BEFORE THE FALL

By David M. Kennedy

``What are we going to do with the influence and power of this great nation?'' Woodrow Wilson asked at Philadelphia's Independence Hall on the Fourth of July, 1914. Both the setting and the date underscored the urgency of his question. ``Are we going to play the old role of using that power for our aggrandizement and material benefit only?'' Or, he asked, was it America's historical mission to fulfill the dream of its founders by going beyond building democracy at home and taking on the task of revolutionizing international life as well?

The founding generation, struggling to defend the fledgling republic's independence, could not plausibly have hoped to realize that larger dream in their own lifetimes, but they repeatedly pointed to the far horizon of their ambitions.

When Benjamin Franklin as commissioner to France spurned the powdered wigs and foppish finery of court dress in favor of a fur cap and homespun garments, he was vividly signaling his upstart nation's intention to repudiate traditional diplomatic practices. As John Adams put it in 1776, ``The business of America with Europe was commerce, not politics or war.'' That was a truly radical idea, but one with enormous implications for the future.

As Wilson sought to answer the questions he posed at Independence Hall on the eve of World War I, he looked to the founders' example. What he came up with was a revolutionary philosophy of international relations that has guided U.S. foreign policy ever since -- until now. President Bush today claims to be pursuing the hallowed Wilsonian goal of making the world safe for democracy. But the president and his neoconservative brain trust have witlessly jettisoned Wilson's means even as they piously invoke Wilson's ends. The essence of Wilson's approach was the careful, laborious toil of building international institutions, agreements and partnerships step by careful step. He didn't expect to create a better world by flaunting America's military might or naively attempting to export democracy, but instead by patiently cultivating ties of trust, mutual interest and reciprocity.

The Bush administration's path to war in Iraq is but the most dramatic example of a set of policies that has put at risk the kind of international leadership that has served both America and the world so well for the past half-century. The policies of the past four years have made America and tthe world less safe, not more

America's mission

Wilson believed that the revolutionary generation's ideas about diplomacy defined something essential and even inevitable about America's role in the world: that it was destined to be the champion of international cooperation, not coercion; of bringing the rule of law to the historically anarchic international arena; of substituting commercial exchange for warfare; and of replacing imperialism with self-rule, as the Americans themselves had done. It was Wilson's great hope that in his time, and by his hand, America would at last fulfill that mission.

World War I gave him his opportunity. In taking the country to war -- and more important in shaping the peace settlement that followed it -- he set out to define a distinctively American foreign policy that would resonate in the hearts of his world-wary countrymen, and change the very nature of international relations. On returning from the Paris peace negotiations and presenting the Versailles Treaty to the Senate in 1919, he said summarily: ``It was of this that we dreamed at our birth.''

A second chance

Wilson's version of that venerable dream rested on two premises: that modern technologies had rendered warfare grossly, inhumanely and intolerably destructive, and that only in a world made more interconnected could America's own security be safeguarded at an acceptable cost. Accordingly, Wilson proposed a new doctrine, ``collective security,'' and a new international institution, the League of Nations, to achieve it. He conceived of the League as a modest first step toward supplanting armed conflict with deliberation and law as the arbiters of international disputes.

He also called for an end to imperial domination and for freedom of the seas and free trade as the guarantors of peace and prosperity. These proposals formed the basis of ``Wilsonianism,'' the central pillar of classic American grand strategy. Every schoolchild knows how that story ended. The U.S. Senate rejected Wilson's treaty, the United States refused to join the League of Nations and the country retreated into a particularly surly isolationism in the two decades after World War I. World leadership had been tendered to the United States, and the offer was refused -- with catastrophic consequences for Americans and others as well. But history sometimes provides a second chance. A generation after World War I, the United States emerged triumphant from an even greater conflict. In a sense, the United States was the only victor in World War II -- the sole belligerent that was healthier, more self-confident and more influential at the war's end than at its onset. America in 1945 wielded vastly greater power -- military, material and moral -- than Wilson had ever commanded. His successors, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, now at last gave a robust answer to the question he had raised on that long-ago Fourth of July.

It was an answer that kept faith with Wilson's vision of the founders' aspirations. The United States in the post-World War II era used its power and influence not simply for its own aggrandizement and material benefit, but also for the larger purpose of binding the world's peoples together with treaties and international organizations and the cords of commerce, thereby dampening history's wretched cycle of warfare and destruction.

Among the many successes of that Wilsonian philosophy were the creation of the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, as well as the Marshall Plan, NATO and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (which morphed in the 1990s into the World Trade Organization).

The United States also supported the evolution of the European Union and the decolonization of Africa and Asia, and provided key leadership on international environmental initiatives like the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and the Kyoto Accord on Climate Change.

Rise of globalization

To be sure, the United States has not always hearkened to the better angels of its nature in the decades since World War II. The war in Vietnam was, to put it mildly, a notable lapse from grace. But the dogged pursuit of greater international cooperation that was the core of Wilson's legacy has produced priceless benefits: no wars among major powers, the long-dreamt integration of historically quarrelsome Europe, the liberation of hundreds of millions of people from colonial rule and Soviet tyranny, and markedly higher living standards for much of the human race.

American leadership has also wrought an expansion of international trade, investment, migration and rates of cultural diffusion and technological innovation on a scale so vast that a new word has been coined to describe it: globalization. All of those achievements would have gratified Woodrow Wilson, not to mention the founders.

Now all those hard-won accomplishments are imperiled. The most dangerous of the Bush administration's foreign policies is not merely the wantonness of the war in Iraq. From its indifference to our allies' response to Sept. 11 -- the first-time-ever invocation of the NATO treaty's Article 5, declaring that an attack on one is an attack on all -- to its cavalier disregard for the United Nations in the run-up to the Iraq war, the Bush administration has turned its back on institutions that previous leaders of both parties worked so hard to create and sustain. Add to that the repudiation of the Kyoto Accord and the International Criminal Court, the flouting of international trade rules for steel exports and agricultural subsidies, and the mounting contempt for European integration, and it looks as if the Bush administration has engaged in a systematic effort to dismantle the entire structure of multilateral agreements built over the past 60 years.

Relations at risk

More is at issue here than simply the loss of some ephemeral good will. What is at stake is the fragile tissue of international relationships that has kept the major powers from one another's throats for an almost unprecedented half-century and promoted a phenomenal expansion of the world economy. Trashing the diplomatic principles that have nurtured and sustained those relationships is unconscionably reckless. America now possesses power unimaginable to Woodrow Wilson, military power especially. For the world's only ``hyperpower,'' the temptation to act unilaterally, relying on martial strength alone, is almost irresistibly seductive.

But those policies threaten a precious diplomatic heritage rooted in the republic's origins, systematized by Wilson and painstakingly implemented by both Democratic and Republican administrations for more than half a century. They are also woefully inadequate to the task of combating terrorism, which requires more, not less, international collaboration. America must remember its history before the work of generations is irretrievably lost -- and before still more terrorists are envenomed to strike against us. Even more urgently than in 1914, it's time to ask again: ``What are we going to do with the influence and power of this great nation?''

DAVID M. KENNEDY, who teaches history at Stanford University, won the Pulitzer Prize for his most recent book, ``Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945.'' He wrote this article for Perspective -- San Jose Mercury-news, Perspective section, Sun, Sep. 26, 2004.

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