The Wilsonian Persuasion in American Foreign Policy By Matthew C ...

The President repeatedly expressed the wish that there were a global organization to help arbitrate international disputes.

Initially, Wilson had regarded the war as a continuance of age-old European power struggles, with all sides partly, if not equally, culpable. He believed that American reluctance to become embroiled in an ignoble war reflected a commitment to humanitarian values. The President had always regarded America as exceptional, a democratic model which, at its best, could serve as a model for other nations. “This is the one country which has founded its polity upon dreams,” he had said in 1907, “which has seen and told the world that it saw visions that were to come to pass through its instrumentality.”¹⁰

In a speech on July 4, 1914, he spelled out his vision of the shining city on the hill. “My dream is that, as the years go on and the world knows more and more of America, it will also turn to America for those moral inspirations which lie at the basis of all freedom.”¹¹ Steering clear of entangling alliances was not the strategy of an isolationist realpolitik, but flowed from a moral vision which conceived of the United States as playing an active role in world affairs as a force for freedom and order, “the mediating nation of the world.”¹² Americans were “too proud to fight” in the conflict, he once said in an unfortunate turn of phrase that was bound to incense the European democracies. Over time, though, it gradually became clear that, for many of the combatants, American recalcitrance marked a betrayal of those values. Ambassador Page wrote from London, “The British have concluded that our government does not understand the moral meaning of their struggle against a destructive military autocracy.”¹³ Over time, Wilson came to understand. His challenge would be to bring the American public to a similar understanding.

Most Americans believed that involvement in the foreign war would signify an abandonment of longstanding national political ideals. They believed that the Europeans were fighting over ancient, petty geopolitical feuds, not principles of governance.