Backward into the future - the dangers of American interventionist foreign policy as practiced by Woodrow Wilson and its application to current problems in Yugoslavia - Cover Story

National Review, March 29, 1993 by John Gray

In the post - Cold War world, it is easy to harbor illusions of American omnipotence. Do not, warns the author, follow Woodrow Wilson down the path of humanitarian interventionism.

Like all other great historical transformations, the collapse of the Soviet system has had unpredicted and paradoxical consequences. One of the least appreciated of these is the new lease on life it has given to the Wilsonian vision in American foreign policy. In a sense this is unsurprising. At first glance, the Soviet collapse looks very much like a confirmation of the central tenets of the Wilsonian faith - such as the eventual convergence of the world's peoples on a universal civilization, and the prefiguring of that civilization in the institutions of American democratic capitalism. For Wilsonianism was always an American adaptation of the historical theodicy of the French Enlightenment, in which the Judaeo-Christian conception of history as a moral drama is emptied of mystery and tragedy and restated in terms of the banal hopes of secular humanism.

In the American version of this conception, it was affirmed that the political order of such a universal civilization was liberal democracy, and that the triumph of liberal democracy meant the end of war. If the assumptions of this philosophy of history are granted, then the goals of the foreign policy of a great power are clear enough: to speed or assist the global convergence on democratic institutions, and thereby to bring about the cessation of war.

The Soviet debacle has given this Wilsonian vision an anachronistic plausibility, which nothing else in the history of our century supports. Its dominance in American public discourse, including that of conservatives, is dangerous and disabling to thought on foreign policy. It has ensured that American opinion is ill prepared for the aftermath of the Soviet collapse, and is set for incomprehension and disillusionment in the likely future. Specifically, it primes American public opinion for recklessly imprudent cuts in defense expenditure. At a time when the security structures that kept the peace in the postwar years are dissolving, and when cheap technologies of mass destruction are uncontrollably proliferating, it is folly for the United States to engage in a massive retrenchment in defense spending, and suicidal for it to contemplate dismantling its space-based defense systems.

The Flip Side

Above all, the reinforcement of Wilsonianism by the fall of the Soviet system has encouraged hopes about the possibilities of American intervention throughout the world whose inevitable disappointment can only have the effect of strengthening Wilsonianism's other side - isolationism. Self-deluding intervention in the endemic ungovernability of Somalia and former Yugoslavia, when it issues inexorably in fiasco and inglorious rout, is bound to strengthen American isolationism and cloud American perception of the real dangers to global security, such as the ominous military build-ups under way in China and Iran. The isolationist impulse is in any case likely to be boosted by trade wars with Europe and Japan that will be aggravated by the emergent protectionism of the Clinton Administration. The result is all too likely to be an inward-looking nationalism in which domestic issues - on any reckoning serious enough - become all-engrossing and the American public turns its back on a world it can no longer comprehend.

In that event, the end of the Cold War will be followed by a global power vacuum in which the absence of any hegemonic power will trigger rearmament in Japan and produce deep instability in Europe. If this outcome is to be averted, Wilsonian ideology must be abandoned as the basis for American foreign policy, and replaced by a conception of American national interest. That will be far from easy, partly because of the ubiquity of ideological fantasy in American foreign policy, partly because what it is to be an American is increasingly understood in the universalist terms of a rationalist civil religion instead of the inheritance of a particular cultural identity.

As Old as Mankind

The Demise of the Soviet system is particularly dangerous for American foreign policy because it encourages the liberal illusion that international conflict is typically ideological in character, so that, in the absence of contending ideologies, peace is the norm for international relations. This liberal view neglects the obvious fact that ideologies of the sort we are familiar with in the twentieth century - that is to say, secular religions promising a delusive release from the terrors of history - are no older than the Enlightenment, whereas war is as old as mankind. The conflicts between and within peoples that make up most of human history have been ethnic and religious conflicts, conflicts about territory and authority, not about secular ideology. The end of ideology - which we are certainly witnessing - heralds, not peace among men, but a resumption of traditional forms of conflict, albeit with novel weaponries and on a larger scale than ever before. It is reasonable to expect the pattern of such conflicts to be dictated by the histories of the peoples involved in them, and to reflect ancient divisions among them of language and religious allegiance, rather than the ephemera of rationalist ideology.