Barack Obama and Woodrow WilsonBy Thomas E. BrewtonThere is a striking parallel between the naivete of Senator Obama and  President Woodrow Wilson in their expectation of imposing a liberal- progressive model of peace upon a fractious world.Senator Obama's faith that his personal diplomacy with our sworn  enemies will transform them into reasonable and peaceful partners is  as old as American liberal-progressivism.  Its most celebrated  expression was in the policy of the Democratic Party's progressive  president Woodrow Wilson, pronounced in his April 2, 1917, message to  a special session of Congress.President Wilson, responding to Germany's resumption of unrestricted  submarine warfare and the sinking without warning of three American  ships the previous month, declared:"The world must be made safe for democracy...we shall fight...for a  universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as  shall bring peace and justice to all nations and make the world  itself at last free..."That universal dominion of right and freedom was to be implemented,  in President Wilson's expectation, by the post-war League of  Nations.  Wilson went to Paris after the war to negotiate the Treaty  of Versailles, confident that his great personal popularity in the  United States and in Europe would convert the world to his vision of  peace through civilized diplomatic negotiation of foreign policy  conflicts.Inevitably, the League of Nations was a dismal failure that could  only protest fecklessly when the Japanese invaded Manchuria in 1931  and when Fascist Italy attacked Ethiopia in 1935, setting the stage  for World War II.  The root problem, of course, was that the League  had no military forces of its own to enforce its resolutions (nor  does the UN today).The UN's few successes in stopping aggression have only come when the  United States took the lead and committed large military forces to  the effort.  Diplomacy alone in the UN General Assembly and Security  Council results at best in unenforceable resolutions condemning  aggression or build-up of nuclear arms.Aside from the fact that Woodrow Wilson's rhetoric sounded not unlike  that of President George W. Bush with regard to Iraq and that Wilson  was promoting entry of the United States into World War I, rather  than surrender in Iraq, his sentiment was fully congruent with the  liberal-progressive policy espoused by Senator Obama in his primary  campaign speeches and in his recent speech to socialist throngs in  Berlin.Underlying liberal-progressive views about human nature and foreign  policy, despite differing circumstance, are the same for Senator  Obama and his liberal-progressive supporters as were the views that  supported President Wilson's naive policy.Both based their faith upon an unrealistic assessment of human nature  and upon their abilities to effect world peace through popularity and  personal negotiation with antagonists, without regard to the harsh  realities of conflicting national interests.In the liberal-progressive paradigm, all peoples are benevolent and  governed by reason.  This implies, dangerously unrealistically in  practice, that the Axis powers in World War I, and Islamic jihadists  today in Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East, truly desired peace  and stable relations with the United States and Israel.Seeing themselves as supremely intelligent and rational, liberals  find it inconceivable that other people might not willingly and  happily accept their conclusions and their leadership.  Therefore,  they believe, the world's problems can be solved simply by reasoned  discussions in the halls of the League of Nations or the UN.  Resort  to military force, by the same token, is irrational and  reprehensible, even in response to mortal threats to national interests.In his 1920 "Human Nature in Politics," Graham Wallas, a major  theorist in the British socialist party, called this the rationalist  fallacy: the assumption that human beings will act in domestic  politics and foreign affairs on purely rational motives and only upon  logical trains of reasoning.If Senator Obama wins the election this Fall, we can only hope that  he will be mugged by reality before allowing Iran to dominate the  Middle East and seize control of the world's major sources of oil.{ExtendedText}Senator Obama's faith that his personal diplomacy with our sworn  enemies will transform them into reasonable and peaceful partners is  as old as American liberal-progressivism.  Its most celebrated  expression was in the policy of the Democratic Party's progressive  president Woodrow Wilson, pronounced in his April 2, 1917, message to  a special session of Congress.President Wilson, responding to Germany's resumption of unrestricted  submarine warfare and the sinking without warning of three American  ships the previous month, declared:"The world must be made safe for democracy...we shall fight...for a  universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as  shall bring peace and justice to all nations and make the world  itself at last free..."That universal dominion of right and freedom was to be implemented,  in President Wilson's expectation, by the post-war League of  Nations.  Wilson went to Paris after the war to negotiate the Treaty  of Versailles, confident that his great personal popularity in the  United States and in Europe would convert the world to his vision of  peace through civilized diplomatic negotiation of foreign policy  conflicts.Inevitably, the League of Nations was a dismal failure that could  only protest fecklessly when the Japanese invaded Manchuria in 1931  and when Fascist Italy attacked Ethiopia in 1935 , setting the stage  for World War II.  The root problem, of course, was that the League  had no military forces of its own to enforce its resolutions (nor  does the UN today).The UN's few successes in stopping aggression have only come when the  United States took the lead and committed large military forces to  the effort.  Diplomacy alone in the UN General Assembly and Security  Council results at best in unenforceable resolutions condemning  aggression or build-up of nuclear arms.Aside from the fact that Woodrow Wilson's rhetoric sounded not unlike  that of President George W. Bush with regard to Iraq and that Wilson  was promoting entry of the United States into World War I, rather  than surrender in Iraq, his sentiment was fully congruent with the  liberal-progressive policy espoused by Senator Obama in his primary  campaign speeches and in his recent speech to socialist throngs in  Berlin.Underlying liberal-progressive views about human nature and foreign  policy, despite differing circumstance, are the same for Senator  Obama and his liberal-progressive supporters as were the views that  supported President Wilson's naive policy.Both based their faith upon an unrealistic assessment of human nature  and upon their abilities to effect world peace through popularity and  personal negotiation with antagonists, without regard to the harsh  realities of conflicting national interests.In the liberal-progressive paradigm, all peoples are fundamentally  benevolent and governed by reason.  This implies, dangerously  unrealistically in practice, that the Axis powers in World War I, and  Islamic jihadists today in Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East,  truly desired peace and stable relations with the United States and  Israel.Seeing themselves as supremely intelligent and rational, liberals  find it inconceivable that other people might not willingly and  happily accept their conclusions and their leadership.  Therefore,  they believe, the world's problems can be solved simply by reasoned  discussions in the halls of the League of Nations or the UN.  Resort  to military force, by the same token, is irrational and  reprehensible, even in response to mortal threats to national interests.In his 1920 "Human Nature in Politics," Graham Wallas, a major  theorist in the British socialist party, called this the rationalist  fallacy: the assumption that human beings will act in domestic  politics and foreign affairs on purely rational motives and only upon  logical trains of reasoning.If Senator Obama wins the election this Fall, we can only hope that  he will be mugged by reality before allowing Iran to dominate the  Middle East and seize control of the world's major sources of oil.Thomas E. Brewton is a staff writer for the New Media Alliance, Inc.  The New Media Alliance is a non-profit (501c3) national coalition of  writers, journalists and grass-roots media outlets.His weblog is THE VIEW FROM 1776http://www.thomasbrewton.com/