ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that international circumstances provided Woodrow Wilson with both need and opportunity, even more so than in Roosevelt’s case, to radically increase America’s level of international engagement. It further argues that enthusiasm for that engagement was intellectually predicated upon a set of interlocking liberal universalist principles – subsequently tagged in political shorthand as ‘Wilsonian’ – and that this was a consequence of Wilson’s need to manage the transition to internationalism within a political culture that rejected balance-of-power thinking about international order. The chapter begins, as the others do, with an outline of national and
international circumstances. The sections that follow then outline in detail the components of Wilsonian thought and their significance. First, the moralistic and idealistic approach Wilson brought to his leadership is discussed, and some parallel with Roosevelt noted. The next section, covering the period before America’s embroilment in the First World War, describes how Wilson continued and extended Roosevelt’s pursuit of a hegemonic, imperialistic policy towards Latin America. This deepened Monroe Doctrine would serve as the model for his later proposals for international order more globally. The section after this discusses Wilson’s making of the case for US entry into the European war, in which he made the justification for American entanglement dependent upon the prospect of a new world order following that war’s end. The remaining sections go on to set out the intellectual framework of that imagined new order, including Wilson’s crucial distinction between governments and peoples, the posited commonality of interests between peoples, the need for the universalization of liberal government, and the assumption that America would exercise global leadership in the future. Finally, the chapter notes the divergence between Wilson and Roosevelt with regard to the role of military strength in the new world order. The chapter seeks to illustrate the way in which Wilson seized upon
American participation in the war to advance an agenda that broke with the Founders’ Era consensus on hemispheric detachment which had constrained his predecessors. As part of the same process, however, the prior existence of that consensus’s prohibitions on entanglement in the European balance of power crucially shaped his formulation of the ideological arguments for a new
American internationalism. Rather than arguing that the US should join the existing global system, Wilson argued that America’s new global engagement was inextricably linked to the emergence of a new, cooperative international order, a perception rooted in his own liberal universalist ideas. As realist assumptions can tell us, the emergence of a new American internationalism during this period was partly the result of America’s increased strength, combined with major shifts in the international distribution of power. Also extremely important, however, was the ideological dimension of Wilson’s leadership in reaction to those circumstances. This interaction between circumstance and ideology led to the emergence of a particular American internationalism that believed the nation’s new engagement with the world could be contingent on the pursuit of liberal reform of the global order and the states within it.
