05 Apr The Rise of the Wilso-Franciscans
Woodrow Wilson was nuts. And to be clear, by “nuts” we mean completely and totally unhinged. Those who knew him thought he had a “God complex.” Wilson, by contrast, thought God had a “Wilson complex.” David Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister, returned from the Paris Peace Conference at the end of World War I and defended his actions there, stating “I think I did as well as might be expected – seated as I was between Jesus Christ [Wilson] and Napoleon Bonaparte [Clemenceau].” Lloyd George was exaggerating, of course, but only about Clemenceau. He wrote the following in his memoirs:
[Wilson] was the product, not, it is true, of a different world, but of another hemisphere. Whilst we were dealing every day with ghastly realities on land and sea, some of them visible to our own eyes and audible to our ears, he was soaring in clouds of serene rhetoric … his most extraordinary outburst was when he was developing some theme—I rather think it was connected with the League of Nations—which led him to explain the failure of Christianity to achieve its highest ideals. “Why,” he said, “has Jesus Christ so far not succeeded in inducing the world to follow His teachings in these matters? It is because He taught the ideal without devising any practical means of attaining it. That is the reason why I am proposing a practical scheme to carry out His aims.” Clemenceau slowly opened his dark eyes to their widest dimensions and swept them round the assembly to see how the Christians gathered around the table enjoyed this exposure of the futility of their Master.
The League of Nations was a terrible idea, from which the Senate mercifully saved the United States. Moreover, it was a terrible idea based exclusively on Wilson’s intention to evangelize his personal pietist views about using government to enforce “God’s will” on earth. Through American participation in the Great War and his plans for the aftermath, Wilson sought to expand markets both for American business and for his top-down Progressive views on governance.
Now, we mention this today specifically because of a recent podcast/video we watched featuring two of this nation’s most vaunted foreign policy “experts,” William Kristol and Robert Kagan. The interwebs calls both men “neoconservatives,” but we have no idea what that means anymore. That term has been so perverted by repeated bouts of bigotry and other sophistry that it is largely devoid of any real meaning. So, instead, we will call both men “interventionists,” which is to say that they never met a war they didn’t like.
The gist of their conversation – or at least the first half – was that the Republican Senate (led by Henry Cabot Lodge) was wrong to keep the United States out of the League of Nations and that it did so specifically because (as Kagan puts it), “they [the Republicans] didn’t like being out of power.” They were, he says, driven exclusively by politics, and their political obsessions kept them from recognizing that Wilson was right. He concludes that “At the end of WW I, the U.S. had the capacity to shape an international environment that was conducive to America’s interest, to create a stable balance in Europe as the U.S. did after World War II. The failure to do that was a critical failure.”
Under normal circumstances, we would have no problem whatsoever with a couple of “experts” sitting around saying stupid things to one another. And praising Woodrow Wilson for his foreign policy acumen is, almost inarguably, stupid. Frankly, given his racial ideas, his economic ideas, and his lack of appreciation for civil rights, praising Wilson is a little bit like praising Mussolini. Those trains ran on time, amIright? But…whatever. This is, at least for the time being, a free(ish) country, and they can do what they want.
What concerns us, though, is that these are not just two ordinary experts. Kagan is among the most influential foreign policy thinkers around. He is a fellow at the left-leaning-but-technically-nonpartisan Brookings Institution. He writes a regular column for The Washington Post. He has been loud and vocal about America’s role in precipitating the war between Russia and Ukraine and about how it is America’s responsibility to ensure that Putin doesn’t win any concessions, that Ukraine not give the Russians even an inch, lest they all be back in the same place, fighting the same battles again in a couple of years.
As for Kristol, he is, unquestionably, the leader of the NeverTrump movement, and for that reason alone is quite prominent and influential. Moreover, he has taken the lead as well in holding Republicans’/conservatives’ feet to the fire on Ukraine, insisting that anyone who strays from the “as much as it takes, as long as it takes” line is a Putin apologist. As National Review Online editor Charles C.W. Cooke recently put it, Kristol’s “approach and tone…toward those who are unsure about America’s ongoing Ukraine policy” – which he describes as “smug, imperious, mob-friendly hectoring” – are “decidedly counterproductive.”
Like Cooke, we’re unsure about what should be done about Ukraine. We want Putin to lose, but after two decades of Kristol-and-Kagan-advocated endless wars, we’re leery of any long-term American commitments, especially without a definition of, much less a plan for “victory.”
Moreover, our uncertainty is complicated by the unflinching certainty displayed by Kagan and Kristol. They have been so wrong about so much so often before that we can’t help but viscerally reject anything that bears their stamp of approval.
And now, they’re both on record supporting Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations. That is, we suppose, more or less the conventional wisdom, that the “isolationist” American Senate prevented global peace and harmony and precipitated World War II. But it is also the reason why we have such a tough time using the label “neoconservative” for guys like Kristol and Kagan. The original neoconservatives – people like Kristol’s parents, Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb, as well as Norman Podhoretz, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and countless others – put their personal and professional reputations on the line explicitly to reject the “blame America first” cultural Left. Indeed, Kirkpatrick made a pretty famous speech on that very subject in 1984. Yet here we have the younger Kristol and Kagan joining forces with the Left to “blame America first” for not being interventionist enough – in Ukraine today and in Paris, January 1919. Such a position is many things – domineering, arrogant, delusional, etc. – but we’d be hard-pressed to call it “neoconservative.”
In any case, we fear we’ve reached an unfortunately decadent moment in American foreign policy history, a moment at which everyone – or at least everyone with any power – is overtly Wilso-Franciscan, a combination of Woodrow Wilson and the “San Francisco Democrats” whom Kirkpatrick noted, “always blame America first.” America and its people are, therefore, never right and always wrong, always either too interventionist or not interventionist enough. That’s a tough spot for any nation. And we doubt it will bring much good to the world.
