Wilsonian Approaches to American Conflicts

From the War of 1812 to the First Gulf War

Ashley Cox

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138226692
• eBook ISBN: 9781315397009
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This book explores US foreign policy, specifically the history of America's entry into the War of 1812, the First World War, the Korean War and the First Gulf War. Using a historical case study approach, it demonstrates how the Wilsonian Framework can give us a unique understanding of why the United States chose to go to war in those four conflicts.

Cox argues that the Wilsonian Framework is an important concern for decision makers in the US and that democracy promotion and the concept of international law are driving factors in each of these decisions to go to war. The realist and economic explanations of these conflicts are not sufficient and we must draw on Wilsonianism to gain a clear understanding of these conflicts. Drawing on the history of American liberalism and the work of Walter Russel Mead and Tony Smith, the book presents a definition of Wilsonianism that represents a broad span of the history of The Republic, in order to show consistency across time. It also establishes why the realist and economic explanations fail to provide sufficient explanatory power and how the Wilsonian Framework can give important insights into these conflicts.

This book will be of interest to international historians and international relations scholars at both postgraduate and scholar level. It will also be of use to those wishing to conduct future research into the motivations that drive the foreign and security policies of the United States.

1 A Wilsonian interpretation

Introduction

The purpose of this book is to show how a Wilsonian framework, that is a framework based on the concepts of democracy promotion and collective security, has been an active and important part of the foreign policy decisions of the United States. Specifically it will contest the assumptions put forward by the realist and revisionist schools that these ideals are used to simply justify the actions of the United States.¹ This book argues against the conception that existing explanations provide a strong enough explanation in isolation for them to be accepted without an understanding of the Wilsonian framework. In short, valuable insight into the decisions to enter these conflicts can be gleaned from adopting a Wilsonian framework.

The case studies that this book presents are ones where the dominant discussion has been one that emphasizes strategic and economic motivations alone and that any pronouncements by the United States to the contrary were a nothing more than a public relations exercise. This chapter will begin with a review of the approaches that this book finds inadequate as complete explanations for these conflicts, including the realist and liberal approaches. As this book focuses primarily on the utility of a Wilsonian approach it will then proceed to discuss the definition of Wilsonianism that this book will use. This will be done by drawing together a discussion of Wilsonianism as discussed by Walter Russell Mead and other authors. Finally this section shows how this book has redressed the deficiency of other explanations in these case studies that are often not treated as Wilsonian conflicts.

Research questions

This book’s primary research question asks whether Wilsonian factors are important in the decision for the United States to enter these conflicts. In order to answer this question it will address three key secondary questions. How can we gain a better understanding of these conflicts if we examine the role Wilsonian factors have played? Are these factors real considerations for the president or merely a justification for the strategic actions of the Unites States? Do these influences extend across the history of the United States independent of American power within the international system? This next section will discuss how each of these questions contributes to answering the primary research question. In the following chapters this book will show that the explanations that previous accounts have presented do not take into account the role that Wilsonian concepts have played in the decisions to go to war.

In order to show that these factors are an important part of the decision, this book will discuss how these conflicts have been traditionally interpreted to show that these factors do not present us with the complete picture of why the United States entered these conflicts. If these factors are not sufficient then it is important to add other explanations to our understanding. These factors are present to us by the Wilsonian School and this book will demonstrate that they give us a better understanding of these conflicts.

This book will address the concept that Wilsonian factors are often used to justify the actions of the United States rather than being an influencing factor.² In the following chapters this work will dispute the claim that Wilsonianism has been used to cover the actions of the United States with an acceptable motive and to show that consideration was given to both the concepts of democracy promotion and collective security in the decision to enter each of these conflicts.

Finally this book asks if we can show that these factors are separate from the power that the United States possesses in the international system. In order to accomplish this, the following case studies have been chosen from different periods of American history; in each of which we see demonstrable differences in the power of the United States. This chapter will discuss the case studies and the reasons they have been chosen in more detail below.

The above questions are important in improving our understanding of the conflicts discussed. In the following section this chapter will discuss the approaches that other authors have used to understand these conflicts and then move on to discuss the Wilsonian approach in more detail.

Traditional approaches

Those trying to understand why the United States has gone to war have presented numerous explanations based on the concept that the United States is pursuing its own strategic and economic interests. This section will discuss the approaches that have been traditionally used to explain these conflicts.

