Commentary—

The Folly Of Nation Building

By Jim Powell

When the United States tries to do good by fighting other people’s wars, it is asking for trouble. We are at a disadvantage when fighting for issues that ultimately will have to be resolved by somebody else. We are at a disadvantage, too, fighting on unfamiliar terrain, dealing with people who speak different languages and have values very different from our own. We are likely to misunderstand the political situations of our allies as well as our adversaries.

This became clear when Woodrow Wilson led the United States into World War I to “make the world safe for democracy.” There was no prospect of an attack on the United States, because the British naval blockade confined the German navy to port, German submarines were neutralized by convoys, and trench warfare casualties forced Germany to conscript older men and boys.

Wilson’s intervention broke a three-year stalemate on the Western Front, enabling the French and British to win a decisive victory. Although Wilson might have been the best-educated man ever to occupy the White House — a former president of Princeton University, former governor of New Jersey, and the author of well-regarded books on American history — he played an international war game with catastrophic ignorance.

Wilson grossly underestimated the determination of the French and British to avenge their war losses with vindictive surrender terms. He didn’t understand that having surrender terms signed by representatives of the new German democracy, rather than by the German kaiser and his generals, would discredit democracy among the German people. Apparently, Wilson didn’t consider the possibility of a bitter nationalist reaction that would generate political support for a demagogue like Hitler.

Similarly, when Wilson pressured and bribed the Russian Provisional Government to stay in the war, aimed at tying up German divisions on the Eastern Front, he didn’t seem to realize that the Russian army had been plagued with problems since the war began, and it was disintegrating. It collapsed by the time Lenin made his fourth and successful coup attempt. Thus did Wilson’s misadventures in nation building contribute to the rise of both Hitler and Lenin.

If the United States had stayed out of World War I, there almost certainly would have been a negotiated settlement, Hitler wouldn’t have been able to crusade against “the shame of Versailles,” the Russian army would have survived to stop Lenin, and Stalin wouldn’t have come to power as he did.

The United States has had two notable nation building successes, in Germany and Japan following World War II. But both nations were almost entirely populated by people of a single nationality, avoiding the kind of civil war among nationalities that has devastated so many other nations. During the late 19th Century, Germany and Japan had had a dynamic private sector and some experience with constitutional limitations on government power.

It might be noted, too, that the postwar German “miracle” began in 1948 when the bold German economics minister Ludwig Erhard defied Allied occupation forces, abolishing exchange controls and price controls that throttled the economy.

Aside from Germany and Japan, the United States has a meager track record building other people’s nations. In their 2003 survey of 14 nation building cases for the Carnegie Endowment, Minxin Pei and Sara Kasper reported only two successes, both in small nations not far from the United States — Grenada (1983) and Panama (1989).

George W. Downs, professor of politics at New York University, has reported that since World War II the United States has intervened in other nations more than 35 times in developing nations, but only once — in Colombia — did a democratic government develop within ten years. There were failures in Guatemala (1954, 1966, 1972), Lebanon (1958), the Congo (1967), Thailand (1966), Vietnam (1960s). and Nicaragua (1978, 1982), among other places.

Prospects are particularly bleak for intervention aimed at establishing liberal democracy in the Middle East. As Freedom House has noted, liberal democracy hasn’t developed in any of the 16 Arab nations.

We should defend ourselves against terrorism and other threats but avoid the temptation to try to do good by becoming embroiled in other people’s wars. The odds are high that such well-intended efforts will backfire.

(Jim Powell, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, is the author of Wilson’s War, FDR’s Folly and The Triumph of Liberty.)