Jonah Goldberg laid down some biting criticism of Woodrow Wilson, if nothing else to underline the distinctions between the 28th president and George W. Bush, descriptions of the latter as "Wilsonian" notwithstanding. I sent him the following, which he was generous enough to reproduce on the Corner. I've adapted the letter to third-person for blogging:
Wilson was outmaneuvered on Versailles by his British and French colleagues, who made the treaty into a hairshirt ranging from incredible reparations to the destruction of every Fokker D.VII. It's painful to look at Wilson's Fourteen Points and then Versailles. Nationalism, for its part, had deep roots in every WWII Axis nation and needed no outside help.
Wilson knew how democracy worked: what left in the practice of his philosophies much to be desired was his adherence to James Monroe's moral neutrality to sovereignty:
I am proposing, as it were, that the nations should with one accord adopt the doctrine of President Monroe as the doctrine of the world: that no nation should seek to extend its polity over any other nation or people, but that every people should be left free to determine its own polity, its own way of development, unhindered, unthreatened, unafraid, the little along with the great and powerful.
Even pre-9/11, that could be dismissed as faint-hearted and insouciant. It was a lack of direct participation which, of course, allowed poorly founded republics like Germany's Weimar to teeter and fall — a problem corrected come 1945.
I think Jonah and I are in agreement in the way Bush is unlike Wilson: he has the brass to cross the legalistic boundary Wilson never could.