Restoring America's Ideals

But soon after the dawn of the 20th century, a redeemer appeared in the person of Woodrow Wilson. Or, rather, to adopt the terms of Widmer's religiously flavored account, Wilson played John the Baptist to Franklin Roosevelt's later Nazarene -- the prophet without honor in his own time but the figure whose legacy, in Roosevelt's hands, restored American diplomacy to its highest and best ideals. As Widmer puts it, Roosevelt demonstrated that "idealism is realism if the willpower exists to make it so."

Roosevelt is the hero of this book, just as Polk and William McKinley and George W. Bush are its villains. In the spirit of the 1941 Atlantic Charter and the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Roosevelt and his immediate successor, Harry Truman, seized a uniquely malleable moment at the end of World War II to create a latticework of multilateral institutions, including the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (which later morphed into the World Trade Organization) and NATO.

That impressive array of organizations substantially made good on Woodrow Wilson's -- and the founders' -- dream of bringing to the international arena at least a modicum of the rule of law and institutional structure that obtained in well-ordered nations. And for more than half a century those institutions, under American leadership, underwrote a remarkable regime of international stability, burgeoning global prosperity, flowering democracy and freedom from want for millions of human beings. Though interventions in Guatemala, Iran and especially Vietnam blotted the national copybook, the Cold War on balance saw the nation's better self in the ascendant, and ultimately victorious.

But Widmer believes that history's remorseless pendulum has now fully swung the other way. Today the international institutions that the United States midwifed in the post-World War II era are in grave disrepair, and international trust in the legitimacy of American diplomacy has withered to an all-time low. Widmer concludes caustically that, thanks to an ill-considered attempt "to spread liberty like so much vinyl siding," we are now faced with the question of "how a group of patriotic leaders could have inflicted so much harm, so quickly, on the world order that had been created by their own country."

Like the jeremiads of old, Ark of the Liberties is longer on lamentation than it is on specific remedies. But Widmer is surely right that in the long history of American diplomatic reversals and frustrations, the most recent ones may bring about the gravest consequences -- unless leadership emerges that once again rallies us around the better angels of our nature, finds a way for us to be freedom's faithful friend but not its arrogant enforcer, and swings the precious ark of liberties back on course once more. Then, just possibly, a brighter day indeed may dawn upon human history. ·

David M. Kennedy teaches history at Stanford University. He is at work on a book about the American national character.