
The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty.
-Woodrow Wilson, Address to Congress on April 2nd
Yesterday, April 6th, marked the centenary of the American intervention in the First World War. After three years of armed neutrality, the United States entered that conflict and thereby rejuvenated the Entente’s strength, which had been drained after three years of great bloodshed. Within a year of American troops arriving on the continent, the Entente had achieved a decisive victory against Germany and the other Central Powers.
Although the United States ostensibly declared war due to Germany’s resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare that January, the purpose of American intervention took on a rational constructivist intent even before war was declared. When he had addressed a special joint session of Congress to request a declaration of war on April 2nd, Woodrow Wilson announced that the intent of American policy would be “to vindicate the principles of peace and justice in the life of the world as against selfish and autocratic power and to set up amongst the really free and self-governed peoples of the world such a concert of purpose and of action as will henceforth ensure the observance of those principles.”
As emphasized by the fourteen points that Wilson promulgated in January 1918, American aims in the war were not restricted to guaranteeing the safety of the nation and of American shipping. Instead, those aims were to rationally construct a new era of international relations, much as the Treaty of Westphalia had done. In this new order, self-determination was to be the ruling principle of this international order and a new League of Nations was to be the means of arbitrating international disputes. No longer would national borders be drawn by a clique of aristocrats, but instead by the general wills of distinct nationalities. No longer would nations need to go to war to achieve their ends, but they would have recourse to international arbitration. Rather than arms-races and autocracies, there would be peace and democracy.
However, benevolent his ambitions for rationally constructing a new international system out of the First World War’s debris may have been, Wilson’s efforts were never met with success and would actually do quite a bit of harm. By intervening in the war, the United States could grant the Entente powers a decisive victory, but it could not prevent them from demanding a Carthaginian peace from Germany that the would not be capable of enforcing. Moreover, the American war-effort brought with it a form of the closed society that willingly treaded on liberty in order to organize all of society towards the single end of fighting the war. Alas, Wilson should have known better because the American Founding Fathers had recognized how dangerous a policy of meddling into European affairs as and had admonished posterity to never do so.
There was no more forceful expression of those principles in foreign policy than in George Washington’s “Farewell Address.” In that letter, which served as a collection of the classically republican principles motivating the foundation of the American notion, Washington had advised against just the course of action that Wilson led America into: “Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor, or caprice?” John Adams, perhaps the most underrated of all the Founders, himself emphasized those principles. In an 1825 letter to Thomas Jefferson, he expressed his resentment of European political order and why America should have no part in it: “The Europeans are all deeply tainted with prejudices, both ecclesiastical and temporal, which they can never get rid of.” Jefferson himself had expressed similar sentiments about the dangers of European entanglements in a 1815 letter to Thomas Leiper: “It is our business to manufacture for ourselves whatever we can, to keep our markets open for what we can spare or want; and the less we have to do with the amities or enmities of Europe, the better.”

While we had France for an enemy, Germany was the scene to employ and baffle her arms.
-William Pitt, 1762 Speech in the House of Commons
Of course, around a century had passed since the Founders provided that advance and American intervention in the First World War. So, it is possible to argue that the American Founding principles were entirely unsuited to the First World War. After all, one might be inclined to think that, as the war’s name does imply, the First World War was the first war at a global scale. Being so, it is reasonable enough, at least prima facie, that the United States could not be neutral because the war had global implications that the American people would eventually have an interest in.
However, this argument neglects the fact that the First World War was not the first global war nor the American Founders have inexperienced with the challenges posed by global war waged by European belligerents. Instead, the American Founders lived in an era in which the American colonies and early republic were encompassed all about by the global wars of European belligerents, particularly the Seven-Years’ War and then the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.
Although the First World War may have gone into history as the first ‘world war,’ it was really not the first such war. Instead, the Seven-Years’ War (1756-63) is most properly the first of a long line of wars on a global scale. If anything, the Seven-Years’ War was more properly a world war than the First World War, as William Pitt had purposefully used the opportunity to secure extensive colonial gains in North America and India that would guarantee Great Britain a colonial empire for generations to follow.
