LIKE ALL other great historical transformations, the collapse of the Soviet system has had unpredicted and paradoxical consequences. One of the least appreciated of these is the new lease on life it has given to the Wilsonian vision in American foreign policy. In a sense this is unsurprising. At first glance, the Soviet collapse looks very much like a confirmation of the central tenets of the Wilsonian faith—such as the eventual convergence of the world’s peoples on a universal civilization, and the prefiguring of that civilization in the institutions of American democratic capitalism. For Wilsonianism was always an American adaptation of the historical theodicy of the French Enlightenment, in which the Judaeo-Christian conception of history as a moral drama is emptied of mystery and tragedy and restated in terms of the banal hopes of secular humanism.
In the American version of this conception, it was affirmed that the political order of such a universal civilization was liberal democracy, and that the triumph of liberal democracy meant the end of war. If the assumptions of this philosophy of history are granted, then the goals of the foreign policy of a great power are clear enough: to speed or assist the global convergence on democratic institutions, and thereby to bring about the cessation of war.
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