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What We Can Learn
From Woodrow Wilson’s Great Blunder
The Case for Staying Out of Other People’s
Wars
By Jim Powell
14/13/05 "
Lew Rockwell"
-- -- The worst American foreign policy disasters of the
past century have been consequences of Wilsonian
interventionism. Critics have been dismissed as "isolationists,"
but the fact is that Wilsonian interventionism has dragged the
United States into pointless wars and ushered in revolution,
terror, runaway inflation, dictatorship and mass murder. It’s
past time to judge Wilsonian interventionism by its
consequences, not the good intentions expressed in political
speeches, because they haven’t worked out.
Surely, one of the most important principles of American foreign
policy should be to conserve resources for defending the
country. President Woodrow Wilson violated this principle by
entering World War I which didn’t involve an attack on the
United States.
German submarines sunk some foreign ships with American
passengers, but they had been warned about the obvious danger of
traveling in a war zone. People need to take responsibility for
their own decisions and proceed at their own risk. It was
unreasonable to expect that because a few adventurers lost their
lives, the entire nation had to enter a war in which tens of
thousands or hundreds of thousands more people must die.
There never was a serious possibility that Germany might attack
the United States during World War I. The German Navy was
confined to German ports by the British Navy, and British
convoys dramatically reduced the number of merchant ships sunk
by German submarines. The German Army was stalemated on the
Western Front, and over a million German soldiers were engaged
on the Eastern Front. German boys and older men were being
drafted to fill the trenches. There wasn’t any armed force
available for an attack on the United States. Despite the
suggestion, in German Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmermann’s
inflammatory telegram, about a possible alliance between
Germany, Mexico and Japan, America was safe.
Wilson claimed that American national security was linked with
the fate of Britain, but because the British Navy had bottled up
the German Navy and neutralized German submarines, Germany
wasn’t capable of invading Britain. In any case, Britain was
struggling to maintain its global empire. The settlement
following World War I had the effect of adding more territories
to the British Empire. Why should American lives have been lost
and American resources spent to expand the British Empire?
Why, for that matter, should the United States have defended the
French or the Belgians? They were defending their overseas
empires, and both had shown themselves to be brutal colonial
rulers. The Belgians were responsible for slavery and mass
murder in the Congo – the first modern genocide, involving an
estimated 8 million deaths.
How could any U. S. president in his right mind have committed
American soldiers to defend Britain and France, whose generals
squandered lives on a stupendous scale? Britain’s General
Douglas Haig, for instance, whose blunders figured in the deaths
of 95,675 British soldiers and 420,000 total British casualties
at the Battle of the Somme (1916). Another 50,729 French
soldiers were killed. Haig not only wasn’t fired, but he
continued to squander lives in battle after battle. It was
amazing that a U.S. president would seriously consider
conscripting Americans for European killing fields drenched in
blood. There were the battles of the Marne (1914, 270,000 French
and British soldiers killed), Artois (1915, 100,000 French
soldiers killed), Ypres (Second Battle, 1915, 70,000 French
soldiers killed), Gallipoli (1915, 50,000 British, Australian
and New Zealand soldiers killed), Verdun (1916, 315,000 French
soldiers killed), Arras (1916, 160,000 British soldiers killed)
and Passchendaele (1917, 310,000 British soldiers killed).
There would have massacres even with better generals. As
military historian John Keegan observed, "The simple truth of
1914-18 trench warfare is that the massing of large numbers of
soldiers unprotected by anything but cloth uniforms, however
they were trained, however equipped, against large masses of
other soldiers, protected by earthworks and barbed wire and
provided with rapid-fire weapons, was bound to result in very
heavy casualties among the attackers…The effect of artillery
added to the slaughter, as did that of bayonets and grenades
when fighting came to close quarters in the trench labyrinths."
Woodrow Wilson didn’t need a crystal ball to understand that
World War I wasn’t our war. He knew how the Europeans, with
their entangling alliances, had stumbled into the conflagration.
He knew how they stubbornly refused to quit. He knew how the
Allied Powers had negotiated their secret treaties to carve up
Europe and colonial possessions. He could see how hundreds of
thousands of young men were being slaughtered in the mud.
