Free The Sorrows of Empire by Chalmers Johnson Page B

warnings about the dangers of a large, permanent military establishment to American liberty would be ever more worshiped and less heeded over time, while the government came to bear an ever-vaguer resemblance to the political system outlined in the Constitution of 1787.
     
    In 1912, Woodrow Wilson, then governor of New Jersey, former president of Princeton University, distinguished political scientist, and author of
Congressional Government,
one of the few genuine classics on the American political system, was elected president on the Democratic ticket. He had benefited greatly from the split in the Republican Party caused by former President Theodore Roosevelt’s attempt to return to politics. As the leader of the first Democratic administration in twenty years, Wilson single-mindedly set out to reform the corruption and inequities associated with America’s Gilded Age. He cut tariffs, imposed an income tax under the Sixteenth Amendment, created the FederalReserve system to perform central bank functions, enacted a federal child labor law, levied the first estate tax, and inaugurated numerous other changes that moved political power in the United States irreversibly toward Washington and the presidency.
     
    But it was in foreign policy where, for better or worse, he made the greatest innovations. Wilson began with the Mexican revolution that broke out in 1910. He could not resist interfering and backing one faction over another. This was, of course, nothing new for an American government that already had Caribbean colonies and semicolonies. It was the way he justified these acts that distinguished him from the turn-of-the-century Republican imperialists and that ultimately made him the patron saint of the “crusades” that would characterize foreign policy from intervention in the First World War through the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Woodrow Wilson was an idealist and a Christian missionary in foreign policy. He was always more concerned to do good than to be effective.
     
    The child of a chaplain in the Confederate army, Wilson was an elder of the Presbyterian Church and a daily reader of the Bible. As one of his biographers, Arthur S. Link, observes, “He never thought about public matters, as well as private ones, without first trying to decide what faith and Christian love commanded in the circumstances.” 14 Born in Virginia, Wilson was also a racist and a prude. Because of America’s republican form of government, its security behind the two oceans, and what he saw as the innate virtues of its people, Wilson strongly believed in the exceptionalism of the United States and its destiny to bring about the “ultimate peace of the world.” He did not see America’s external activities in terms of realist perspectives or a need to sustain a global balance of power. He believed instead that peace depended on the spread of democracy and that the United States had an obligation to extend its principles and democratic practices throughout the world. 15
     
    Before he was finished in Mexico, he had ordered the navy to occupy Veracruz in April 1914; provoked Francisco “Pancho” Villa’s raid of March 9, 1916, on Columbus, New Mexico; and dispatched General John J. Pershing on an unsuccessful punitive expedition deep into Mexican territory to capture Villa. Wilson publicly regarded himself as Mexico’s tutor on its form of government, a role that soured Mexican-Americanrelations for decades. A war with Mexico was barely averted, but this heavy-handed meddling in the affairs of a neighbor disguised by a cloud of high-flown rhetoric about liberal, constitutional, and North American ideals did not go unnoticed. Japan repeatedly used the precedent, along with its own rhetoric of “liberation” from Western imperialism, to justify armed interventions in Manchuria and revolutionary China, which were on Japan’s doorstep. The United States had no cogent response—except ultimately to go to war with Japan over behavior