WORLD POLICY JOURNAL 
ARTICLE EXTRACTS:
Volume XXI, No 2, SUMMER 2004
The United Nations Rediscovered?
Brian Urquhart*
Last year, the president of the United States declared the United Nations “irrelevant” to the future of Iraq, perhaps even to any major problem of international peace and security. Heady notions of remaking the world through the exercise of national military power were in the air. In Iraq, there would be a fearsome lesson in regime change. There would be democratization of the Middle East; and coalitions of the willing would take the place of that perverse old U.N. Security Council. The war on terror would be reinforced by punitive example, by the unilateral prevention of hostile acts against the United States. These and other fantasies prevailed over both common sense and expert opinion. Only the steadfastness of the armed forces of the United States prevented the resulting debacle from being even worse.
Faced with the predictable nightmare of Iraq’s religious and ethnic divisions, a stubborn and violent guerrilla resistance, and the establishment in Iraq of an operational al-Qaeda network, not to mention an election at home, Washington was to hand over sovereignty to the Iraqis on June 30. The United States, almost enthusiastically, dumped the task of political middleman and electoral organizer on the United Nations, while a new Security Council resolution has sanctioned the handover and conferred other tasks on the world organization. This is quite a switch in U.S. policy, and, quite possibly, the mother of all poisoned chalices for the United Nations. If the hydra-headed resistance continues, the U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq, with its task of advising and supporting the interim government, will be an obvious target, notwithstanding the Security Council’s creation of a special military organization to provide security for the U.N. mission.
In previous missions, the U.N.’s chronic dilemma of responsibility without power has been mitigated by both practical and political support from governments and by its traditional status as an impartial body welcomed by all parties to a problem. In today’s Iraq, the very concept of representative and orderly government, and all those who work for it, Iraqis and foreigners alike, are at present under murderous attack from al-Qaeda and like-minded groups. After June 30, the main security force will still be the U.S.-led coalition, the main target of the resistance. In fact, al-Qaeda has already proscribed the United Nations and its representatives as enemies. If all that, and the inherently divisive nature of the Iraqi state, were not enough, Iraq has little experience of representative institutions or of the infrastructure that a working democracy requires. Nor will the U.N.’s traditional enemies in the United States, some of them the founding fathers of the current debacle in Iraq, be slow to maximize any U.N. shortcomings. The current oil-for-food scandal, the facts of which have yet to be established, is just a practice run. The new Security Council resolution is a considerable step forward, but in practice many potential pitfalls remain.
*Brian Urquhart is a former undersecretary general of the United Nations. His books include A Life in Peace and War, Hammarskjold, and Ralph Bunche: An American Odyssey.
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Spain Changes Course: Aznar’s Legacy, Zapatero’s Prospects
Paddy Woodworth*
Appearances are sometimes remarkably close to reality. There is a well-known photograph of former Spanish prime minister José María Aznar with President George W. Bush, in which both men are smoking cigars and both have their feet up on the table at which they are seated. Aznar’s usually stern features have relaxed into a radiant glow of consummation. He has fulfilled one of his supreme ambitions. He is on homefolks terms with the leader of the world’s only superpower.
However, another and more concrete ambition remained unfulfilled. The photograph was taken in Canada at the G-8 summit in June 2002. But Aznar was not there as of right, since Spain does not belong to this elite group of states. He was there simply because Spain held the rotating presidency of the European Union at the time. Aznar had made membership of the G-8 one of his key foreign policy targets, and it must have seemed within his grasp that June day. Like so many of his other aspirations, however, it was ultimately to elude him.
There is another famous photograph of Aznar with Bush, taken nine months later, in which the Spanish premier looks much less at ease, and the usual humorless and painfully watchful expression has returned to his face. The appearance is much more complex here, the reality harder to read. The British prime minister, Tony Blair, is also present, but it is Bush who has his arm on Aznar’s shoulder. It seems legitimate to glimpse a touch of uncertainty in Aznar’s fixed stare, as he tries to give the impression of a statesman among equals, looking destiny right between the eyes. This photograph was taken in March 2003 in the Azores. The Portuguese prime minister was the host at the summit, but is the Spanish leader who is standing up front with the big boys, getting ready to go to war with Iraq, regardless of what his European and Arab neighbors, Spaniards in general, or even his own party, the center-right Partido Popular (PP), thought about this venture.
