to my mind, professor not has done more than anyone to tell us what woodrow wilson had to deal with, to tell us the history and the moment of woodrow wilson, to tell us what he confronted in the world he lived in. professor tony smith has done more than anything to tell us why this matters. frankly, every president since wilson, it has not been a question of whether or not they were will sony and -- whether or ian or not.re wilson so much of his book tonight still continues to guide american foreign-policy. some might say hot -- might say haunt american policy. what professor smith will help us understand in a more foregoing way helps drive america today. i'm pleased to have the author of this book, why wilson matters , to explain to us. then you can go buy your own copy. professor smith, the floor is years. applause [applause] professor smith: i think everything is working. i think he introduced me in a way that introduced my family. my sister and i grew up in richland hills in the heart of the metroplex and my friend karen jones used to go with me to luann's for those of you to remember. we were the champions of the north texas push. this was before luann's closed in 1970. -- [inaudible] the lakewood ranch used to slip in because they would be that be drinking underage. karen and i were horrified because we were. they were calling attention to a widespread problem in dallas. i'm glad to see a few of you know these places. i have known, for a long time -- known tom for a long time. someone i've also known for a long time. meet jeff engel is a real treat. i saw that there was a reference to a book that he and tom had published. it sounds interesting. i'm waiting for my copy. when life strikes the president, i noticed that neither of the bush presidents is in it, nor is jimmy carter. it looks like it's going to be a wonderful book. who get up early and watch cbs news may see when charlie rose says, your world today in 90 seconds. i'm going to have to give you wilson's world this evening and 2400 seconds, about 40 minutes, what we should keep ourselves to. this is an excellent time to be discussing woodrow wilson. april 6 was the centennial of the declaration of war against germany. the result of which was that an army by december of 1918 of 1.8 million american soldiers were in europe. 126,000 died, 200-4000 were wounded. this pales in comparison with -- 240,000 were wounded. the bottom-line is the fact that -- the american contribution work decisive. it is possible the germans would have won if the united states had not intervened when and how it did. the result was to make woodrow wilson the presiding figure at that openednference in paris early in 1919. finally, the person most responsible for the creation of the league of nations in april 1919. in for two years of centennial's. to april 2019, passing by what was called the armistice, but was in fact the german surrender in november 1918. this war left huge marks on the 20th century. most historians give it more weight than they give the second world war, however near and more horrific it may seem to us. the reason is that it unleashed several forces. the bolshevik revolution being the most obvious. of fascism, the rise in italy and nazi germany. we can shift our gaze to the world under the domination of western imperialism, most notably china. of thes the beginning rise of what was later called third world nationalist revolutionary movements. the impact of these forces is still felt today. in a way, communism and fascism are more or less dead ideologies. one thing less commonly brought up is wilsonianism. the reason it is important is that it is still with us today. it has been with us ever since fdr entered the white house in 1933. particularly, since the german invasion of poland in 1939. fdr was close to wilson and his secretary of state was, in fact, much closer. the transposition of wilsonian thinking into american foreign-policy came about very easily with the outbreak of world war 2. all of that said, not much is known or appreciated about woodrow wilson. i would say that he could win the most important president who was forgotten or dislike. he was certainly dislike in his own time by people who opposed the war, to whom he repaid the favor by punishing them. hadliberal left, who supported his presidency and the war, were shocked his repression of dissidents to the war. people he labeled dissidents, people who he called the hyphens , german-americans, irish-americans who were opposed to the war. people who were socialists or pacifists, whom he imprisoned or allowed vigilante groups to go out after. , who weren-americans treated very badly indeed. there is a three-part pbs series going on about world war ii, in -- in many ways, i don't think it is particularly good. but what is good is how it focuses on the crackdown of wilson on these people. or his disregard as to african americans. the dislike of wilson continued far past the war itself. the united states did not enter the league of nations by a vote in the senate in march of 1920, confirmed later. theas soundly rejected american public in the presidential election of november that year, when a republican was returned to the white house. the first of three republicans with coolidge and hoover. it was only when fdr came back fdr wilson came -- when came into office that wilson began to be remembered. even at that time, he was despised by the intellectual elite. walter lippman hans martinson, , george kennan, the list could go on and on. he was also disliked by, as the time went on, the left in the united states. they saw him as a person who