ABSTRACT
On November 19, 2003, on a highly publicized trip to Britain
aimed at propping up his main wartime ally, George W. Bush
spoke in Whitehall before parliamentarians and foreign affairs
leaders, and he prominently invoked the name of that great lib-
eral internationalist Woodrow Wilson. Wilson, eighty-five years
earlier, was the last US president to stay at Buckingham Palace,
Bush crowed, but otherwise, few paid much attention to the de-
tails of his speech. It was, after all, one of these inane, platitudi-
nous deliveries that politicians make in which the good and
mighty are praised while the bad are condemned as evil. Bush
praised Wilson but bemoaned the fate of his cherished League of
Nations: “The League of Nations, lacking both credibility and
will, collapsed at the first challenge of the dictators. Free nations
failed to recognize, much less confront, the aggressive evil in plain
sight. And so the dictators went about their business ... bringing
death to innocent people in this city and across the world, and
filling the last century with violence and genocide.” In this flurry
of wishful thinking, Bush was not simply blaming the victim of a
century ago-the League of Nations-but backhanding his own
contemporary nemesis: the United Nations. He seemed to have
conveniently forgotten that if the League lacked credibility and
will it was in no small part because its major architect, the United
States, refused to join, that American policy after 1919 was impli-
cated in the rise of fascism in Italy, and that the unnamed dicta-
tors were excluded from the League at its birth.
