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Ark of the Liberties: America and the World by Ted Widmer
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The foundations of Wilsonian foreign policy and its permutations under George W. Bush
A Review by Art Winslow

Woodrow Wilson is a tip-of-the-tongue name in foreign policy circles these days, largely because the members of the Bush administration are seen as revamped Wilsonians. Former Middle East envoy Dennis Ross, in his recent book Statecraft, identifies them as such, citing their belief in the transformative power of the United States and its role as an example and their conviction that divine providence guides their work -- with the profound difference, Ross notes, that Wilson "believed fervently in collective security and international law," which would limit national sovereignty and also "constitute a practical and a moral inhibition on the use of force."

Similarly, Council on Foreign Relations fellow Walter Russell Mead contends, in Power, Terror, Peace, and War, that the new claque of Wilsonians, neoconservatives who have dominated Republican foreign-policy debates in recent years, have "radically restructured the Wilsonian agenda" and that the secular shapers of progressive...
 
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