When the new Spanish prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero of the center-left Socialist Party (PSOE), wanted to confirm his intention to take his country’s troops out of Iraq last April, he referred to this image. Speaking at his investiture debate in the Spanish parliament, he said: “We are going to take Spain out of that photograph in the Azores.” Aznar’s meticulously constructed reputation, and his prospects for international advancement, built up over 25 years of very hard work, had been shattered in the three days following the March 11 bombings in Madrid. “You and your war!” his prime minister designate, Mariano Rajoy, now leader of the opposition, is said to have yelled at him, banging the table, on Saturday March 13, as a totally unexpected defeat loomed in the next day’s elections. In Spain, the occupation of Iraq was not just one party’s war. It was one man’s war. And now the country he had represented wanted to be cut out of an embarrassing photograph, leaving gaping questions over a legacy that had seemed so secure only a month earlier.
*Paddy Woodworth covered the March 11 Madrid bombings for the Irish Times, the BBC, the London Times, SkyNews, and Irish television and radio. He is the author of Dirty War, Clean Hands: Eta, the GAL and Spanish Democracy (Yale University Press, 2003) and “Using Terror against Terrorists,” in The Politics of Contemporary Spain, Sebastian Balfour, editor (forthcoming from Routledge).
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Some Hard Truths about Multilateralism
Jonathan D. Tepperman*
Throughout this year’s presidential campaign, Democrats, when discussing foreign policy, have inevitably focused on a single theme: the value and benefits of multilateralism. The argument usually surfaced in one of two ways: when the candidates criticized President George W. Bush for acting (in Iraq and elsewhere) as though he didn’t care what the rest of the world thought, and when they described how they themselves would conduct U.S. foreign policy if elected.
Retired general Wesley Clark, for example, liked to promise that if he were president, he would use something he called “efficient multilateralism,” to “link diplomacy, law, and force [to] achieve decisive results without using decisive force.” Former Vermont governor Howard Dean argued that the United States should “set a positive example and work together [that is, multilaterally] to meet the challenges facing the global community in this new century.” Sen. John Edwards pledged “[to] lead in a way that brings others to us, not that drives them away.” And Sen. John Kerry, the candidate with the most foreign policy experience and ultimately the nominee, told supporters that he would “replace the Bush years of isolation with a new era of alliances,” would “work with allies across the world to defend and extend the frontiers of freedom,” and would “rally democratic countries to join in a lasting coalition to address the common ills of a new century.”
Coalitions, cooperation, alliances–in other words, multilateralism–were very much in the air. And since securing the nomination, Kerry has relentlessly pursued the theme. In April, in his first full-length television interview since winning the nomination, Kerry slammed Bush’s “arrogant and ineffective” diplomacy and swore that, if elected, the United States would “formally rejoin the community of nations.”
There is something blithe and simplistic about such language, however. Of course, pledging to cooperate with other countries for the greater good of humanity always sounds nice–especially when compared to the way George W. Bush has behaved as president, alienating more friends and allies with less cause than any other American leader in living memory.
The problem with these sorts of vague promises, however, is that they are notoriously hard for presidents to make good on. Multilateralism–which can be loosely defined as acting through alliances and international organizations and obeying the constraints they set–is much harder for presidents to practice than to praise. This has been true even for internationalist-minded Democrats, as Bill Clinton learned the hard way during his own term in office. No matter what a candidate pledges to do during a campaign, once in office, he inevitably finds that there are powerful obstacles–some of them domestic, some of them international, all of them hard to overcome–that make it impossible to pursue a consistently multilateral foreign policy.
*Jonathan D. Tepperman is senior editor at Foreign Affairs magazine.
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Remittances: The Perpetual Migration Machine
*Michele Wucker
In the late nineteenth century, wealthy British families exiled their wayward second sons to far-off colonies with the promise of a monthly allowance. In return, these black-sheep “Remittance Men,” immortalized by Mark Twain in his travelogue, Following the Equator, pledged to stay out of trouble and out of the way. Today’s remittance men (and women) are not the black sheep of their families but the workaday heroes of the developing world. Families in developing nations send their best and brightest members abroad to find jobs and send money home. In countries like Mexico, India, Turkey, and the Philippines, the mantra is no longer, “Go away and stay away,” but “Go and don’t forget us.”
Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi once called Indians abroad a bank “from which one could make withdrawals from time to time.” Today, developing countries are making withdrawals from the “bank” of global migrant worker remittances at an increasing rate. In 2003, migrant workers living abroad sent more than $100 billion in remittances to their home countries–a source of funds that is being hailed as the great new hope for the developing world.
