Divine destiny

WOODROW WILSON is a tip-of-the-tongue name in foreign policy circles these days, largely because the members of the Bush administration are seen as revamped Wilsonians. Former Middle East envoy Dennis Ross, in his recent book "Statecraft," identifies them as such, citing their belief in the transformative power of the United States and its role as an example and their conviction that divine providence guides their work -- with the profound difference, Ross notes, that Wilson "believed fervently in collective security and international law," which would limit national sovereignty and also "constitute a practical and a moral inhibition on the use of force."

Similarly, Council on Foreign Relations fellow Walter Russell Mead contends, in "Power, Terror, Peace, and War," that the new claque of Wilsonians, neoconservatives who have dominated Republican foreign-policy debates in recent years, have "radically restructured the Wilsonian agenda" and that the secular shapers of progressive internationalism have lost out to evangelicals and other fundamentalists, who argue "that only a much more aggressive pursuit of American ideological values can deal with the security threats we now face" and promote "specifically Christian rather than liberal secular humanist values in foreign policy."

The persistence of this blend of idealism and religious ideology in politics -- along with a belief in American exceptionalism and its accompanying missionary outlook -- is a recurring theme in Ted Widmer's "Ark of the Liberties." "In many ways," he asserts, "we still live in Wilson's world." Whereas Wilson "is often given credit for inventing a new way of thinking about U.S. foreign policy, it is probably more accurate to say that he tapped into old feelings that had never entirely disappeared." (Those feelings went against the isolationism of his time: Wilson's post-World War I idea of a coalition of the willing was the League of Nations, but Congress balked at U.S. membership.) "Ark of the Liberties" is in part a search for the roots of those Wilsonian impulses, which Widmer traces to pre-Revolutionary days, and in part a summary of the foreign-policy orientation of administrations from the country's creation to the present, often as evidenced in officials' speechifying. The gamut of American history, from George Washington's farewell address (in which he argued for a foreign policy of neutrality) to nation-building in Iraq, is on display.