SPEAKING
FREELY What is a Wilsonian
realist? By C Mott Woolley
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please click hereif you are interested in
contributing.
To describe his
change of heart in the wake of America's
difficulty in Iraq, Francis Fukuyama has described
himself in America at the Crossroads as a
"Wilsonian realist". In another time and place, an
equally astute student of US foreign policy,
Harold Nicolson, aide to British foreign minister
Arthur Balfour at the 1919 Versailles peace
conference, tried to combine realism and
Wilsonianism. This is described in Peacemaking,
1919, Nicolson's Paris memoir, in which he
painfully describes "a decline in idealism, a
change of heart".
In Peacemaking,
Nicolson recalls embarking to Paris in 1919 as
a
hopeful young diplomatist only to become a
not-so-hopeful one as the peace conference
unfolded: "There were few of us who were not
disappointed: and in some of us the conference
inculcated a mood of durable disbelief - a
conviction that human nature can, like a glacier,
move but an inch or two in every thousand years."
To read of Nicolson's coming of age is but to read
of the change of heart described in Fukuyama's
America at the Crossroads.
In his
memoir, Nicolson asks: how can a Wilsonian mission
be fulfilled in a world where other powers are
disdainfully chary of that mission and opt instead
to guide themselves by realpolitik? In describing
his purpose at Versailles, Nicolson says, "We were
journeying to Paris not merely to liquidate war,
but to found a new order ... We were preparing,
not Peace only, but Eternal Peace. There was about
us the halo of some divine mission. We must be
alert, stern, righteous and ascetic. For we were
bent on doing great, permanent and noble things."
America's avowed purpose during the initial weeks
of "shock and awe" was nothing less.
As
reported in the International Herald Tribune on
April 24, the administration of US President
George W Bush, hat in hand, has now quietly called
on former secretary of state James Baker to lead a
new bipartisan "study group" to assess the
ill-fated venture in Iraq. This article suggests
the son has now had to submit to his earthly
father's advice, hitherto unheeded. This is a
stunning development. One can expect that Baker's
report will read much like Nicolson's bittersweet
assessment of what went wrong in Paris in 1919.
Before crossing to Paris, Nicolson took
pains to read and understand Woodrow Wilson's
political philosophy. Says Nicolson:
I was conscious moreover, that there
was in his pronouncements a slight tinge of
revivalism, a touch of Methodist arrogance, more
than a touch of Presbyterian vanity. Yet I was
not deterred by these disadvantages. The United
States, I read, have not the distinction of
being masters of the world - (Mr Wilson was
speaking in 1914) - but the distinction of
carrying certain lights for the world that the
world has never so distinctly seen before,
certain guiding lights of liberty, and
principle, and justice. I was disconcerted
neither by the biblical, nor yet by the
Princeton savor of these words ... There are, I
read, American principles, American policies. We
stand for no others. They are the principles of
mankind and must prevail. This statement, I
felt, might have been more tactfully worded: yet
as a statement it was sound
enough.
Having steeped himself in the
lore of Wilson, Nicolson experienced a great
sadness tinged by disgust in the denouement in
Paris. Speaking of Wilson, Nicolson further says:
It must be admitted, that President
Wilson possessed "a one-track mind". It is not
possible to understand the character and policy
of Woodrow Wilson unless we give prominence to
the strong strain of fanatical mysticism which
marred an otherwise academic reason ... He
believed in all sincerity that the voice of the
People was the voice of God. The "dumb eyes of
the people" haunted him with their mute, their
personal appeal. He felt that those myriad eyes
looked up to him as to a prophet arisen in the
West; as to a man chosen by God to give to the
whole world a new message and a more righteous
order. The fact that he forbore to commune with
Mr Lansing [Robert Lansing, Wilson's secretary
of state] was due to his preference for silent
communion with God. The fact that he treated the
United States Senate with irritated aloofness
arose from his conviction that it was not as
their representative that God had dispatched him
to the Villa Murat, but as the representative of
the Great Dumb People. It is not a sufficient
explanation to contend that President Wilson was
conceited, obstinate, non-conformist and
reserved. He was also a man obsessed: possessed.
He believed, as did [Jean-Paul] Marat, that he
was the physical embodiment of la volote
generale.
