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. ²pIn some ways, in fact, Wilson was the proto cold warrior.For acentury Americans had believed heart and soul in their creed, but before 82 At War with OurselvesWilson they also had the luxury of believing that it would be, for the mostpart, unmolested by world events.When those circumstances changed inthe First World War, it became necessary to do more than merely wish theAmerican belief system on the world; the times called for active promo-tion of it.The same need arose when the ideological threats from fascismand communism emerged later on.That is why every president fromFDR to Reagan fought out those titanic battles of alternative worldviewsalong distinctly Wilsonian lines, and why George W.Bush has followedsuit in the war on terrorism.The reason is that American expansionismhas never been able to move too many steps beyond an exceptionalist jus-tification for it.To wit, if we are going to commit our national resourcesand will to go abroad and fight major warsÞönothing like that had beendone in the nineteenth centuryÞö it must be to remake the world in ourimage so that other nations will become as nonthreatening as we are,rather than merely to broker or influence foreign conflicts.As John F.Kennedy once said in summing up what was at stake in the Cold War, The real question is which system travels better. ²¹ George Kennan, arealist, once condemned this legalistic-moralistic tradition as an Ameri-can disease.But he was shouting into the wind: This exceptionalist, values-driven foreign policy was clearly demanded both by the times and by thepeculiarities of the American sensibility.And this skein of thinking, asKennan called it, shows no sign of disappearing today.Quite the contrary.Just as the Bush neoconservatives would later argue during the war onterrorÞö when the president declared that the twentieth century endedwith a single surviving model of human progress ²² Þö Wilson believedthat his postwar settlement, involving the failed League of Nations, wouldshow there was to be no difference between American principles andthose of mankind. ²³But out in the heartland, and among their representatives in Congress,many Americans continued to believe there was a difference and that JohnQuincy Adams was still right.Wilson himself failed, finally, to impose anew international structure; the League went down to defeat in the Senatewhen Henry Cabot Lodge, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Com-mittee, refused to sign off on Article 10, which obligated all league mem-bers to intervene in the event of aggression against other members, and The American Temptation 83Wilson refused to compromise.Lodge s objection, of course, was merelythe old fear of entanglement, and his unilateralist justification for thisstance was very much along the lines of today s unilateralism.Thanks inpart to LodgeÞöand to Wilson s overreachingÞöAmerican nativism enjoyeda resurgence in the interwar years.The hapless Wilson died embittered,paralyzed by a stroke, to be replaced by a self-described normal Republi-can president, Warren Harding, who never brought up the League ofNations again (and was followed in succession by two other isolationistGOP presidents, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover). We have torn upWilsonism by the roots, Lodge crowed after Harding won in a landslide.²tThat was followed by other abject failures of international law, especiallyof the 1929 Kellogg-Briand Pact outlawing war. The effort to abolish warcan come to nothing, Walter Lippmann wrote, unless there are createdinternational institutions, international public opinion, an internationalconscience which will play the part which war has always played in humanaffairs. ²u He was right, but American internationalism would lay dormantfor another decadeÞöuntil December 7, 1941
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