Similarly to the Seven-Years’ war, most of the First World War’s bloodshed was in Europe and its hostilities were to be entirely decided in battles on the European continent, unlike, for example, the Second World War’s Pacific theater. In this sense, the First World War was much like the Seven Years’ War (1756-63): There may have been theaters of war across the world, yet those theaters were largely European violence spilling over into the rest of the world. Just as the French and British fought in North America in the Seven Years’ War (a theater known to American schoolchildren as the French and Indian War), so did the Germans and British fight around the African Rift Valley.
All the world-wide maneuvering in the First World War was largely an attempt by one power or another to tie down resources of its enemies that could otherwise be allocated to Europe. Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck’s guerrilla campaign required the British army to station battalions that could have otherwise buttressed the Western front just as Maximilian von Spee’s mischief in the South Pacific required the Royal Navy to dispatch two battlecruisers there, including HMS Invincible, that would have otherwise been stationed in Britain. Although, the First World War was a global war in scope, it was still fundamentally a European war similar to the war that America’s Founders had experienced in Seven Years’ War’s North-American theater.
The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars were another set of European conflicts that spilled out into the wider world and which the Founders actually had to create concrete policies in response to. When the Revolutionary Wars broke out in 1792, George Washington wisely kept America neutral, whatever may have been people’s sentiments over the political principles entangled with that war. For example, when the French ambassador Citizen Genêt beat the drums of war for the revolutionary government on American soil, Washington asked for the French to recall him, which they did. His administration also negotiated the Jay Treaty, which diffused tensions with Great Britain that might have led to another war.
John Adams showed similar restraint in dealing with the scandal of the XYZ affair and in navigating American diplomacy through the Quasi-War without having to get involved in the wider war between Britain and France. Adams certainly did trample on American liberty by signing the Alien and Sedition Acts, but a sympathetic historian could very well give the president some credit for trying to keep America out of war by signing them. Grievous mistakes like the Alien and Sedition Acts notwithstanding, the American Founders provided an example of how the American republic should interact with European wars, and that is with disinterested benevolence towards all.
During the First World War, America should have observed to the wise principles of the American founding and avoided committing the nation to a European war. By 1917, the First World War had devolved into a nationalistic struggle for existence that a nation founded on America’s principles should have had any role in. When Pope Benedict XV had asked for the belligerents to enumerate their war-aims, none could actually do so, because they really had no specific war-aims. For all belligerents, the only option worse than continuing the war was losing it. If the Entente won, Germany expected to be humiliated and dismembered. If the Central Powers won, France and Great Britain expected Germany to establish an autocratic hegemony over central Europe and thus control over the wider continent. The war was therefore a death-spiral, in which nations had no conscious policy but to commit themselves to the struggle.

This is not a peace. It is an armistice for 20 years.
-Ferdinand Foch
Wilson led the United States into the conflict with the view that America could provide a conciliatory solution to the conflict and mitigate other powers’ more unsavory interests. However, just as Washington’s principle of honesty being the best policy made American entirely unsuited to politics of late 18th century Europe, so should have it prevented the nation entirely unsuited to those of early 20th century Europe. Wilson had proclaimed “open covenants of peace” as the first of his Fourteen Points, but he should have known that Europe diplomats would have none of that. Britain, France, and Italy had signed secret treaties, including the London Pact and the infamous Sykes-Picot agreement,that had motivated the fighting. Self-interested as they were, British, French, and Italian diplomats and politicians were not going to happily, or even willingly, agree to having the spoils of the bloodiest war their respective nations have ever fought be denied to them.
The tragedy of the Treaty of Versailles, which ultimately failed to provide any lasting resolution to the First World War’s carnage, was that it was simultaneously too harsh and too lenient. For whatever Wilson may have intended to happen at the Paris Peace Conference, the United States was still but a single nation at the table. Primus inter pares, yes, but still but a single nation. The United States could decisively turn the fortunes of war in the Entente’s favor, but it could not prevent the Entente powers from demanding the kind of victory that the kind of treaty that such a victory would normally prescribe. The Treaty of Versailles was therefore too harsh of a treaty. Moreover, as that decisive victory came from an overseas source, when it came time for the European Entente powers to enforce the treaty they had inflicted upon Germany, they could not. Although Wilson would have liked to have America play a larger role across the world, the American public did not yet have an appetite for such a victory.