As Nicolson notes, many
historians, Ray Stannard Baker among them, see
Wilson as representing "the power of light against
the power of darkness". But Nicolson rejects this
characterization, saying instead that the essence
of the US effort abroad has been better described
by Dr Charles Seymour, himself a member of
Wilson's diplomatic team in Paris and later at
Yale the editor of The Intimate Papers of
Colonel House, who said: "Wilson's idealism
was in line with a healthy Realpolitik."
How can that be? Is not the conjoining of
moral ideals and realpolitik a contradiction in
terms? How can one possibly be a Wilsonian
realist? Nicolson says Dr Seymour is quite right
to say Wilson's idealism was in line with
realpolitik. To support his conclusion, Nicolson
cites Article XIX of the Covenant of the League of
Nations:
The Assembly may from time to time
advise the reconsideration by Members of the
League of treaties which have become
inapplicable and the consideration of
international conditions whose continuance might
endanger the peace of the world.
In
light of this provision, Nicolson asserts, it is
error to regard Wilson as a purblind idealist.
Instead, he says: "The leading statesmen in Paris,
not excluding President Wilson, were vividly aware
that the Treaty which was being drafted would
require revision at a more distant epoch when the
hysteria of the war had subsided. They provided
for that revision [in Article XIX]."
This
begs the question. Why disguise one's purpose in
arcane language of legalism? Why not dispense with
the ideal and get on with it? This attempt to mask
the world as it is prompted Maynard Keynes'
scathing attack on Wilsonianism, "that web of
sophistry and Jesuitical exegesis that was finally
to clothe with insincerity the language and
substance of the whole Treaty".
Nonetheless Nicolson contends that by
acceding to the terms of Article XIX, albeit
grudgingly, Wilson acknowledged that his vision in
certain parts of the world might have to wait. In
making this point, does not Nicolson underscore
the essence of realpolitik: moral ideals must give
way if their "continuance might endanger the peace
of the world"? Like Fukuyama, Nicolson does not
see a contradiction in this. As explained by
Nicolson: "I much prefer the process of thought
adopted by Dr Charles Seymour to the processes of
emotion indulged in by Mr Stannard Baker."
As Nicolson notes, the realist in Wilson
was put to the test when he denied to the American
people in 1919 any knowledge of the Allies'
"Secret Treaties" before he went to Paris at war's
end. Under those treaties, most notoriously the
Sykes-Picot Treaty, France and England had carved
up the spoils of the Ottoman Empire at the end of
World War I. As realists are sometimes wont to do,
Wilson, although a staunch advocate of the
principle of open covenants openly arrived at,
sought to keep from the American public the very
fact of these treaties. As explained by David
Fromkin in A Peace to End All Peace:
The Allies would not renounce the
claims that they had staked out for themselves
in their secret agreements. The President could
not use coercion to make them do so: while
fighting alongside them he could not hurt them
without hurting the United States. Yet he knew
that if news of the agreements leaked out it
would hurt them all. As an opponent, on
principle, of secret treaties, he was pushed
into the paradoxical position of trying to keep
the Middle Eastern agreements a secret; but he
was not able to do so. When the Bolsheviks
seized power in Petrograd, they published the
copies of the secret agreements they had
discovered in the Russian archives. Fearful of
the effect on American public opinion, Wilson
tried - but failed - to prevent publication of
the treaties in the United States.
Not
surprisingly, as the United States Senate came to
question the wisdom of Wilson's undertaking in
Paris, it focused on what the president knew about
these treaties, and when he knew it. This delicate
question is carefully discussed by Balfour's
niece-biographer Blanche E C Dugdale, who
describes the evening of April 30, 1917, when
Balfour was a guest of Wilson. After "a family
dinner at the White House", she writes, "the
President and Balfour entered upon an informal
conversation about War Aims, Colonel House [Edward
House, Wilson's chief adviser] acting as steersman
in the conversation. Then it was that Balfour
disclosed to the President the existence and the
character of certain 'Secret Treaties' ... All
doubt as to the British Foreign Minister's entire
openness on this subject has been removed by the
publication of Colonel House's Papers."
As Dugdale explains in her biography, when
Wilson appeared in 1919 before the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, he asserted "that he had no
knowledge of the Treaties, as a whole, before he
went to Europe for the Peace Conference ... The
allegation of concealment, when repeated by Mr Ray
Stannard Baker, was acutely resented by Balfour
... Talking to me [his niece] on the subject in
1928, without having read Colonel House's
Papers, which had recently been published,
he said:
House tells me he has blown to
pieces that story that I never told Wilson about
the Secret Treaties when I went over in '17.
