important pronouncements during World War I. And like many theories and doctrines, at least in the history of US foreign policy, Wilsonianism emerged as a proposed solution to a specific set of international problems.

Wilsonianism was, first and foremost, a response to the Great War. For nearly three years, from August 1914 until April 1917, Wilson maintained a policy of offi­cial neutrality, and Americans did not join the fighting in Europe. When it became clear, toward the end of 1916 and into 1917, that the United States was likely to be dragged into the conflict, Wilson proposed a set of principles that were both im­mediate war aims and long-term objectives for the establishment of a permanent postwar world order. The most important of these were national self-determination, democracy promotion, international organization (in the form of the League of Nations), disarmament, freedom of the seas, and open diplomacy. Each of these principles sounded idealistic, but each was designed to alleviate tensions that were thought to have caused the outbreak of war in Europe in 1914. Self-determination and democracy, for example, would remove European people from imperial bondage and thus forestall the kind of nationalistic and ethnic conflicts that had poisoned relations within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, as well as between Austria and neighbors like Serbia (and behind Serbia, Russia).^[2827] Open diplomacy would prevent secret treaties from pushing the great powers toward competition and war, and the League of Nations would provide them with a forum to air their grievances and settle them peacefully.

For an emerging great power that was suddenly on the cusp of being the world's greatest power, Wilsonianism provided an ideal blueprint for an American-friendly world order. After their unhappy experience in the Philippines, Americans were un­interested in building a formal, territorial empire. At most, US troops functioned as a police power garrisoned throughout the Caribbean, and occasionally elsewhere. But for the most part, Wilson and other American elites had no interest in creating overseas colonies. After the war, Wilson was unable to commit even to a temporary US mandate over portions of the dismantled Ottoman Empire, such as Armenia, so strong was congressional opposition to establishing a territorial American em­pire.^[2828] Yet as the largest power in an interconnected and increasingly interdependent world, the United States could scarcely avoid the world's problems—being dragged into World War I was proof of that. If Americans wanted to avoid becoming reluc­tant belligerents in future wars, they had to play a leading role in constructing an international system that was conducive to their interests—based on the free flow of capital, people, communications, and trade—and not those of the European territo­rial empires.^[2829] Wilsonianism took the premise of the Open Door and applied it to the entire world.

The major flaw with Wilsonianism was not its premises; as we shall see, in slightly modified form it provided the basis for a durable American-led world order after World War II. The main problem with Wilsonianism was that its visionary could not build a domestic consensus behind it.^[2830] The peace Wilson signed in Versailles with Britain, France, Germany, and the other powers was rejected by the US Senate. This killed any chance of American membership in the League of Nations, and with it the leading role on issues of international security. Americans did not exactly play a minor role in international questions of the interwar period, and they were even active (if unofficial) participants in League initiatives, particularly on economic matters.^[2831] But US foreign policy in the interwar years was always marked by a deep ambivalence toward an integrated world system, between an impulse to lead and a desire to remain apart.