Word: wilsonianism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...reassure Europeans that he hadn't forgotten about them. "America remains engaged in Europe," he said, attempting to refute those who say his Administration is preoccupied with Asia and the Pacific Rim. The first U.S. head of state to address the French parliament since Woodrow Wilson, Clinton sounded almost Wilsonian when he called for cooperation among America's European allies to settle the current war -- this one in Bosnia...
...beginning of the last decade of the twentieth century," Kissinger writes, using a typically grandiloquent phrase to say by 1990, Wilsonian idealism "seemed triumphant." This does not please him. He concludes his book with sentences of pro forma praise for America's idealism followed by sentences that begin with But. In the end, the buts win: "American idealism remains as essential as ever, perhaps even more so. But in the new world order, its role will be to provide the faith to sustain America through all the ambiguities of choice in an imperfect world...
...rectitude who draped foreign policy with a mantle of idealism. His amphibious forays into Latin America were designed, he said, to foster "constitutional liberty." And his rationale for bringing the U.S. into World War I was that "the world must be made safe for democracy." Criticized for being too Wilsonian, he replied, "Sometimes people call me an idealist. Well, that is the way I know I'm an American. America is the only idealistic nation in the world...
...earnest though imperfect attempt to embody the Wilsonian principle of national self-determination, the postwar settlement created several new countries that were true nation-states. The Poles got back Poland, and the Hungarians got Hungary...
Promoting the Wilsonian ideal of self-determination should be a goal of U.S. foreign policy, but not when one nationality uses the fulfillment of its own aspirations as an excuse for the suppression of others...