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Review
| Wilsonianism: Woodrow Wilson and His Legacy in American Foreign Relations, by Lloyd E. Ambrosius. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. 233 pp. $75, cloth, and $24.95, paper.
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| In this essay collection, distinguished historian Lloyd E. Ambrosius looks past President Wilson's short-term failure to achieve his idealistic aims in the immediate aftermath of World War I and contends that, in the longer term, Wilson's goals of national self-determination, free market capitalism, and collective security became the framework within which the international system operated. Thus, Wilson's legacy—what Ambrosius terms "Wilsonianism"—determined the course of U.S. foreign relations for the rest of the 20th century. Moreover, Ambrosius says Wilson's legatees have also shared Wilson's failure to allow for the fissiparous tendencies of disparate cultures and national interests, resulting in an insensitivity to geopolitical pluralism that led the U.S. into such morally dubious and ultimately unsuccessful interventions as the Vietnam War. Uneasy as he is with some of the assumptions of Wilsonianism, Ambrosius has been placed in the "realist school" of political scientists who criticize Wilson's liberal internationalism, but Ambrosius is often at pains in Wilsonianism to differentiate his interpretations from aspects of the realists' arguments. Not all historians, and certainly not most undergraduates in history classes, will be as interested as Ambrosius is in examining as minutely as he does in this book the nuances and variants in this complex theoretical debate. |
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Part I "History and Ideology" contains two essays defining Wilson's intellectual preconceptions and his somewhat naive faith in interdependence. Part II "Collective Security and the German Problem" includes five essays, four of which focus on the difficulties Wilson encountered during the Paris Peace Conference trying to launch the League of Nations when the Allies and the Germans were more interested in Germany's postwar fate. An additional essay challenges the common assumption that the anti-Treaty Republicans in the U.S. Senate were simple isolationists. Significant numbers of Republicans promoted a defensive treaty with France as a safer guarantor of European stability in the postwar era than the League of Nations. In Part III "National Self-Determination and Ethnic Politics" Ambrosius in one essay challenges another common assumption by demonstrating that large numbers of hyphenated Americans supported the Treaty, although most historians see them largely as opponents. In another essay, he takes on another conventional interpretation when he says that Wilson's compromises over boundaries during the Paris Conference can be defended as realistic and practical decisions rather than mere concessions in order to gain approval for the League Covenant. Ambrosius continues on this revisionist tack in Part IV "Historiography and Wilsonian Statecraft." He contends in one essay that Wilson's famous stubbornness over altering the Treaty to satisfy his critics was due less to the psychological aftereffects of the strokes he suffered in 1919–1920 than it was to rigidity already embedded in his Presbyterian faith and in the Progressive-era preoccupation with order. The final three essays are perhaps the most demanding in the volume because, as contributions to the ongoing debate among diplomatic historians and political scientists over theoretical aspects of Wilsonianism, they assume prior familiarity with the writings of many contemporary scholars. Ambrosius trains his sights on such targets as New Left revisionists, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. The latter is subjected to a particularly vigorous dressing-down for presenting "the past as he thought it should have been rather than as it actually was" in his exculpatory autobiographical works, In Retrospect, Wilson's Ghost, and Argument Without End. That McNamara attempts to defend his flawed Vietnamese policy in a Wilsonian light is particularly irresponsible according to Ambrosius, devoted as his career has been to establishing the true character of Wilsonianism. |
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As a collection of essays (written for journals, for conference presentations, and some just for this book), Wilsonianism will appeal mainly to specialists in diplomatic history and political science. Undergraduates will find the book heavy going, because it presumes both a fairly sophisticated familiarity with 20th century diplomacy and a grasp of the historiographical debates about how to interpret that diplomacy. Moreover, the book is a challenging reading experience, since the reader has to fill in the gaps between the highly specialized, often discrete, chapters. Another problem for any reader proposing to read the book right through is the eventually tedious repetition of the author's favorite themes. Therefore, for teachers of history, this book would be best treated as a resource to be mined selectively for particular topics that would enhance lectures or would aid advanced undergraduates with research projects |
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| Northern Kentucky University |
Jeffrey Williams |
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