The inner contradictions of Wilson’s liberal mindset had been duly exposed and, in
being so, were revealed as a generic weakness in American liberalism – that is, its
inability to relate effectively to the world because of America’s predisposition
towards perceiving the alien outside through the image of its own indigenous liberal
experiences. Wilsonian liberalism sought to overcome these constraints in a
concerted form of transformative international action. But in the end this preferred
mode of interplay, merely exposed the ‘peculiar American blind spots of Wilson’^17
and had the ‘effect of projecting the limitations of the American liberal perspective
onto the world scene’.^18
Man, the State and Warreveals that Waltz had very similar reservations over
the liberal excesses of Wilsonianism. Waltz divided liberals into two camps.
‘Noninterventionist liberals’ depended more on historical forces, notions of progress
and the educative effect of model liberal democracies to create an evolutionary
process towards a peaceful world order. Working on the premise that regressive and
hostile states can and will change for the better, noninterventionists looked towards
promoting internal liberalization at a distance (e.g. free trade, arms reduction,
decolonization). ‘Messianic interventionists’ on the other hand were liberals who
disputed the mechanisms of international change. In place of what they regarded as
self-abnegating gradualism, liberal interventionists placed their trust in the trans-
formative exertion of power in order to shift the environment in a progressive
direction.
Woodrow Wilson could at times appear to be driven by the demands of national
security. But in the main, his reputation was that of a messianic interventionist who
broke new ground by extending the prospectus of engagement to the point of
promoting the creation of an international organization designed to perform
governmental functions. The objective was to move beyond the customary processes
based upon the narrow calculation of state interests and the normal dynamics of a
balance of power system. Whereas liberals had previously rejected international
organizations as unnecessary and regressive, Wilson’s advocacy of such a scheme
‘mark[ed] a turning point’.^19 It disclosed an impulse in liberalism that was both
hubristic and dangerous. Waltz does not merely reiterate the common conclusion
relating to Wilson. He applies the critique to all forms of interventionist liberalism
that occasion a moral obligation to provide final solutions to war.
Interventionist liberals are... not content with a realism that may prolong
the era of war forever. Their realism lies in rejecting the assumption of
automatic progress in history and in the consequent assertion that men must
eliminate the causes of war if they are to enjoy peace. Their realism involves
them in utopian assumptions that are frightening in their implications. The
state that would act on the interventionist theory must set itself up as both
judge and executor in the affairs of nations.^20To Waltz, such liberals would aim to ‘make a leap into the future and take all of us
with them’.^21 The reckoning was that even with the most virtuous of motives such
42 Waltz and the process of Cold War adjustment