The Paris Peace conference was indeed a circus and it was a circus because the United States really had no place at the table. The reasons why the war had been so long and so bloody was that its motivations, to quote John Adams, were “deeply tainted with prejudices.” The problems and predicaments posed by the war had solutions and outcomes that could probably only be decided by Europeans and for Europeans. American involvement only pushed those solutions and outcomes back a generation, and unfortunately they would involve two foreign powers, America and the Soviet Union, establishing two competing empires over the continent.
Although it is possible to explain the harm done by Wilson’s foreign policy as a consequence of starry-eyed idealism, Wilson’s domestic policy during the war demonstrated a robust authoritarianism entirely contradictory to America’s Founding principles. The United States was going to go to war one and indivisible. Those who dissented would be singled out and dealt with. As Wilson warned in his April 2nd speech: “If there should be disloyalty, it will be dealt with with a firm hand of stern repression.” And repression there was. The 1917 Espionage Act provided the federal government the ability to jail and punish those who interfered with recruitment or prevented enthusiasm for the war. Eugene Debs, who had previously been a Socialist candidate for president, was arrested and convicted for having “obstructed recruitment.” This systematic use of repression to control dissent was a radical departure from the polycentric mode of governance that Alexis de Tocqueville had lauded in Democracy in America. It was a rejection of the Founding ideals of a nation, rooted in dissenting Protestantism, that had formulated those ideals, in part, through protracted debates in pamphlets and other printed means.
Just as in medicine, the best maxim in politics is to first do no harm. The abandonment of Founding principles in foreign policy did much harm. At its best, Wilson’s enthusiasm for war was a naïve attempt to make the world better, at its worse, that enthusiasm was a prideful attempt to impose a political system on the wider world through central planning. Either way, Wilson’s intervention did very little good and a whole lot of harm. The Treaty of Versailles did not secure Wilson’s aim of “really free and self-governed peoples of the world such a concert of purpose and of action as will henceforth ensure the observance of those principles” against “selfish and autocratic power.” Rather than making the world safe for democracy, Wilson’s attempt to rationally construct a new world order made it a petri dish for various mutations of the closed society, whether it be Bolshevism in Russia or Nazism in Germany. Rather than securing liberty at home, the American war-effort trampled on American liberty; the 1917 Espionage Act is still one of its reverberating effects.
When look at from a distinctly historical point of view, the American intervention in the First World War was a blunder that, like much else in the Progressive Era, corroded the Founding ideas of the American republic. It would have been better to take George Washington's words to heart and to avoid "interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe." The First World War was a European war that could have only reached a suitable resolution with a distinctly European solution.
RIP Boris Nemtsov
Laws, like houses, lean on one another.
-Edmund Burke, Vindication of a Natural Society
Is there any good news coming from Russia these days? Whether it’s Russia’s involvement, to say the least, in Ukraine or the social slip towards ever greater kleptocracy, every word of news seems to be tinged by suffering as Russia becomes ever more totalitarian. In an interview with Anthony Bourdain, Boris Nemtsov quipped that “Unfortunately, existing power represents Russia of 19th century, not 21st century.” Last Friday, February 27th, Mr. Nemtsov became a victim himself of that existing power when he was gunned down in Moscow, within sight of the Kremlin. In its coverage of Mr. Nemtsov’s death, The Economist christens the man a liberal martyr.
Like all good liberals should be, Mr. Nemtsov was a outspoken critic of corruption and cronyism in his home country. He was Vladimir Putin's gadfly. From his criticism of the Sochi Olympics to his work for fair elections, Mr. Nemtsov had always been one could look to in Russian politics to have some hope for a free Russia. His assassination on Friday is a blow to that hope. Even worse, in a world that sees Russia increasingly taking a belligerent stance towards the outside world, it’s supposed to be.
Those who assassinated Mr. Nemtsov were no amateurs. If they were, they couldn’t be to get away with the deed in sight of the Kremlin. The assassins know that we all know the conclusions that will be extrapolated from the event. To speak of Mr. Nemtsov’s death as a murder would, therefore, be a shameful unwillingness to address the political dimensions that the assassins knew Russians and, perhaps especially the outside world, would take from the event. As Mr. Nemtsov himself remarked in his interview with Anthony Bourdain: “Everybody understands everything in this country.”