actually was talking about peace and democracy as a front for american economic interests abroad with a strong military. this was kind of a marxist widespread in american universities in the 1960's, particularly into the 70's. the right did not like him, either. he was for strong government. and because -- if you were a real list, he seemed to idealistic and too much of a moralist. the bottom line was that wilson was simply not appreciated. most recently, he has been opposed by african-americans. you who have followed black lives matter, you know there were protests -- wheretions at princeton wilson was a student and professor, and president until early in the 20th century. he was in politics. he did not like to call it political science. matter asked lives the legitimate question, if wilson's most favorite statement -- most famous statement was that he wanted to make the world safe for democracy, why didn't he do so in america? that leads up to something that was reminded to me a minute ago. the book is titled "why wilson matters." believe it or not, princeton university contacted me and said , could you change the title? we are going to be occupied. it is too positive. could you change it to something like, does wilson matter? i have some explaining to do. to a book iions go published in 1994, again with princeton, called "america's mission: the united states and the worldwide struggle of democracy." book introduced was the idea that the cold war had been won essentially, not thanks to our economic and military power alone, as much as this was true, but also because the contest between liberal internationalism and proletarian internationalism, and struggleal struggle, a of fate, if you will, had been won by liberal internationalists. it is a polite term for wilsonian. but since nobody likes wilson, no one wanted to use that term. liberal internationalism is kind of a camouflage phrase for him. whati pointed out was that won the cold war was liberal internationalism. it was not either containment policy nor military. it was a combination of things. i don't know how many of you pick this up -- a flyer distributed this evening. is first point on this flyer what i call the virtuous diamond of liberal internationalism. it is a combination of democracy , multilateralism, economic openness, and american leadership. before together resulting in either a regional or an international zone of peace. the great liberal promise that takes us back to the enlightenment. people did not want to recognize this was wilsonian. what did this have to do with woodrow wilson? he did not leave a good record that was coherent of his thinking he had series of strokes since he was a young man and finally was not able to finish his philosophy of politics. which he wanted to do after he left the white house. he started it, something like 20 pages were written. at any rate, what tried to do was to re-establish what wilson might have said had wilson been able to put together the pieces of the puzzle as the puzzle lay before him in 1918-1919, the answer is to look at his analysis of germany. germany, for him, was a malignant country. and it was malignant for a combination of reasons. it authoritarian. it was militaristic. it whereas imperialist, it was protectionist, and as a result of all that's things it thought in balance of power terms. when you put all this together, you have what he called the perfect flower of war. now, the important thing to keep in mind here is that not all authoritarian governments are necessarily, for wilson, malignant. germany, however, was capable of putting all of this together, although he was careful to separate the german people from what he called the german imperial government. so that when the united states declared war on germany, the united states declared war, not the government of the united states. not against the german people but against the german imperial government. the government was at the origin of the problem. now, if we look at the second citation on the handout that i have for you, you will see what is the most famous declaration that wilson ever made, when he asked the congress in early april of 1917 for a declaration of war, saying the world must be safe -- made safe for democracy. its pause most presented upon at the tested foundations of political liberty. a steadfast concert for peace can never be maintained except bay partnership of democratic nations, no autocratic government could be trusted to keep faith within it or observe the covenantsment must be a league of honor and partner ship of opinion. only free people can hold their purpose and honors steady to a common end and perform the interests of mankind to narrow interests of their own. here, then, is the origin of the ideas that unlay the league. that it would come together predominantly as a group of democratic nations, but there was a slight problem in this. i'll get to that problem later. let me switch back to the 1940s, if i can jump ahead to the , 1940s. the 1924s is the wilsonian decade, where we have the britain-wood system which integrated the leading capitalist economies into a form of regulated capitalism that creates the greatest burst of growth and prosperity among these countries in world history. some people say it's late 19th 19th century with the british but i don't think statistics , hold that up. secondly, the gold standard, was the occupying of japan and germany, which converted these two highly authorize tarean into,horitarian countries guess what, democracies. and in the case of germany it mattered particularly because that allowed the marshall plan to look