Myself. But did you tell him? Was
it his business?
AJB. Oh, yes. I
was bound to tell him. But it was a very
delicate business, for of course they were
secret. The way I got over it was to tell him
about them as a secret, - as man to man. I told
him personally.
Despite the perfidy of
these treaties and Wilson's role in trying to keep
them secret, Nicolson remained a believer in the
"tenets of his [Wilson's] political philosophy".
Nicolson notes, "In spite of bitter
disillusionment I believe in them today. I
believed, with him, that the standard of political
and international conduct should be as high, as
sensitive, as the standard of personal conduct."
This is extremely difficult to reconcile
with Nicolson's later comments about the Secret
Treaties. Speaking of these, he says:
I assume, and hope, that the future
student of the Peace Conference will rid himself
in advance of all emotional or ethical affects
which the term 'Secret Treaties' may induce. He
will, I believe, be sensible enough to realize
that in the heat of belligerency statesmen are
apt to grasp at any bargain such as may minister
to the successful prosecution of the war. They
have done so in the past; they will continue to
do so in the future ... People who study the
past under the conviction that they themselves
would automatically behave better in the present
are adopting a dangerous habit of mind. They are
importing the ethical standards of tranquility
into the emotional atmosphere of danger. It
would be better were the student of
international affairs to concentrate less upon
comparative ethics and more upon the problem of
human behavior at periods when humanity is
strained.
Is not this the very
sophistry of which Keynes spoke earlier? How can
Nicolson's statements quoted immediately above be
squared with his earlier averment that "the
standard of political and international conduct
should be as high, as sensitive, as the standard
of personal conduct"? The two statements cannot be
reconciled any more than one can reconcile
Wilsonianism and realpolitik. To support the
Secret Treaties, Nicolson must abandon the ideal
of open covenants openly arrived at in favor of
the doctrine of necessity. There is no danger
greater to the principles Wilson sought to advance
than the doctrine of necessity, yet when the two
collide, Nicolson opted to endorse necessity over
principle. Is this what it means to be a Wilsonian
realist?
One of the most fundamental of
all "American principles" is the rejection of the
doctrine of necessity as a source of legitimacy
for state action. Nowhere has this been better
stated than by the United States Supreme Court (a
protector and enunciator of America's values) when
setting aside the arrest of a citizen under
president Abraham Lincoln's martial law. In Ex
Parte Milligan (1866), the court famously
held:
The Constitution of the United
States is a law for rulers and people, equally
in war and in peace, and covers with the shield
of its protection all classes of men, at all
times and under all circumstances. No doctrine
involving more pernicious consequences was ever
invented by the wit of man than that any of its
provisions can be suspended during any of the
great exigencies of government. Such a doctrine
leads directly to anarchy or despotism, but the
theory of necessity on which it is based is
false, for the government, within the
Constitution, has all the powers granted to it
which are necessary to preserve its existence,
as has been happily proved by the result of the
great effort to throw off its just
authority.
In light of the Supreme
Court's decision to free a man Lincoln would have
imprisoned, which is more important to US foreign
policy: following the doctrine of necessity or
rejecting it and adopting the principle
established by Ex Parte Milligan? By this
example, the contradiction between realpolitik and
Wilsonianism is brought into sharp focus: the
prisoner in question cannot be both imprisoned and
set free. If, as Francis Fukuyama has said in
America at the Crossroads, we are now to be
guided by the precepts and wisdom of Karl Otto Von
Schoenhausen Bismarck, who said, "The Herzegovina
question is not worth the bones of a Pomeranian
father," by what measure is the Iraq question
worth the bones of a "Pomeranian father"?
Perhaps the impossible contradiction
between Wilsonianism and realpolitik is stated by
Rene Descartes in Principles of Philosophy:
"But above all we must impress on our memory the
overriding rule that whatever God has revealed to
us must be accepted as more certain than anything
else. And although the light of reason may, with
the utmost clarity and evidence, appear to suggest
something different, we must still put our entire
faith in divine authority rather than in our own
judgment."
C Mott Woolley is a
practicing lawyer in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He is a
graduate of the School of International Service at
the American University in Washington, DC, and,
prior to entering law school, served as an intern
in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Near
East/South Asia Division, US Department of State.
(Copyright 2006 C Mott Woolley.)
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please click hereif you are interested in
contributing.