It was claimed that the United States would have been threatened
if a single power – Germany – had been able to control the
entire European continent. But that was unlikely, since World
War I had been stalemated for more than three years. The best
the Germans might have hoped for would have been to annex
Belgium and northwestern France, where much of World War I had
been fought, as well as territories gained from Austria-Hungary
and western Russia. If the Germans had won the war, they would
have had a hard time holding their empire together because of
all the rebellious nationalities, the same nationalities that
figured in the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian
empires. Most likely outcome of a German victory: costly civil
wars ending in German collapse.
In any event, people have been fighting each other for thousands
of years, and America managed to develop despite a succession of
empires in Europe and elsewhere. America was in its infancy when
Spain was the mightiest power on earth, enriched by precious
metals from Mexico and Peru. During the late 1600s, the French
King Louis XIV dominated Europe, persecuted Protestants and
fought one war after another, but America thrived as a
sanctuary. A century later, America broke free from the British
Empire. George Washington, as the first President of the United
States, wisely counseled his countrymen to stay out of European
wars, and this policy was continued by his successor Thomas
Jefferson despite French and British interference with U.S.
shipping. The United States prospered while the French Emperor
Napoleon Bonaparte organized the first modern police state,
conquered Europe and marched into Russia.
America’s Founders had the humility and wisdom to recognize that
the United States couldn’t prevent other people from fighting.
If the United States had tried forcing "peace" on foreigners,
this would have required raising and equipping an army, and
fighting adversaries who knew their land much better than we
did. We would have had to fight with allies whose motives turned
out to be less pure than we had supposed. We would have made
enemies we didn’t have before. In the end, we would have widened
a conflict, and probably more people would have been killed than
if we had stayed out.
The arrogant Wilson should have learned a lesson when he tried
nation-building in Mexico, and the effort backfired. What could
have been simpler than sending some American soldiers across the
Mexican border to find a bandit and help install a good ruler
down there? Yet Wilson’s intervention failed to find the bandit,
failed to install a good ruler, killed people and made enemies.
Preoccupied with his good intentions, Wilson never seemed to
have considered the possibility that intervening in Europe might
do worse than fail to achieve peace. Because of historic
resentments and staggering battlefield casualties, there was a
lot of bitterness in Europe. Governments were nearly bankrupt,
and people were hungry. They wanted vengeance for their
suffering. The political situation was explosive. If one side
were able to achieve a decisive victory, the temptation would be
strong to seek retribution. So, Wilson intervened, enabled the
Allied Powers to achieve a decisive victory, and the result was
the vindictive Versailles Treaty with devastating political
consequences that played out in Germany and around the world.
Apparently thinking only about what he wanted, he pressured and
bribed the Russian Provisional Government to stay in the war,
when he ought to have known that country had been falling apart
ever since it entered the war in 1914. Wilson ought to have
known that millions of Russian peasants weren’t going to be
affected much one way or the other by what happened on the
Western Front, the only thing that Wilson cared about. He ought
to have known that Russian peasants were deserting the Russian
Army by the thousands, to go home and claim land, and soon there
wouldn’t be any army to defend the Provisional Government. If
Wilson didn’t know these things, he didn’t have any business
trying to play an international war game. Wilson’s blunders made
it easier for Lenin to seize power on his fourth attempt in
1917, leading to more than seven decades of Soviet communism.
Wilson ought to have known he was playing with fire when, at the
Versailles Conference following World War I, he participated in
redrawing thousands of miles of national borders. He knew how
nationalist hatreds had exploded in the Austro-Hungarian Empire
and triggered the Balkan wars and World War I. Turkish
nationalists expelled some 100,000 Greeks from the Anatolian
Peninsula where many families had lived for over a thousand
years, and large numbers of Greek women were raped and Greek men
murdered. Turkish nationalists massacred an estimated 1.5
million Armenians.
Woodrow Wilson’s decision to enter World War I had serious
consequences in Iraq, too. Because the British and French were
on the winning side of the war, the League of Nations awarded
"mandates" to Britain and France in the region. If the United
States had stayed out of World War I, there probably would have
been a negotiated settlement, and the Ottoman Empire would have
survived for a while. The Middle East wouldn’t have been carved
up by Britain and France. But as things turned out, authorized
by League of Nations "mandates," British Colonial Secretary
Winston Churchill was determined to secure the British Navy’s
access to Persian oil at the least possible cost by installing
puppet regimes in the region.