Last year, migrant worker remittances, which are growing at a double-digit annual rate, amounted to nearly twice the amount of global development aid ($56 billion). The $38 billion in remittances sent to Latin America in 2003 were nearly equal to all foreign investment in private companies in the region. Remittances account for more than 10 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) of six Latin American nations, and for over 29 percent of Nicaragua’s GDP. In Haiti and Jamaica, remittances generate more revenues than does foreign trade. In Honduras and Nicaragua, average annual remittances per household amount to more than double annual per capita GDP; in Haiti, they amount to more than three times per capita GDP. Nor is this a phenomenon seen only in poor countries; in the late 1990s, émigrés owned one of every five dollars in the Portuguese banking system.
By comparison to the notoriously volatile capital markets, remittances are remarkably steady. Indeed, they often rise during economic crises, when receiving countries are having the hardest time attracting capital. These funds often support not just the person who receives them, but entire families, and local communities benefit from the multiplier effect as money circulates among businesses.
Ironically, the better off immigrants are, the less likely they are to send remittances. Thus, it is the poorest workers who are most responsible for keeping their home countries going. The moral implications of this situation are complicated further by the practices of the financial firms that skim sometimes excessive commissions and fees from this flow of money.
Money transfers from émigrés–what Bangladesh calls “manpower exports”–are helping the least developed countries stay afloat, for now. Yet remittances have side effects that may create other problems in the future. For one thing, although many development economists see these transfers as a stable source of income,2 the flow of remittances is vulnerable to political and economic shocks abroad. Even more worrying is the fact that developing nations may see this flow of cash as an excuse for not undertaking needed development projects.
But the biggest side effect of remittances on policy considerations is this: the money eventually stops coming unless people continue to emigrate. By adding a huge financial incentive to the traditional function of emigration as a social safety valve, remittances discourage governments from making the changes needed for people to stay home–and, indeed, reward them for encouraging people to leave. In other words, remittances feed a perpetual migration machine.
This machine can rob a country of its ability to improve itself if the best and brightest of its citizens go abroad. It is crucial, therefore, that receiving countries handle remittance flows wisely in order to be able to end their reliance on manpower exports as a means of survival and induce skilled émigrés to return home.
*Michele Wucker is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute and the author of Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for Hispaniola.
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Cheap Chickens: Feeding Africa’s Poor
*G. Pascal Zachary
The chicken peddler in Accra’s central market looked astonished as my wife repeated that the price for his live broiler was too high. He shook his head in anger. “Today’s price is forty thousand cedis,” he declared, the equivalent of four dollars and fifty cents in U.S. currency. When the peddler insisted his price was fair, my wife laughed, then asked, “Have you ever bought a Brazilian chicken?”
The peddler didna’t answer. Accepting defeat, he glared at my wife and stalked off, holding a few chickens by the neck in each hand.
My wife, an African herself, is a hard bargainer. Even so, there was a time when she would gladly have paid four dollars and fifty cents for a live chicken. But that was before Brazilian chickens came to Ghana. The chickens from Brazil were frozen, to be sure, but there was a seemingly endless supply of them, and they were half the price of live ones. The Brazilian chickens had other advantages over homegrown ones: they came stripped, cleaned, and ready to cook.
So my wife bought Brazilian chickens. She bought them even though she didn’t know how these chickens, shrouded in tight plastic wrappers, suddenly turned up in Accra, Ghana’s capital. She bought them even though she didn’t understand why, even after they had been shipped halfway around the globe, they were so cheap.
The popularity in Accra of cheap Brazilian chickens is an example of what has gone right and what has gone wrong with the supply of food in Africa. Because of global trade, Ghanaians–especially those who live in cities–eat a wider range of foods than ever before. Shiploads of Thai rice stream into Ghana’s Tema port, selling for prices below those charged for rice grown only a few hundred miles away in northern Ghana. Canned tomatoes from Italy pour into the country, even though locally grown tomatoes are plentiful. The least expensive chocolate bar comes all the way from Indonesia, even though cocoa–the product’s main ingredient–is Ghana’s largest cash crop.
Food imports, while helping consumers, hurt food producers. Domestic producers are less efficient than foreign producers. Whether they raise chickens or grow rice, Ghana’s food producers face relentless competition from cheap imports that undercut their incentive to invest in production by robbing them of both profits and markets.
