In response to: The Madness of Saint Woodrow: Or, What If the United States Had Stayed out of the Great War?
April 2, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson declares to Congress that America would “make the world itself at last free.”Walter McDougall’s trenchant Liberty Forum essay on Saint Woodrow and the Great War is as much concerned with the present and future of American foreign policy or grand strategy as with the past. The closing reference to Donald Trump warns the current administration and its supporters to sustain their focus on U.S. national interest as the central principle of foreign policy, in the face of Establishment temptations. America’s post-Cold War “crusade,” writes McDougall, may have “triggered a backlash” in the form of Trump’s nationalism, but he goes on to “predict that Trump will be no more willing or able than Barack…
More Responses
In asking us to consider alternative histories of American responses to the Great War, Walter McDougall provides a splendid model of what the strategic theorist, Carl von Clausewitz, called “critical analysis.” Said the famous Prussian war college professor, it is not enough to complain that the results of a particular strategic decision were bad. One…
My congratulations to Richard Reinsch for selecting this outstanding panel and thanks to the commentators for their fair and insightful reviews. All of them have addressed the topic for the standpoint of their particular expertise – church history in Richard Gamble’s case, grand strategy in Karl Walling’s case, and constitutional theory in Paul Carrese’s case…