In Mesopotamia, Churchill bolted together the territories of
Mosul, Baghdad and Basra to make Iraq. Although Kurds wanted an
independent homeland, their territory was to be part of Iraq.
Churchill decided that the best bet for Britain would be a
Hashemite ruler. For king, Churchill picked Feisal, eldest son
of Sherif Hussein of Mecca. Feisal was an Arabian prince who
lived for years in Ottoman Constantinople, then established
himself as king of Syria but was expelled by the French
government that had the League of Nations "mandate" there. The
British arranged a plebiscite purporting to show Iraqi support
for Faisal. A majority of people in Iraq were Shiite Muslims,
but Feisal was a Sunni Muslim, and this conflict was to become a
huge problem. The Ottomans were Sunni, too, which meant British
policy prolonged the era of Sunni dominance over Shiites as they
became more resentful. During the 37 years of the Iraqi
monarchy, there were 58 changes of parliamentary governments,
indicating chronic political instability. All Iraqi rulers since
Feisal, including Saddam Hussein, were Sunnis. That Iraq was
ruled for three decades by a sadistic murderer like Saddam made
clear how the map-drawing game was vastly more complicated than
Wilson had imagined.
Considering Wilson’s global catastrophes, it’s remarkable that
his interventionist policies have been adopted by Democratic and
Republican presidents ever since. President Franklin D.
Roosevelt followed in Wilson’s footsteps when he maneuvered the
United States into World War II, after promising American voters
that he would stay out. Within five years after Hitler’s defeat,
more people than ever – some 800 million – suffered oppression
from totalitarian regimes, in the Soviet Union, Albania,
Bulgaria, China, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, East Germany, Hungary,
Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Rumania and Yugoslavia. Millions in
Eastern Europe were liberated from Hitler, then handed over to
Stalin. Both Hitler and Stalin murdered Jews. One might make a
case that the war against Hitler was pragmatic, but since the
United States was allied with Stalin, an even worse mass
murderer, World War II couldn’t be described as a just war. And,
one must not forget, the Pacific war occurred as a consequence
of American efforts to thwart Japanese aggression in China, but
China ended up going Communist. No justice in that, either.
President Harry Truman followed in Wilson’s footsteps with his
undeclared Korean War that didn’t involve an attack on the
United States yet killed more than 38,000 Americans. President
Lyndon B. Johnson followed Wilson with his undeclared Vietnam
War, still another war that didn’t involve an attack on the
United States – over 58,000 Americans killed.
Again and again, seemingly easy interventions have become
complicated, starting with Wilson’s fiascos in Mexico and
Europe. The Korean War became a quagmire with its rugged terrain
and Chinese hordes, the Vietnam War with its jungles and
guerrilla fighters, and the Middle East with its cities and
suicide bombers. We play to our strengths defending our country
and play to our weaknesses intervening in the affairs of other
countries where people speak different languages, have different
ideas, live in places that are strange to us – and are embroiled
in conflicts that have little to do with our national security
interests. In some cases, such as the Balkans, the United States
intervened in conflicts that have been going on for hundreds of
years, before the United States existed.
And, yes, the United States has made enemies by intervening in
ancient disputes between Jews and Muslims as well as disputes
among Muslim sects in the Middle East. American blood has been
shed defending unpopular Saudi kings and the Shah of Iran, and
trying to maintain order in Lebanon and build a new Iraqi nation
following the overthrow of Saddam. During the past thousand
years, the Muslim world has produced kings, dictators and
religious fanatics – it’s a region largely unfamiliar with
religious freedom and constitutional limitations on government
power. Yet Wilsonian nation-builders have imagined that they
could somehow develop a nice liberal democracy by sending in
soldiers and money. What we’ve seen, of course, has been terror
and civil war.
