Lessons of Diplomacy, Wilsonianism

"In America's view, it was not self-determination which caused wars but the lack of it; no the absence of a balance of power that produced instability but the pursuit of it. Wilson proposed to found peace on the principle of collective security. In his view and that of all his disciples, the security of the world called for, not hte defense of the national interest, but of peace as a legal concept."

"Never before had such revolutionary goals been put forward with so few guidelines as to how to implement them."

"Wilson was surely right about the European nations' having made a mess of things. However, it was not so much the balance of power as Europe's abdication of it that had caused the debacle of the World War I. The leaders of pre-WWI Europe had neglected the historic balance of power and abandoned the periodic adjustments which had avoided final showdowns. They had substituted a bipolar world much less flexible than even the Cold War world of the future, in that it lacked the cataclysmic inhibitions of the Nuclear Age. While paying lip service to equilibrium, the leaders of Europe had catered to the most nationalistic elements of their public opinion. Neither their political nor their military arrangements allowed for flexibility; there was no safety valve between the status quo and conflagration. This had led to crises that could not be settled and to endless public posturing that, in the end, permitted no retreat."

"Wilson was proposing a world order in which resistance to aggression would be based on moral rather than geopolitical judgments. Wilson rejected the notion that international conflict had structural causes. Deeming harmony to be natural, Wilson strove for institutions which would sweep away the illusion of clashing interests and permit the underlying sense of world community to assert itself."

"In essence, Wilson's ideas translated into institutions tantamount to world government, which the American people were even less prepared to accept than a global police force."

"The Treaty of Versailles was too onerous for conciliation but not severe enough for permanent subjugation."

"The price for conducting foreign policy on the basis of abstract principles is the impossibility of distinguishing among individual cases."

"The gravest psychological blight on the Treaty was Article 231, the so-called War Guilt clause. Eighteenth-century peacemakers would have regarded "war guilt clauses" as absurd. For them, wars were amoral inevitabilities caused by clashing interests. In the treaties that concluded eighteenth-century wars, the losers paid a price without its being justified on moral grounds."

"The purpose of an alliance is to produce an obligation more predictable and precise than an analysis of national interest. Collective security works in the exact opposite way. It leaves the application of its principles to the interpretation of particular circumstances when they arise, unintentionally putting a large premium on the mood of the moment and, hence, on national self-will."

"Collective security contributes to security only if all nations--or at least all nations relevant to collective defense--share nearly identical views about the nature of the challenge and are prepared to use force or apply sanctions on the "merits" of the case, regardless of the specific national interest they may have in the issues at hand. Only if these conditions are fulfilled can a world organization devise sanctions or act as an arbiter of international affairs."

"It is in the nature of prophets to redouble their efforts, not to abandon them, in the face of a recalcitrant reality."

"In the end, collective security fell prey to the weakness of its central premise--that all nations have the same interest in resisting a particular act of aggression and are prepared to run identical risks in opposing it. Experience has shown these assumptions to be false. No act of aggression involving a major power has ever been defeated by applying the principle of collective security. Either the world community has refused to assess the act as one which constituted aggression, or it has disagreed over the appropriate sanctions. And when sanctions were applied, they inevitably reflected the lowest common denominator, often proving so ineffetual that they did more harm than good."

"Nothing remotely resembling the Soviet Union had appeared on the horizon of European diplomacy since the French Revolution. For the first time in over a century, a country had dedicated itself officially to overthrowing the established order."

"A nation defeated in war and partially occupied by foreign troops has basically two choices. It can challenge the victor in the hope of making enforcement of the peace too painful; or it can cooperate with the victor while regaining strength for a later confrontation. Both strategies contain risks. After a military defeat, resistance invites a test of strength at the moment of maximum weakness; collaboration risks demoralization, because policies which appeal to the victor also tend to confuse the public opinion of the vanquised."

"In the nineteenth century, agreements were never justified by the "atmosphere" they generated, and the concessions were never made to sustain individual leaders in office. Nor did leaders address each other by their first names as a way of underlining their good relations with each other for the sake of their public's opinions. Since then, the trend toward personalizing relations has accelerated."

"Confused leaders have a tendency to substitute public relations maneuvers for a sense of direction."

"Finally, a mechanism was devised for doing nothing at all. It took the form of a fact-finding mission--the standard device for diplomats signaling that inaction is the desired outcome. Such commissions take time to assemble, to undertake studies, and to reach a consensus--by which point, with luck, the problem might even have gone away."

"Statesmen always face the dilemma that, when their scope for action is greatest, they have a minimum of knowledge. By the time they have garnered sufficient knowledge, the scope for decisive action is likely to have vanished. In the 1930's, British leaders were too unsure of Hitler's objectives and French leaders too unsure about themselves to act on the basis of assessments which they could not prove. The tuition fee for learning about Hitler's true nature was tens of millions of graves stretching from one end of Europe to the other."

"The West's obsession with Hitler's motives was, of course, misguided in the first place. The tenets of the balance of power whould have made it clear that a large and strong Germany bordered on the east by small and weak states was a dangerous threat. Realpolitik teaches that, regardless of Hitler's motives, Germany's relations with its neighbors would be determined by their relative power. The West should have spent less time assessing Hitler's motives and more time counterbalancing Germany's growing strength."

"The essence of demagoguery resides in the ability to distill emotion and frustration into a single moment."

"The Western democracies' initial reaction to Hitler's ascendancy was to accelerate their commitment to disarmament."

"What political leaders decide, intelligence services tend to seek to justify. Popular literature and films often depict the opposite--policymakers as the helpless tools of intelligence experts. In the real world, intelligence assessments more often follow than guide policy decisions."

"Ironically, the Wilsonian approach to international relations, which had facilitated Hitler's advances beyond what any previous European system would have considered acceptable, after a certain point also caused Great Britain to draw the line more rigorously than it would have in a world based on Realpolitik. If Wilsonianism had prevented earlier resistance to Hitler, it also laid the foundation for implacable opposition to him once its moral criteria had been unambiguously violated."

"What had changed beyond Hitler's comprehension was that, once he had crossed the line of what was morally tolerable, the same moral perfectionism which had formerly generated pliability in the democracies transformed itself into unprecedented intransigence."