President Barack Obama's Wilsonian moment
On Jan. 31, 1916, Milwaukee's streets were filled with 20,000 people hoping to gain entrance to the city Auditorium to hear President Woodrow Wilson speak. Wilson, weeks away from announcing that he would run for re-election, was in the middle of a Midwest speaking tour intended to calm fears that he would involve the United States in the Great War being fought abroad.
"Some men seem to have forgotten that there is no precedent in American history for any action of aggression on the part of the United States," Wilson reassured the 7,500 who were able to gain entrance to his speech, "or for any action which will show that America is seeking to connect herself with the controversies on the other side of the water."
Yet Wilson's speech was not unequivocal; the president left some room to maneuver. "God forbid that we should have to use the blood of America to freshen the color of (our) flag," Wilson said in his typically stilted prose. "But if it should ever be necessary again to assert the majesty and integrity of those ancient and honorable principles, that flag that will be colored once more, and in being colored, will be glorified and purified."
Fourteen months later, and only six months after Wilson was re-elected using the slogan "he kept us out of war," the U.S. joined the war in Europe. The U.S. presence was eventually enough to stave off Germany's march into Belgium and France, but it cost 117,000 U.S. lives.
Nearly 100 years later, another European power is on the move, as Russia continues its invasion of Ukraine's Crimea Peninsula. Last week, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton compared the actions of Russian President Vladimir Putin to those of Adolf Hitler leading up to World War II. But the parallels between President Barack Obama's predicament and Wilson's travails leading up to World War I may be more apt.
Both progressives had scant experience in international politics before being elected president; Obama was a U.S. senator for only two years before running for chief executive in earnest. Wilson spent a life in academia before a two-year stint as governor of New Jersey before being elected president in 1912.
Both Obama and Wilson were elected because of American weariness of war; Obama rode in on a wave of discontent with the war in Iraq; Wilson reassured voters that the war in Europe wasn't America's fight. Further, both presidents have been saddled with the same habit of underestimating opponents.
In December 1916, Wilson proposed a "peace without victory" plan for Europe, which included the blueprint for a "League of Peace" to which nations would hand over their sovereignty. Germany responded to Wilson's plan by announcing its submarines would begin torpedoing any vessel — civilian or otherwise — near the British Isles.
That left Wilson "sad and depressed" that the world "had suddenly reversed itself," wrote presidential adviser Edward House. But in fact, Wilson was simply provided a wake-up call to the win-at-all-cost conflict the Great War had become. His progressive anti-conflict temperament had weakened the U.S. diplomatic cause and made force a more inevitable option.
On Feb. 28, in the wake of Crimea's efforts to secede from Ukraine, the Russian alarm clock sounded for Obama. In 2012, when Mitt Romney claimed that the Russians are our "No. 1 geopolitical foe," Obama responded: "The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back."
Fast forward to just five days prior to Russia moving into Crimea, when national security adviser Susan Rice appeared on "Meet the Press" and deflected questions about whether Russia was planning an invasion. "It's in nobody's interest to see violence returned and the situation escalate," Rice said. Her statements drew howls from foes such as Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who said, "I think it's very clear that this whole operation took this administration and the intelligence community by surprise, but it shouldn't have."
Now the world is sowing the seeds of Obama's failure to take Putin seriously. Military options appear to be on the table, but it seems it would take more Putin provocation for armed conflict to be considered. Even diplomatic remedies open up a snakepit of competing national interests, and European nations seem disinterested in employing any economic sanctions that could harm their own economies.
Someone should tell Obama that 1917 is on the phone. And because of our nation's weakened diplomatic position, it may be paying a visit soon.