American Democratic Interventionism: Romancing the Iconic Woodrow Wilson

There is an American foreign policy tradition in respect to military interventions in the Third World, which validates the importance of democratic ideals as central to the success of the policy. Woodrow Wilson is the founding father of this tradition. While the normative commitments of Wilson made sense in Victorian America and can probably be considered innovative for his day, the manifest lack of success in transferring democracy through military intervention leads us to question the character of Wilson’s interventions and the ideals that motivated them. This essay will consider the content of Wilson’s democratic theory and its integration into ideals of national mission and destiny; how this became the philosophical basis for policies of military intervention; the assessments offered by historians of the success of this policy; and the role of racial paternalism in legitimating the policy at the time. In a contemporary respect, we are left with the question of whether we want such a philosophy of democratic interventionism to be the basis for transferring democratic values and practices to Third World countries today.