Abstract
The secular notion of American exceptionalism divorced from explicit racial or religious expression and based on governmental institutions and civic virtue – America as ‘the last, best hope of earth’ (Lincoln), America as ‘the ark of the liberties of the world’ (Melville) – goes back to the American Revolution. Nevertheless, before Wilson the conceptual framework that could explain the rightness of American global expansion in terms of bringing democratic government to others had not been well formulated. With Wilson, by contrast, the United States for the first time could present in secular terms, concepts argued from a cultural and historical perspective that made the expansion of American influence around the globe legitimate, not only in terms of national security but to the benefit of all mankind. Here is the key, I would propose, to the self-confidence and self-righteousness, which has been the hallmark of American foreign policy for a century now. Democracy promotion (associated with open markets economically and multilateralism) reflected America's cultural superiority (inherited from racial thinking), as well as its mission to help others (descended from its religious background). In Wilson's hands, an enduring framework for American foreign policy was born, one that remains with us to this day.
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Notes
On race, see Horsman (1981) and Jacobson (2000); on religion, see Mead (2001).
Smith (1994c). It might be objected that under the terms of the Reagan Doctrine, the United States did return to forceful democracy promotion in Central America.
For the genealogy of liberal internationalism from Wilson to the 1990s, see Smith (2007).
The points here are developed at more length in Chapters 4–6.
Niebuhr (1952), reprinted in 2008, pp. 73–75.
Marshall (2006), with essays by Kenneth Pollack, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Larry Diamond, Ronald Asmus, Michael McFaul and Michael O’Hanlon, among others.
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Smith, T. From Woodrow Wilson in 1902 to the Bush doctrine in 2002: Democracy promotion as imperialism. Int Polit 48, 229–250 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/ip.2011.11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/ip.2011.11