Email this citation. Wilsonianism Resurgent? Introduction Each time at the end of the two great wars that did so much to shape the course of the twentieth century, the United States attempted to define the outlines of a new world order? His more general point, however? It was also repeated regularly thereafter: by other realists like the influential Hans J. It is remarkable, in fact, how frequently those opposed to what they saw as the less acceptable face of American foreign policy after often turned to Kennan and what they believed was his sound advice to the United States to behave more like a normal country and less like a political crusade.
Reading later attacks on realists, one could easily be forgiven for thinking that they had been apologists for the excesses of the cold war rather than some of its more effective intellectual opponents.
With the end of the cold war, one might have predicted that this persistent and somewhat overheated debate would have died.
But this was not to be. Even George Bush was not immune to the disease? For this he was severely assailed and soon came under fire from a battery of opponents who pointed out that, while the idea of promoting freedom was all very well in theory, in practice it provided policymakers with little or no guide as to how to deal with a host of pressing problems on an everyday basis.
It also ignored the obvious lesson of history, which taught that a policy based on the virtues of democracy was bound to fail. One only had to look at what had happened after Word War I to see this.