Ghana has a comparative advantage in the production of certain foodstuffs. The country is the world’s second largest producer of cocoa beans, which are the primary source of the country’s export earnings, but relatively few beans are processed domestically. Similarly, Ghana exports few of the bananas and pineapples it grows in abundance due to an absence of food processing capacity and a lack of infrastructure necessary to get these perishables to foreign markets quickly.
Why Ghana’s food producers are not better prepared to compete in the global food trade is part of the larger question of why sub-Saharan Africa cannot feed itself.
*G. Pascal Zachary is the author of The Diversity Advantage: Multicultural Identity in the New World Economy (Westview, 2003). He spent last year in Ghana as country director of Journalists for Human Rights.
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Africa and the Battle over Agricultural Protectionism
*Todd Moss and Alicia Bannon
In recent years, as African governments and development advocates have stepped up their campaign to reform the trade policies of rich countries, the issue of agricultural protectionism has come to the forefront. This is a highly divisive issue, with rich countries resisting poor countries’ demands for major changes. In fact, the latest World Trade Organization (WTO) negotiations, the September 2003 Cancun meeting, failed largely because of the impasse over agriculture.
Critics highlight the hypocrisy of rich countries giving lip service to free trade while maintaining tariff barriers and paying subsidies to their farmers. Their argument that agricultural protectionism places an unfair burden on Africa is becoming a mainstream view. The New York Times, for example, argues that African farmers are “rightfully outraged that a nation [the United States] that enjoys all the benefits of open markets for its industrial products keeps putting up walls around its farmers.” The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) have also come out strongly against current agricultural trade practices and advocate a major overhaul in order to benefit low-income countries.
Several African countries have also become assertive on agricultural issues in international trade debates. South Africa played a lead role in the recent wto negotiations, with Uganda, Botswana, and Kenya also becoming vocal players. Four West African countries–Burkina Faso, Mali, Chad, and Benin–have called on the United States to cut the $1-3 billion it spends each year subsidizing American cotton growers. More broadly, African politicians have used their bully pulpits to criticize unfair trade policies and their impact on Africa’s long-term development. “The rich countries have a choice,” says Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni, “either let Africa have real access to your markets for products, especially agriculture, or acknowledge that you prefer to keep us dependent on your handouts.”
Now, for the first time in history, an American court has shown itself
willing to let such a suit go to trial to consider whether a U.S. corporation can be penalized for knowingly standing by while its overseas partners–in this case a foreign military–commit abuses, even if the company did not actually direct the abuses itself.
Recently, development advocates and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have joined the campaign for reform of global agricultural markets. Oxfam and the World Council of Churches, among other organizations, are taking an active role in lobbying trade negotiators on this issue. In short, fairness in agricultural trade policy has become for this decade what debt relief was for the 1990s–central to the critique of U.S. and European policies toward the poor and a focal point for development advocacy.
The protectionist policies of rich countries are indeed a serious issue for Africa, where farming accounts for about 70 percent of total employment and is the main source of income for the vast majority of those living in or near poverty. The 30 member countries of the OECD spend a combined $235 billion per year to support their agricultural producers, but only about $60 billion on foreign aid (about one-fifth of which goes to Africa). Subsidies, tariffs, and nontariff barriers distort global prices and restrict access to rich-country markets. The global trading system discriminates against the world’s poorest nations, making their products less competitive and undermining opportunities for growth, employment, and, ultimately, economic and social development. Additionally, intransigence on the part of rich countries over agricultural reform also indirectly harms poor countries due to its effects on broader trade negotiations.
According to one estimate, unimpeded global trade would boost developing country income by about $200 billion a year in the long term. The current stalemate over agriculture has frustrated trade liberalization and reform efforts in both multilateral and regional negotiations, hurting poor countries’ prospects for export growth, and stalling progress on other important trade issues, like intellectual property rights.
Despite widespread criticism of current agricultural trade policies, rich countries continue to respond to entrenched interests. In fact, after introducing reforms to reduce subsidies in 1996, the United States has since increased its level of protectionism. The 2002 farm bill further increased federal subsidies–to some farmers by more than 80 percent. Across the Atlantic, France, Spain, Ireland, and Portugal have resisted changes to the European Union’s broad agreement on farmer payments, known as the common agricultural policy (cap). They effectively watered down a compromise reached last June that would have reduced protection levels. Among other things, France won a concession from the EU to maintain price guarantees for cereals, the largest single absorber of cap funds. Why are rich countries so intransigent when it comes to agricultural protectionism?
