On April 2, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson, who had narrowly won reelection with the slogan “He kept us out of war,” asked a joint session of Congress for a declaration of war against Germany. In his speech, Wilson explained what had changed – and why the U.S. could no longer isolate itself from the carnage in Europe.
“The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty. We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make. We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind. We shall be satisfied when those rights have been made as secure as the faith and the freedom of nations can make them,” Wilson said.
In the century since, most U.S. presidents have echoed Wilson to one degree or another. And, especially in the years after the Cold War, Americans took it for granted that their nation must promote or defend democracy across the globe because, with Soviet Communism relegated to the dustbin of history, people everywhere would naturally gravitate to freedom and capitalism.
Nowadays it is impossible to avoid the words “fate of democracy” in public discourse, as it has become an axiom among many public intellectuals and politicians that fundamental freedoms are on the line at home and abroad, from Ukraine to Taiwan. President Biden frequently frames U.S. foreign policy in terms of a global confrontation between democracy and autocracy.
In this episode of History As It Happens, historian David M. Kennedy explores the origins of the Wilsonian idea that now permeates American foreign policy and our basic political thinking. But, Mr. Kennedy argues, we may be getting Wilson wrong in one important respect. Declaring that the “world must be made safe for democracy” is not the same as saying “we must make the world democratic.”
“Wilson was not on a mission to transform all the regimes of the world. He wanted the world to be reshaped in a way that would make those regimes that had managed to establish themselves on democratic principles free to pursue those principles, and not turn into heavily-armed states that were in a constant state of preparation for or actual engagement in warfare,” said Mr. Kennedy, a professor emeritus at Stanford University and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Freedom from Fear.”
Mr. Kennedy has argued that a distorted interpretation of Wilson’s “activist foreign policy” has “saddled the United States ever after with some unusually weighty, easily misunderstood, and sometimes dangerously inappropriate international commitments” (Over Here: The First World War and American Society, p. 382).
Listen to the full interview with Mr. Kennedy by downloading this episode of History As It Happens.
