Wilsonianism and the sweep of American foreign policy history

Abstract

The contention of this essay is that Wilsonianism has rested in part on a conviction that popular government, government responsible to the people, is right and that it is also advantageous to the United States in that popular governments will by nature be peaceful members of international society, thereby allowing the US to live in peace. However, there are tensions within Wilsonianism itself which compromise that hope when pursued through international institutions.

Keywords:

• Wilsonianism
• colonial America
• Tocqueville
• Constitutional Convention
• peace terms
• League Covenant

Notes on contributor

David Clinton is Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Baylor University. His scholarly interests lie in the history of international relations thought, in ethics in foreign relations, in diplomacy, and in US foreign policy. He has authored the book The Two Faces of National Interests and edited the book The Realist Tradition and Contemporary International Relations, as well as co-editing the book Realism and the Liberal Tradition. His work has appeared in The Washington Quarterly, The Review of Politics, Interpretation, and Statecraft and Diplomacy.

Notes

1. See Walter Russell Mead, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World (New York: Routledge, 2002).

2. Quoted in Daniel G. Lang, Foreign Policy in the Early Republic: The Law of Nations and the Balance of Power (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), 41. See also the discussion of the dangers of universal monarchy in David C. Hendrickson, Peace Pact: The Lost World of the American Founding (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003), 40–6.

3. See Louis Henkin, Foreign Affairs and the Constitution (New York: W.W. Norton, 1972), 137–56.

4. James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, 2 Vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1889), I: 34.

5. Inis L. Claude, American Approaches to World Affairs (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1986), 5. Claude argues that, contrary to the usual interpretation of the history of American foreign policy as one of oscillation between isolation and intervention, the record of the United States throughout the twentieth century was one of fairly consistent dedication to the role of auxiliary.

6. See Felix Gilbert, To The Farewell Address: Ideas of Early American Foreign Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961).

7. Alfred H. Kelly and Winfred A. Harbison, The American Constitution: Its Origins and Development, 5th ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1976), 87.

8. Nicholas Murray Butler, Across the Busy Years: Recollections and Reflections, 2 Vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1939), I: 11–2.

9. Nicholas Murray Butler, The Path to Peace: Essays and Addresses on Peace and Its Making (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930), 10–11, 85.