*Todd Moss is a research fellow and Alicia Bannon is a research assistant at the Center for Global Development, Washington, D.C. The views expressed here are those of the authors alone and do not represent the views of the CGD, its staff, or its board of directors.
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REPORTAGE
India’s Sikhs: Waiting for Justice
*Barbara Crossette
The Indian political system got two unexpected jolts in May. First the Congress Party, led by Sonia Gandhi–widow and daughter-in-law of two assassinated former prime ministers–was swept to power in national elections against all predictions. A few days later, Gandhi stunned India again by refusing the prime ministership and handing the reins of government to Manmohan Singh, a reluctant politician who lost the only parliamentary election he ever contested, in 1999, but a widely heralded economic reformer who had been finance minister in the early 1990s.
Singh, however, is not only a financial whiz with an Oxford education. He is also the first Sikh to become prime minister of India–and his fellow Sikhs have 20 years of grievances to settle with his party and the Indian government. Can they count on him?
The new prime minister will have plenty of other problems on his list. Congress was elected in large part because the poor in India, who vote with courage and enthusiasm, were not taken in by the previous Hindu nationalist government’s portrayal of India as a glittering high-tech nation. By World Bank estimates, more than three-quarters of India’s one billion-plus people were surviving on two dollars a day or less at the turn of this new century.
The Congress Party also garnered votes among urban intellectuals and others committed to the vision of a secular, tolerant India articulated by its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. That image appeared to be fading fast under the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, as textbooks were rewritten with Hindu overtones and Muslims were slaughtered in the bjp-led state of Gujarat. Many Indians voted for a renewed commitment to minority rights.
Sikhs (as well as Muslims) will want more, however. They want justice and reparations for abuses that were encouraged, if not condoned, by politicians and that left thousands dead over two decades.
As few in India need reminding, Sonia Gandhi’s mother-in-law, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, was gunned down in 1984 by her Sikh bodyguards, an act of vengeance prompted by her ordering the Indian army to attack Sikhdom’s holiest shrine, the Golden Temple in Amritsar, in June of that year. Indira Gandhi made the move to crush a Sikh militant barricaded there whom she had earlier encouraged as an instrument to shatter political unity in Punjab, the traditional Sikh homeland. It was a fatal decision.
In the days that followed her death on October 31, mobs encouraged by Gandhi’s Congress Party roamed Sikh neighborhoods, butchering men and boys with savage brutality, setting fire to the still-living and the dead. Sikhs were hauled from vehicles and killed on the roads; they were hacked to death on trains. About 3,000 Sikhs (the number is still in dispute) were murdered in nothing less than a pogrom, most of them in Delhi. In many neighborhoods, the police were nowhere to be seen. Only when the army stepped in did the killing and destruction of property stop.
“Yesterday we mourned for Indira,” the Indian Express said in an editorial on November 2, 1984. “Today we mourn for India.”
This November will mark 20 years since those days of terror and death. Several reports by Indian human rights groups on the killings and more than half a dozen official government commissions have come, and mostly gone. Yet no Indian politician accused of complicity in fomenting the attacks has been tried. No one in authority responsible for the astonishing negligence in law enforcement has resigned. Indeed, the federal minister then in charge of home affairs, P. V. Narasimha Rao, went on to become prime minister seven years later (after the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, Indira’s son and another victim of her disastrous statecraft, this time with respect to Sri Lanka). In 1992, it was Prime Minister Narasimha Rao who stood aside once again when a Hindu mob tore down a sixteenth-century mosque in the northern town of Ayodhya. That outburst, in turn, foreshadowed the slaughter of about 2,000 Muslims in 2002 in the state of Gujarat–ironically, the birthplace of Mahatma Gandhi.
In what other mature democracy, Indian human rights activists and newspaper editorialists ask, would such wholesale, high-casualty attacks on any minority group go unpunished, and for two decades? Why are Indian law enforcement officials and public figures never held accountable?
*Barbara Crossette, who has been writing about India since the early 1980s and is the author of several books on South Asia, was the New York Times bureau chief in New Delhi from 1988 to 1991.
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Supply and Demand Democracy in Egypt
*Charles Onians
Cairo is a city of contradictions, from its Pharaonic architecture dominated by satellite dishes to its increasingly conservative inhabitants, who at once desire and scorn Western lifestyles. Take a walk around the city’s smog-covered downtown and you’ll see women in full-length, Saudi-style hijab walking past shop windows filled with racy lingerie, while rubbish collectors sit on donkey carts chatting on their mobiles, holding up the advance of an armada of Mercedes.