Americans seem surprised when local people have opposed our
well-meaning interventions, particularly after we helped get rid
of an acknowledged evil like Saddam Hussein. But people don’t
seem to want somebody else building their nation, even when they
made a mess of it. They might want Americans to send money and
sacrifice some lives, then go home. A small but determined
terrorist minority can cause a lot of trouble for us.
An interventionist foreign policy requires a president with the
highest level of foreign policy expertise, but there isn’t any
method of assuring that only such people will occupy the White
House. Many factors other than foreign policy expertise
influence the outcome of presidential elections, such as a
candidate’s personality, achievements and positions on other
issues. In any case, the worst foreign policy decisions, such as
entering World War I, the Korean War and the Vietnam War, have
tended to involve a consensus among foreign policy experts –
"the wise men," as Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas called them
in their book about postwar policy. "The best and brightest" was
David Halberstam’s phrase in his critique of the Vietnam War.
How could the experts be wrong? Predicting foreign policy
outcomes is as difficult as predicting anything else.
Intervening in the affairs of other nations means taking sides.
It isn’t easy to predict which among many personalities and
groups might emerge as enemies. Anyway, an outsider has a
limited number of options, including support for a sympathetic
regime and conquest, both of which would inflame nationalist
hatreds.
The catastrophes Woodrow Wilson unleashed ought to serve as a
warning that humility is urgently needed in U. S. foreign
policy. It is not possible to control what other people do. We
can only control what we do. We will have our hands full making
this the best country it can be.
U.S. foreign policy ought to be guided by the following
principles:
(1) Defend America from terrorism. The focus should be
protecting the national security interests of the United States,
not defending other countries from a wide range of threats. Nor
should the United States try to counter political instability
elsewhere. There has always been political instability in the
world, and most of it doesn’t affect the national security of
the United States. We should avoid having American forces
permanently stationed in other countries. American blood and
treasure should be reserved for safeguarding Americans. We
should repeal proliferating restrictions on civil liberties
which, enacted in the name of fighting terrorism, do little if
anything to protect national security.
(2) Stay out of other people’s wars. By definition, these don’t
involve an attack on the United States. We should phase out
alliances that obligate the United States to enter wars
unrelated to American national security interests, such as the
NATO alliance obligating the United States to enter wars in
which any of 19 member nations might become embroiled. The
United States should phase out similar obligations in the Middle
East, Korea and elsewhere. The more American resources expended
in other people’s wars, the less are available to protect
American national security interests.
(3) Don’t try to build other people’s nations. Independent
nations cannot be built by stationing U.S soldiers in a
territory and giving the government foreign aid. For better or
worse, people must build their nations by making their own
choices. People don’t want foreigners trying to build their
nations, because the foreigners – in particular, a foreign
government – would be making the choices. When the United States
pursues nation-building, American soldiers are killed enforcing
choices that local people don’t want. This essentially means
American soldiers die in vain.
(4) Be open to the world. Maintain freedom of movement for
people, goods and capital, among other things to minimize the
risk that economic disputes escalate into political and military
conflicts. We should abolish immigration quotas and welcome
immigrants from all nations, except immigrants with known
terrorist or other criminal backgrounds. Immigrants should
perhaps be excluded from welfare state benefits (which,
considering the debilitating effects of welfare, would probably
give immigrants an advantage over those born in the United
States). There shouldn’t be any tariffs, import quotas,
antidumping penalties or other import restrictions. Nor should
there be foreign exchange controls or other restrictions on
capital flows. The goal should be to minimize
government-to-government contacts and facilitate the entire
range of peaceful, private contacts around the world.
More immigrants have come to the United States than to all other
destinations combined. Immigrants created new technologies,
built great companies, enriched American cuisine and the
American language itself. This was anything but "isolationism."
America became a rich and influential country precisely because
of a willingness to learn from everybody.
America cannot save the world by fighting endless wars, but we
can set an example. We must protect a flourishing free society
which peaceful people are welcome to join or emulate in their
own lands.
Jim
Powell, a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, is the author of
Wilson’s War, How Woodrow Wilson’s Great Blunder Led To Hitler,
Lenin, Stalin And World War II (2005),
FDR’s Folly, How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great
Depression (2003), and
The Triumph of Liberty, A 2,000-Year History Told Through The
Lives Of Freedom’s Greatest Champions (2000).
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