Title: Woodrow Wilson in Our Time: NATO's Goals in Kosovo
Abstract: Confronted with the political disintegration of the Yugoslav federation in the early 1990s, historian John Lukacs observed that Woodrow Wilson was in retrospect beginning to make Lenin look like a small fry."The ideas of this pale Presbyterian professor-president," he wrote, "were more revolutionary than those of the Bolshevik radical from the middle Volga region."[1]It's hard to argue with that.Just as Wilson's propagation of national self-determination destroyed European empires in 1918, it also demolished states Wilson helped to create--Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia--and it continues to pose challenges to the sovereignty of states that did not exist in Wilson's time.For all the mischief and misery it begat, the Soviet Union is gone.The ideas upon which it was founded are today taken seriously by nobody of consequence.Lenin is dead, but Wilson lives as possibly the most vital force in the international relations of our time.This the more so, possibly, because Wilson himself is presently so badly understood.His Fourteen Points, presented to Congress on 8 January 1918, was simultaneously a statement of war aims and the proposed blueprint of principles for postwar peace."An evident principle runs through the whole program," Wilson noted, "the principle of justice to all peoples and nationalities, and their right to live on equal terms of liberty and safety with one another, whether they be strong or weak."[2]By declaring balance-of-power diplomacy defunct and raising national self-determination as a principle on which peace would henceforth depend, Wilson prescribed nothing less than a fundamental reconstitution of international relations.