forward to the european union. it also set the framework for the north atlantic treaty organization, or nato, which was created in '49. you put all of these things together, some people would throw the u.n. in but i think that's less important. you get, again, the virtuous diamond. a place in and american leadership is indispensable but the fact the united states is a democracy but its closest allies are democracies and they're joined together in a collective military situation but they trade with each other and they do so through multinational networks of an extraordinary sort, never been seen in world history, by countries that are not acting under authoritarian orders to do this. this is really quite an accomplishment and completely fulfills what it was that the president was looking for, i think, in 1919. now, the third quote here is an astonishing quote. it is a quote from gorbachev. 75 years after the united states declared war on germany, the cold war over, gorbachev came to the united states and he went to fulton, missouri, and there on the anniversary of winston churchill's famous address in 1946, saying that a iron curtain was falling across europe, gorbachev, three years -- nearly three years after the fall of the berlin wall, declared that the end of the cold war was a victory for common sense, reason, democracy. the united nations should creating stuck toward to impose sanctions and other means of couple pulse when rights of minority groups especially are being violated. and went on to underscore the universality of human rights, accept the ability of international interference wherever human rights are violated and democracy must prove that it can exist as the antithesis of to tall -- totalitarianism. this means we must move from the national to the international arena. on today's agenda is not just a union of democratic states but also a democratically organized world community. that's really quite an extraordinary statement. well, see if i can find where i am in my own notes here. during the 1990s, after my become crane out, i took my ball off the eye of what was going on with liberal internationalism. i am at a very liberal university. and i got, i started writing the become on ethnic groups and foreign policy. ethnicity and gender were -- all liberals are into that, and so in 1997 i was at the wilson center in washington in 1998 i was the council on foreign religiouses in new york, and i sort of missed what was going on in liberal international relations theory during the 1990s. finally my become came out with harvard in 2000, and i was giving book talks and right in the middle of it all, 9/11 happened. following 9/11 came something really to me out of the blue, and that was the bush doctrine. i have the bush doctrine down here on -- i'm not going read all the bush doctrine. don't worry. but we have got citations from the bush doctrine which are very meaningful. what they argue is something that at first in 2003 i wasn't quite clear what was going on. i knew that the language was wilsonian but there was something wrong about the accent. it was like going from -- i don't know -- texas to inning explained you understand what is being said but you don't quite understand there's something about it that is peculiar. well, the bush doctrine said all the right things. if we go back to the virtuous diamond it was there democracy promotion, open markets, cooperation among allies, u.s. leadership, world peace. and so in the fourth entry i've got here for your takeaway pages, i have the opening statement by george w. bush, which is replete with these words, and then his final statement in the pursuit of our goals our first imperative is to clarify what we stand for. the united states must defend liberty and justice because these principles are right and true for all people everywhere. no nation owns these aspirations, and no nation is exempt from them. america must stand firmly for the nonnegotiable demand human digit it in, rule of law, limits on absolute power of the state, free speech, freedom of work, respect for private, religious tolerance, and the national security of the out must start from these core beliefs and look outward for possibilities to expand liberty. this is liberal internationalism. but it's also not traditional liberal internationalism. what i'm going to argue is that it differs in fundmental ways from the way liberal internationalism was thought another by wilson and during the cold war period. what had happened -- i will try to go through this quickly because it's very complicated argument -- is that the political science establishment in the united states in the i'm no longer in at the good graces i used to be, began to conceptualize three ideas of amazing force. the first was called democratic peace theory. if democracy spreads, peace will spread. look at the european union. the second was democratic transition theory. that all countries can become democracies. the transition from authoritarianism to democracy isn't that difficult. look what we did for germany and japan. we can do it anywhere. the third idea was that since the desirable peace is possible through democracy, there's the responsibility to protect, a new justice war doctrine that meant we could invade any country we wanted that was authoritarian, provided it inflicted huge human rights prices on its citizenry. -- crises on its citizenry. well, as i think tom knox -- where is tom knock -- as tom he,k would say, where is anyway? he's around here somewhere. as he would say my reaction to , this was not only to be against the war but to suddenly say, what have i