Woodrow Wilson was tormented by Republican isolationists. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr. of Massachusetts was a particular thorn in his side and is credited with successfully leading the charge against the U.S. joining the League of Nations that Wilson championed so valiantly. There are cynics who believe that Lodge and his cohort whipped poor Woody into the stroke that killed him. And, ultimately, that failure led to the calamity that was World War II.
Woody and Franklin Roosevelt were my childhood heroes. I must admit, however, that it wasn’t until I was much older that I came to know they didn’t really like each other. The civics teachers of my youth – you don’t know what civics is or was? – too bad! – placed Wilson on such a high pedestal that I thought he had been canonized. His fourteen points – it was fourteen wasn’t it? – were gospel for these molders of youthful minds in the nineteen forties. That every Balkan family could be its own nation if it wanted to be made sense to young idealists, and there was no other approach to American foreign policy that should be entertained, according to junior high school teachers of the day.
It was Wilsonian doctrine that shaped my views toward the United Nations in the years following W.W. II and, especially, when the North Koreans attacked their countrymen. Only as I aged and came to live through other eras did I begin to challenge the notions drilled into me during the most malleable years of my life.
I came to see the UN as a useful but flawed – even corrupt – institution but an absolutely necessary vehicle for airing world grievances and for developing coalitions for putting down actions by states acting outside international norms. Thus Korea, the Balkans, the invasion of Kuwait, and many other similar ventures could be argued – sometimes successfully – before major international unions like the UN and NATO.
However flawed the UN or other international alliances, they gave cover to the U.S. in foreign affairs - until the debacle that is Iraq today. We stepped out from behind the curtain and acted on our own – with a phony coalition designed to hide that fact. When the mission began to flounder, we had to cover our tracks. We needed a philosophical underpinning for our folly, and the neocons were at the ready with Woody’s idealism and his fourteen – it was fourteen, right? – points and democracy for everybody with the U.S. for delivering it.
Only now the real Republicans, moderates, independents, and everyone else, including me, who’d weaned themselves from Woody years ago and who’d moved on to the realpolitik of Tricky Dick, Dr. Strangelove, and Bret Scowcroft had bought into what old Lodge had tried to tell us.
It took a good while, but Woody sure is taking his revenge on the Republicans. Sadly, we’re all in the boat with them.
Blog on!
Wild Bill