Just as Vladimir Putin, and even Boris Yeltsin, inherited the organs of their government from the Soviets, so too did the Soviets from the Tsars. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. However small the machine of terror surrounding Vladimir Putin today may be when compared to either the KGB or Okrana, it’s still there. Assassinated journalists are an all too common event in Russia today. The assassination of Mr. Nemtsov is not much different from the use of terror in Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union. Contrary to what Mr. Nemtsov suggested, the Russia of the 21st century is still frighteningly like the Russia of the 19th century.
The Russian people, just like any other nation, cannot escape their history. As much as Boris Nemtsov is, indeed, a martyr for liberalism, he is on the wrong side of history. Mr. Nemtsov’s liberal optimism that the Russia of the 21st century can be more like the United States of the 21st century than the Russia of the 19th century ignores the importance of the evolution of social order in cultivating, and constraining the cultivation of good policies.
In Federalist No. 1, Alexander Hamilton offers the question of “whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forced destined to depend, for their political constitutions, on accident and force.” Hamilton has the ratification of the American Constitution in mind as deciding that question.
Hamilton thought that the establishment of a new United States, one and federal, could prove that human beings weren’t tied to the governments they lived in, that they could come together for a better, brighter alternative. The words are full of the Enlightenment optimism about democracy that, should’ve at least, died a bloody death by Robespierre’s guillotine.The American Revolution itself wasn’t progressive, nor was it even a revolution proper; rather, it was a conservative war of independence.
Russia is another illustration of why Hamilton’s words misrepresent how to get good government. Whatever hope and promise there may have been in the new Russian Federation of liberal reform, by now, are snuffed out. The exact causes of much too complex to explore in a short book, let alone here. Nevertheless, the conclusion that good government can be established “from reflection and choice” has been dashed. Intentions, themselves, aren’t enough. Nor is technical knowledge. To find success, all reforms have to work through history, that is through the complex process of all of human society coevolving with itself across time. Russia shows just how hard it is to establish a liberal society when all one has to go back on is a very, very illiberal history. I cannot escape the conclusion, then, that Mr. Nemtsov's campaign for a liberal Russia is, at the end of the day, tilting at windmills. Russians liberals can respond that they need to be apart of the change if it is to ever occur, but I then wonder where the realistic avenues for liberal change are.
The nations in the former Soviet Union in Eastern Europe often do have a real choice: Look westward of eastward. The mutually exclusive visions for society ultimately represented by Washington DC and Moscow are very real. The Cold War happened for a reason, so did former Soviet Republics asking to join NATO ever since the scarlet banner was brought down from the Kremlin.
Mr. Nemtsov’s death demonstrates that even amidst the institutions of tyranny, people’s desire for liberty still burns ardent. Alas, it also demonstrates that an ardent love of liberty isn’t enough to create liberal governments. Institutions aren’t create by people all pulling at once and choosing at a single moment to create them; rather, institutions grow across history. In formulating reforms, policy-makers have to keep that history in mind. All too often that history excludes the possibility of the desired reforms.
As for Mr. Nemtsov being a liberal martyr. At least in my eyes, the struggle for liberalism in Russia, however Quixotic I may take it to be, seems to be much purer than the struggles for liberalism elsewhere. The reason for that is that Russian liberals actually face Søren Kierkegaard wrote that the truest Christians are those who had to suffer for their beliefs. Without that element of suffering, a Christian, Kierkegaard argued, couldn’t claim to be a true Christian. There is wisdom in that notion. It’s impossible to give a belief lip-service when one might become a target for it. Only those who have had to suffer a worldly cost for their beliefs can really be sure of how valuable those beliefs are.
Liberals in Russia can be sure that liberalism is valuable and that their faith is pure. Liberals elsewhere cannot be so sure, which is troubling since, at its best, liberalism is a fight against the privileges that would lead one to give a political belief lip-service for personal gain.
Posted by Harrison Searles on 03/04/2015 at 06:43 AM in Commentary, History, Politics Without Romance | Permalink | Comments (0)
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