been doing writing all these wonderful things about liberal internationallallism when it's under the flag of wilsonianism, democracy promotion and human rights, we're engaged in this -- well, what did obama call it? dumb war with the invasion of iraq. not that the war against afghanistan to get rid of al qaeda was wrong, but tofully the flag of operation iraqi freedom, the iraq and afghanistan were going to be democracyized, what -- democratized, what was going on here? i was, for a while, flummoxed. my oppositionwhat to the war should also translate into an opposition to things that i personally liked, like human rights watch, amnesty international, doctors without borders. you name it, i'm probably a member of it. okay, so this went on for a while, this kind of confusion, how had the 1940s, the greatest decade the history of american foreign policy, how had it given way, beginning in 19 -- 2003, to the greatest disaster in american foreign policy, which continues with us today. in both cases, using liberal internationalism as an explanation, while the only way to deal with this was to go back to woodrow wilson and study in more depth than i had before what wilson had to say. what i discovered -- yeah -- does this work better? >> ok. mr. smith: okay. so, what i found in going back to woodrow wilson was that for him, democracy was very much a question of time and place. you cannot expect the democracy will spread globally, either quickly or easily or perhaps at all. he illustrated this with the french revolution, opposed to the american revolution. our revolution, he said, was bare lay revolution at all. we war simply asserting the rights of the english, in institutions that were colonial and had been built by the english. the french -- and we were doing it with the support of the church and the church that was most involved in this was, guess which one? the presbyterian church which was woodrow wilson was a member of. in fact calvinism in genoas the opposite of -- in genoas the -- in general was the opposite of the anglican church. what we have here-and-argument -- what we have here is an argument that democracy is something that is only suited to had an peoples who certain cultural history to them. well, if that's the case, what are these cultural prerequisites? here, the more i read wilson, the more i became persuaded that there was the dog that didn't bark, and the dog that didn't bark was calvinism. and it was particularly the covenant of the presbyterian church. this was the template of wilson how democracy comes about. i don't know how many of you belong to the group of churches that today can be called affiliated with presbyterians in terms of their domestic organization, but it's not just churches. it's also reform judaism, and explains at least in part, think, why wilson was so welcoming of jewish americans into princeton and then into his administration, and also was protective of the notion of a jewish homeland in the far east. -- i mean the middle east. so, what we have then is the notion that you can strip it able from calvinism. you don't have to be christian. you don't have to be white. in fact, what these protestant denominations began to do was to found universities like the american university in cairo, the american university in beirut, also in iran and turkey, they were going to convert these muslims to christians. didn't work very well. what they did convert them to was constitutionalism, and many of the liberal movements that we have seen in the middle east come out of these plants in the 19th -- late 19th and early 20th century to missionary schools that spread in so many parts of the world. let's get back without me running over time to what was going on in the united states. in the united states, the critical mistake that was made was to think that local cultures don't matter. now, it's true, we were a necessary condition to german democratization but we were far from a sufficient condition for german democratization. that depend on the german people themselves. could not have happened without a strong german middle class, a strong german protestant and also catholic movement that were antifascist, without high level of economic doubt. without a perceived doctrine from the kaiser, the notion of civic honor and duty of bureaucrats. i mean, the germans were not difficult to democratize. yeah, it took awhile, but germany is anybody's noticed remains very much germany and yet in maybe ways it was fundamentally changed by the american occupation. or take the only country that democratized after world war i and there was no more occupation. it was czechoslovakia. became a model democracy by the '30s and it did so not because american troops occupied czechoslovakia but because the czechs and the slovacs slovacs and what they were able to work among themselves. in short if you do not look at the character of the people you are saying you're going to democracyize, you're going to get in trouble. this happened the iraq. people really thought that democracy would spring out in iraq? anyone who looks -- who has any background in the area would have said, this is an absurd belief, and yet i can document that it was a real belief. now, i know what some of you are thinking. you're thinking this was all a facade over something else. it was really the weapons of mass destruction. please, it was not the weapons of mass distraction. everybody was clued in that this was the calling card but there oar persuasions, other arguments that are more persuasive. for example, that george bush wanted to show his father george , h.w. bush that he could do something