https://www.claremont.org/crb/article/the-great-resenter/
THE GREAT RESENTER
Patricia O’Toole’s The Moralist is yet another hagiographic account of the mission and martyrdom of Woodrow Wilson, the patron saint of American internationalists. With minor variations, O’Toole sticks to the Received Account as told by John Milton Cooper in Woodrow Wilson: A Biography (2009) and by A. Scott Berg in Wilson (2013). In this view, the 28th president came close to ushering in the millennium after World War I, but his prickly self-righteousness lost the great moment. Under the diabolic influence of Republican Henry Cabot Lodge, the story goes, the Senate refused to ratify the League of Nations treaty that Wilson had brought back from the Versailles Peace Conference. Wilson then destroyed his health in a desperate effort to persuade the American public about the League, and the world plunged back into a dark age of atavistic nationalism. O’Toole, whose previous books include biographies of Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Adams, thinks of Wilson as a moralist rather than a politician, and attributes his failure to a combination of excessive high-mindedness and an inadequate blood flow to the brain that ultimately led to his incapacitating stroke in October 1919. She deduces the latter from the translucence of the president’s ears upon his return from Versailles.
It is quite wrong to speak, as this book’s subtitle does, of the world that Woodrow Wilson made, for he made no world at all; he merely signed the Versailles Treaty by which Britain’s David Lloyd George and France’s Georges Clemenceau turned the Great War into the opening salvo of a new Thirty Years’ War. So utterly utopian was Wilson’s vision that it is unfair to characterize the internationalism of Bill Clinton or George W. Bush as “Wilsonian.” Clinton and Bush threw America’s weight around after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but they did not propose—as Wilson did—to replace America’s sovereign decision-making with a global council. Wilson’s League of Nations was closer to the conspiracy theorists’ notion of the United Nations. The commonplace belief that minor concessions on his part would have won ratification of the League of Nations treaty is untenable.
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Wilson was a latecomer to the matter of collective security. William Howard Taft, whom he defeated in the 1912 presidential election, formed the League to Enforce Peace in 1915, which proposed a collective security agreement that pledged members to arbitration and to wield economic and military force against aggressors. Wilson’s nemesis of 1919, Henry Cabot Lodge, endorsed Taft’s League the following year, remarking that “[p]robably it will be impossible to stop all wars, but it certainly will be possible to stop some wars and thus diminish their number.” Wilson at that time still was reluctant to enter World War I, to the frustration of hawks like Theodore Roosevelt.