Unmarried couples holding hands in the street draw scathing looks, yet the city’s reputation for ready prostitution pulls in thousands of Gulf Arab tourists every summer. And while more and more young women wear headscarves, they also increasingly wear tight-fitting jeans. Escape the downtown hubbub in a twilit doorway and you’re likely to find a young man selling pirated videos. Here, alongside The Matrix and other Hollywood staples, you’ll find one of last year’s most sought-after items–secretly filmed footage of renowned singer and belly dancer Dina enjoying intimate moments with her husband. As Cairenes snapped up the bootlegs, the gossip press homed in on the real scandal–the couple may not have been married, and that, it was said, would be unacceptable.
Fascinating as Cairenes’ ability to resolve these apparent contradictions is, a creeping increase in conservative religious behavior in recent years reflects a more ominous competition for moral authority between the government and political Islam. The government changes its moral tone not only to please the people but also to placate those calling for democratic reform, and so the warp and weft of contradiction and compromise continues to hold the country together–in religion, culture, and politics.
*Charles Onians is a Cairo-based journalist specializing in human rights issues.
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Woodrow Wilson’s “New Diplomacy”
*Robert W. Tucker
U.S. fears of regional instability? Concern over humanitarian abuses? The need for regime change to curb “rogue” behavior while fostering democratization? Respect for the rule of law? Promoting self-determination? Does not all of this sound familiar? Ninety years ago, many of these very same issues were already on the table as Woodrow Wilson came to grips with the first serious foreign policy crisis of his presidency.
–The Editors
It is an old story that Woodrow Wilson came to office expecting to deal mainly with domestic affairs. There is his well-known remark to a friend during his presidential inauguration in March 1913: “It would be an irony of fate if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign affairs.” The remark has often been taken as a candid, if unguarded, confession of inadequacy in the field of diplomacy. If so, it seems quite out of character for so self-confident a man. More likely, as the distinguished historian Arthur Link once observed, Wilson “was simply recognizing the obvious fact of his primary concern with domestic issues and his superior training for leadership in solving them.”
The expectation of the president-elect did not appear unreasonable at that time. There were, it is true, the issues posed by the Mexican Revolution that the outgoing Taft administration had left to its successor. Even here, however, it was not unreasonable at the outset to see these issues yielding to measures traditionally employed in dealing with political instability south of the border. Elsewhere in the hemisphere, events requiring a response from Washington did not appear to hold out an element of novelty or to necessitate special attention. In Asia, novel developments were evidently in the making; but there our interests were still quite modest. Toward Europe, a policy of detachment from what George Washington had characterized as the “ordinary vicissitudes of her politics” remained firmly in place. That this most hallowed of American diplomatic traditions would be challenged within a brief period by the outbreak of a general European war occurred only to a handful of observers.
In the event, Wilson’s expectation was not fulfilled. In the course of his tenure in office, Wilson was confronted with a range of diplomatic issues, the novelty and complexity of which were without precedent in the nation’s history. How prepared was he to deal with these issues? Considered from the vantage point of his academic training and teaching experience, the answer must be that he was not well prepared. Wilson’s training had not emphasized the disciplines conventionally regarded as necessary for the diplomatist. Nor did his teaching experience compensate for his lack of academic preparation. This experience was by and large limited to the fields of American history and politics, and what we would term today political development. Occasionally, Wilson taught courses in comparative government. He once gave lectures in international law. The sum of all this did not amount to much in the way of anything approaching an expertise in the diplomatic relations of the period. Wilson’s real interests, as his considerable publications indicate, plainly lay elsewhere, in the history and workings of democratic–particularly American–political institutions and the dynamics of political leadership at a time when public opinion was widely considered the great emerging force in the world.
There is little in this record to suggest anything resembling the kind of background and interest in world politics that characterized a Theodore Roosevelt or Henry Cabot Lodge. Nor is this conclusion substantially qualified by pointing to Wilson’s occasional comments on the emerging American role in the world. It is the case that at the turn of the century, along with others, he expressed the growing view that a policy of isolation no longer responded to the nation’s interest, that America must henceforth play a greater role in the world, and that its economic interests alone required the abandonment of isolation and the assertion of a prominent position among the great colonial powers of the day.
But what did these expressions of an evolving role and interest add up to? What did Wilson’s view that the United States must abandon a traditional isolation mean in practice? How was it to find expression in foreign policy?
*Robert W. Tucker is professor emeritus at the Johns Hopkins University.
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