This article is a series of extracts from a longer article
in The Wilson Quarterly (© 1999)
The author, G. JOHN IKENBERRY was a Wilson Center Fellow, professor of
political science at the University of Pennsylvania, and nonresident senior
fellow at the Brookings Institution, Washington DC
Why Export Democracy?
The
'Hidden Grand Strategy' of American Foreign Policy
Woodrow Wilson was probably the purest believer in the proposition that democracies maintain more peaceful relations, and his great optimism about the prospects for democracy around the globe after World War I accounts for his exaggerated hopes for world peace. "A steadfast concert of peace can never be maintained except by a partnership of democratic nations. No autocratic government could be trusted to keep faith within it or observe its covenants," he declared in 1917.
Emerging from World War I, Woodrow Wilson believed that the world stood on the brink of a great democratic revolution, and so it seemed obvious to build order around the idea of a universal democratic community. But the democratic revolution never came, as Russia lapsed into totalitarianism and even Continental Europe failed to develop the democratic qualities Wilson expected.
After President Wilson's spectacular failure to create world order
through the League of Nations after World War I, liberal internationalism was
badly discredited. And the charge that Wilson and his followers were
sentimental idealists was not unjustified. "In the conduct of foreign
affairs," writes Wilson biographer Arthur S. Link, Wilson's "idealism meant for
him the subordination of immediate goals and material interests to superior
ethical standards and the exaltation of moral and spiritual purposes."....