America’s Century Of Making The World Safe For Democracy

Part 1 – On The One Hand….

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The phrase, “Make the world safe for Democracy,” Shakespearean in its ubiquity in America’s philosophical framework on foreign policy, sincere and cynical, wise and reckless, was President Woodrow Wilson’s as he sought a Congressional declaration of war against Imperial Germany. This April marks the century anniversary of our entry into World War 1, and of our attempted extension of that facet of the American experiment. Let’s have an overview of how Wilson’s “making” played out, for his high aspirations to redeem the war bloodshed, to remake the mad world, and what it meant for America, then and now. This is the first article in a three part series.

Let’s begin by accepting the school of thought that World War 2 was a continuation of WW 1. None of the war issues were settled. Indeed, through the whole war no belligerent power made plain what the issues were. They were fighting because of the threat posed by the massive armies, and could not end things because they were fighting. Most of the peace terms were to return land lost in the fighting, and to recover the money lost by the fighting. World War 1 became the ultimate consequence of industrialized, attritional warfare (American Civil War generals could have told them just what would happen. The libertarian reminds of the consequences in trusting in the wisdom of government).

France and England were left standing but exhausted, continuing as exploiters of colonies all over the planet. Germany was prostrate, but determined to have another go, weighted by economic distortions created by treaty of Versailles reparations (“if we have to pay you back, we’ll do it with money that has inflated away its value.” John Maynard Keynes hated the reparation regime, rightly predicting the infection that would fester in the wars continuation). The married furies of German militarism and grievance kept hold of the German soul in secret. The Communists of Russia applied the same ruthlessness to the war continuation as they did to governance, after spending the interwar generation carving out their own colonial spheres in Ukraine, the Balkans, Finland, and Poland (rebranded as for the betterment of their fellow proletarians). Japan, dusting off the colonial playbook, picked over China and Korea while sharpening its sword to take the Pacific English and Dutch colonies. The Imperial order was only half dead, and it took the second half, World War rebooted, to kill its zombie.

With the end of the World Wars and the dust settling, how much of the belligerents’ cooperation was exhaustion and how much enlightenment? Only God knows. But the space was created for international rule-of-law civility where none had been before.

Following the World Wars, it is not debatable that America’s guiding hand of principle repaired, then lifted, the world to a level of cooperative civility and prosperous free trade unmatched in the history of mankind. Look at the decline in worldwide poverty made possible by the new international order. Woodrow Wilson deserves enshrinement in the pantheon of humanist heroes for just that.

Atomic weaponry lurks in the background; we could still manage to blow up the world. Will man’s civility, flowing from the prosperity that flows from free trade increase? Can humanism outgrow The Bomb? So far, it’s been so good. All of The Bomb brandishing now comes from outsiders to the new world civilization. Will the new world civility be consumed by nativism, political failure and general populist orneriness? Civilization is always a work in progress.

Europe seems unlikely to offend again, and by itself that’s quite something. The old colonial order is mostly dead (lookin’ at you, Putin’s Russia), buried at a crossroad with a stake through its heart. Asia wants to prosper, and sees how to have it. China steers a middle course, between colonial corpse to be picked over and starved Communist corpse for Mao to pick over: his “great leap forward” caused a famine that wiped out 45 million people; the greatest single political atrocity in history, its surreal (the four pests campaign) and callous incompetence a perfect sum of the system’s philosophical end-point. Communism is, at this point in history, a dying parasite meme, having taken up in the host of resistance to colonialism. Without the justified rage-fuel, Karl Marx would likely have been just another utopian egg head without an adult’s acceptance of the nature of the world (E.O. Wilson: “communism is a great idea, just wrong species” – On ants). With colonialism dead, communism dies; when the host dies the parasite always follows, but the zombie can still shamble.

In implementing the Marshal plan, the tree grown from Woodrow Wilson’s seed, and fostering world-wide free trade, Americans did not sacrifice much for the task of sorting out the mess, or so it seemed at first (covered in Part Two). And the sacrifice was not sacrificial because it was beneficial; made as it was by free trade and economic adaptive growth on a scale far beyond what any central planning scheme could do but retard. Consider: the USSR, just across the Berlin Wall, stole away as much from “their” half of Europe as we put into “ours.” Great Britain did no come off war rationing until 1954. And we Americans fixed it all up with barely a shrug.

The mass production capability built to fight the war kept Europe from starving away as she fought for her lives in the aftermaths of both sides of the wars: the Dutch were at one point reduced to eating their tulips. No country where we have “Wilsonian” influence has had a famine in this century, and that includes the populations of Asia and Europe taken into our charge during the war. Our system created a relief from food insecurity so complete that now our fattest states are our poorest ones: obesity now a choice of personal discipline and functionality. Antibiotic technology was neither birthed in the communist nor the imperialist world, it was birthed in Wilson’s. Again, no society under “Wilsonian” influence has had a plague in this century (the influenza outbreak of 1918 killed more people than the war did).

At the same time we evolved our mass war production capability into a consumer industrial system which went far in redeeming America’s traditional race sins; in that the African American diaspora to the North for factory jobs freed them from the impoverished rat cage of the Jim Crow South. It’s hard to imagine our race progress happening without that prosperity.

The post-WW2 open-space boom created a world-wide non-elite culture of individuality whose diversity multiplies astonishingly. No elite music person studied The Blues, Gospel, and their child Rock N Roll, until they could steal it to teach in colleges all these years later (Alan Lomax going around with his trunk tape machine was the only one who really tried). Jazz music was the decadent-influence target of the church and police until Rock N Roll displaced it in their fears (“Elvis the Pelvis”). No such cultural flowering came from the old order, and it certainly didn’t come from Communism; people were sent to the Gulag for our decadent cultural influence. Change happens the way it does for a reason.

Neither the Communist bloc nor the Imperial order gifted man: flight; computing; atomic power; personal transportation; personal communications; mechanized farming; birth control (and subsequent liberation of women); the Internet. Wilson’s world of self-determination and political rights did, in the framework of innovation protected by the rule of law.

Now, crediting Wilson with this progress (though he would seize the title “progressive”) is, of course, ridiculous (the philosophical fallacies of doing so are part of his “cons,” covered in depth in Part Two). It is accurate to say Wilson went far in tearing down the framework of political dysfunction, replacing it with an adaptive, democratic system were the advancement can be born, live and prosper. All of these good things lay undiscovered until there was an evolutionary system ready to find them, along with the right economic ecosystem to make use of them. We should think about the centuries lost while we think of Wilson’s century won.

At last we come to Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points (incidentally, “The American Experience” on PBS had a comprehensive look at World War 1 just lately. It’s highly recommended, and the inspiration for this piece). When something becomes established fact it can no longer be called an experiment. We don’t need any more experiments to conclude that the moon is not made of green cheese. This is Wilson’s crowning gift to the world: in looking at the fourteen points it seems insane that the governments of world ever should have believed a world order could be otherwise (some still don’t accept it). In rejecting the ideas of the Fourteen Points it seems man would be doomed to conflict in perpetuity, and the perpetuity would have been brief indeed, if the butcher bills of the World Wars and atomic weapons are contemplated. Can we go so far as to say Woodrow Wilson saved the world and mankind? The case is supportable.

The libertarian bleats: “My God, look at the human lives lost in coming to that obvious conclusion! The World Wars were completely unnecessary!” (of course, only a naïf trusts in the wisdom of government). But there are moments of vision, and the seers become America’s, and the world’s, fathers.