The realist school began with the discussions of Thucydides over the origins of Athens’ war against Sparta. This argument was based purely on the concept that powerful nations act in their own interest and weak nations must put up with these demands.³ Modern international relations explanations for state behaviour can be found in two key texts. E.H. Carr’s Twenty Years’ Crisis and Hans Morganthau’s Politics Among Nations.⁴ These texts essentially form the basis of classical realist theories of international relations that concentrate on the system in which the state exists and whose explanations are predicated on states needing to protect themselves in order to ensure their own survival. Neo-realists emphasize to a greater extent the importance of power on a state’s behaviour. Kenneth Waltz’s Theory of International Politics argues that states are driven by the need to survive threats to them and so the balance of power within the system is of primary importance as it dictates the threats a nation faces.⁵ As an offshoot to this theory, we see John Mearsheimer’s theories of offensive realism which dictates that states must maximize their power and, where possible, seek regional and global hegemony as the only way to guarantee a state’s survival is to ensure that there are no states that are capable of threatening it militarily.⁶ The application of these theories has been discussed by a number of authors in attempts to explain the behaviour of states.⁷

This section presents some of the core concepts that the Realist Schools have in common. Realism is centred on ‘the concept of interest, defined in terms of power’.⁸ Morgenthau argues that realist theory ‘will guard against two popular fallacies: the concern with motives and the concern with ideological preferences’.⁹ Waltz supports this:

No matter how good their intentions…. Each state pursues its own interests, however defined, in ways it judges best. Force is a means of achieving the external ends of states because there exists no consistent, reliable process of reconciling the conflicts of interest that inevitably arise among similar units in a condition of anarchy.¹⁰

In this argument, realism is the only choice for leaders because ‘only a rational choice foreign policy minimizes risks and maximizes benefit and, hence, complies both with the moral precept of prudence and the political requirement of success’.¹¹ In his theory Morgenthau not only argues that realism is the dominant paradigm by which states act but he is highly critical of ‘the “legalistic-moralistic approach” to international politics’.¹² When states follow this approach, he goes on to argue, they consider international relations only on the basis of a legal argument, without considering the interest of their specific nation, thus the decisions reached could have ‘no bearing on the issue that their very existence might have depended upon’.¹³ By treating power as the unit by which we measure success in international relations, the realist paradigm argues it is the only thing for which nations strive and that a government that does not increase its power is failing in its objectives. As Tang argues:

In a nutshell, all states seek security. Because both offensive realism and defensive realism subscribe to the core assumption of realism that power is the fundamental feature of (international) politics and because political outcomes (e.g., states’ security) are primarily determined by material power, both offensive realism and defensive realism believe that seeking relative power is an important means of external self-help under anarchy.¹⁴

Waltz goes on to argue ‘because each state is the final judge of its own cause, any state may at any time use force to implement its policies’.¹⁵ Morgenthau argues that no matter ‘the ultimate aims of international politics, power is always the immediate aim’¹⁶ as without power states can achieve none of their other goals, but that by choosing to use power states become an actor in international relations.

Further, he contends that a nation is not always involved in international politics. When a state interacts with another state certain activities, including ‘legal, economic, humanitarian and cultural’¹⁷ take place and these are not part of realist theory. Although Morgenthau concedes that there are some restraints on what a state can do to achieve these ends, he leaves little room for how a nation’s own internal character can lead to different decisions in the same circumstance. Within the realist paradigm, the state is the most important unit within the international system and the only unit that conducts international politics. These states will always need to act in line with their own national interest and ‘as long as the world is politically organized into nations, the national interest is indeed the last word in world politics’.¹⁸

Neo-realism concentrates mostly on the structural factors of international relations. That is, the self-help incentive imposed by the chaos of the international system means that nations who wish to survive, as all states do, are forced to act to maximize their chances of survival. They do this by seeking to be more powerful than the other actors and thus ensure their survival, for as Kenneth Waltz argues ‘international structures are defined, first, by the ordering principle of the system, in our case anarchy, and second, by the distribution of capabilities across units’.¹⁹ By studying how these factors force states to act, it is easy to see why the internal nature of the state was not considered a vital factor.²⁰ Waltz argues that ‘states are made functionally similar by the constraints of structure, with the principle difference among them defined according to capabilities’.²¹ If the nature of international relations is systemic in its origin, then all states within the system are likely to act in a similar fashion as they are all bound to compete within the same system. The defining characteristic of each actor within the system is the power that they wield; hence states act differently from each other because the strategies they can pursue vary as a result of the differences in power. John Mearsheimer goes further, arguing that states must seek hegemony over other states because it is the only way these states can ensure their power is greater than their opponents. ‘States recognize that the more powerful they are relative to their rivals, the better their chance of survival. Indeed, the best guarantee of survival is to be a hegemon, because no other state can threaten such a mighty power’.²²

Neo-classical realism²³ takes the approach that ‘relative material power establishes the basic parameters of a country’s foreign policy’²⁴ but ‘to understand the way states interpret and respond to their external environment. They say one must analyse how systemic pressures are translated through unit-level intervening variables such as decision-makers’ perceptions and domestic state structure’.²⁵ In common with the more traditional realist approach, the national interest is still the driving factor but the options available to policy makers are limited by the nation they lead. This theory attempts to bridge the gap between realist assertions of states as like actors and the observations that states of a different character behave differently. This is important as it suggests that we do need to consider the role domestic ideology plays in the determining of foreign policy of a state. This book will achieve this by addressing how Wilsonian influences have played a role in the decisions of the United States to go to war.

Strategic motivations are not the only factors authors have presented to explain the actions of states within the international arena. Theories that have concentrated on econ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 A Wilsonian interpretation
• 2 The First World War
• 3 The War of 1812
• 4 The Korean War
• 5 The Gulf War
• 6 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index