Word: wilsonian
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Vietnam was conceived as a Wilsonian venture. However wrong yesterday's hawks were in many respects, they were right that communism spelled ruin and misery for the peoples of Southeast Asia...
Americans may have left the remnants of their Wilsonian idealism years ago, somewhere north of the Mekong Delta. They are certainly no longer driven by a desire to "pay any price, bear any burden," as John Kennedy said, to ensure the liberties of others around the world. In a way, the crisis in the gulf brings together a fortuitously crass coincidence of American idealism and materialism; Americans look to punish the aggressor and protect their energy supplies at the same time...
...becomes easier -- there is less need to support dictators in the name of anti- Communism -- but harder to justify. Why make the effort? Seventy years ago, Americans were not wildly enthusiastic about Woodrow Wilson's crusade for democracy. Whether a post-Soviet America will want to embrace Wilsonian idealism any more than did a pre-Soviet America is an open question...
...nation is no longer moated -- economically, militarily -- by the Atlantic and Pacific. As Viet Nam instructed, what America touches does not necessarily become sacred -- an end of the Wilsonian illusion. America, which once cherished the conviction that God had endowed its national idea, began feeling lost in what might be called the Brownian motions of history -- Brownian movement being the term for molecules that fly about with no discernible pattern or reason. The American pre-eminence in manufacturing is gone. A thousand hypodermic needles are punching through the nation's borders...
...anti-Soviet feeling: In an interview with the American journalist Louise Bryant, Lenin said, "America will gain nothing from the pious Wilsonian policy of refusal to do business with us for the simple reason that our government is not to their liking." This statement has stood the test of time. Fantastic allegations about the Soviet Union's ambitions for "world supremacy" and "a world Communist government" may only lead the cause of international intercourse and cooperation into a dangerous deadlock. The hue and cry about "international terrorism" allegedly being masterminded by the Soviet Union is just as absurd...