right. or there was lot of oil there and we could beat opec if we that go oil. or look at the position of iraq. it touches our friends, israel and saudi arabia, and it also touches or enemies, syria and iran. what a beautiful place to hold, with all that oil and so toe -- and to show the world what we can do. democracy was an afterthought. it really wasn't an afterthought. it was in the forefront of the global war on terrorism. now, i'm not saying the other factors didn't matter. think they did. i'm not giving only one cause for the invasion. but there was the belief, extraordinary, totally mistaken, that we could democratize these countries and that in doing so, we could create the same kind of peaceful attitude in the arab middle east that weed a created with the european union. now, you're asking yourself, how do i know this? well, i think i know it because the ideology is very easy to see how it went from the university seminar rooms into the white house. there's what i call a food chain or could also be called a gravy chain because money is involved in it -- that goes from these -- from harvard and yale and princeton and stanford and other leading organizations, into groups like brookings or the american enterprise institute or a view virginia identity -- variety 0 other plays where policymakers go and the early 1990s were a time everybody wanted to no now what we do now? what's the purpose to our power? and the answer was, well, just democratize as much of the world as we can. bring about peace, freedom, prosperity and an increase in american national security. you can see this in specific groups. the progressive policy institute which was related to the democratic party, is -- it's mind-boggling to read the statements which they put out, or the project for the new american century, which was the center of the neoconservative movement. okay. it can be easily documented these people went into overdrive to push the idea that the iraq war was going to be easily won, democracy would be the result, and then there would be falling dominoes in the middle east as democracy took hold. we see this even more strikingly to me, or more worrisome to me, in studies that came out from apparently totally nonpartisan sources. rand, whose major settlement is in santa monica, california. all kinds of government grants to write eenormous studies -- flied the handouts -- called such things as a nation -- a beginner's guide to nation-building. nation and state building. how we're going to democratize all these people. democraciesize all these anymore are you kidding we're going democratize afghanistan? i mean, what possible belief could hold up for five minutes to such a preposterous idea? well, tens of millions of dollars went into it. hundreds of thousands of lives were lost. billions of dollars were spent proving that it could happen. what it proved is it couldn't happen. well, what occurs, then in all of this, is the notion in the bush white house that it will happen, and he gets elected a second time, believe it or not. but what i want to do in making my argument is to say that it doesn't stop here. it doesn't stop. this isn't a neoconservative plant within the republican party. if you look on my handout thing, the people who wrote blurbs. it's number five on the handout -- to a nation -- the 2009 - publication of nation buildin, it includes prominent german, swedish, high government officials, people who have been secretaries or equivalent of secretaries of state and also includes kofi anan and thought that state-building could be accomplished. one mystery to me is how anybody could -- came to this belief. the men who wrote this -- mostly men, but there were some women, like samantha power, who had ideas that they were trained at these best universities during the cold war, but professors who knew better than all of this. i mean, i knew better than all of this instinctually because i'd been trained by these people myself. so what happened then -- i'm going to be running out of anytime a minute -- is the proof that this is really such a strong conviction in washington, takes us to the obama administration. some of you may be aware that in 2016, jeffrey gold buying -- jeffrey goldberg published a highly influence shall in my view not particularly good article called the obama doctrine in "the atlantic monthly." there wasn't such thing as the obama doctrine. it doesn't exist. obama simply updated the bush doctrine. he didn't change it. this is as good an argument as i can find to show the power of ideas. i'll give you just two examples of this during the obama years. first, the endless decisionmaking he had to go through during 2009 to decide whether to surge in afghanistan or not, and then he decided to do so. after he said he had spent all his time reading about vietnam. he didn't read about vietnam. unit sure he didn't read about vietnam. what he read were the rand reports and general david petraeus' awful book called "counter insurgency: a manual" all of which were nation and state-building devices which either glibbly passed over vietnam or just talked about vietnam without coming to any real conclusions. those also are available online for free and their listed on my handout today. so obama surged. didn't surge as much as secretary of state clinton wanted him to. he only put it in traditional 30,000 service members in 2010. he said he would have them out by 2014. three years ago, by my counting. secretary clinton wanted 100,000 and wanted it to increase. okay. this is all very unfortunate mistake. but obama -- it's amazing, in book i have quote after quote after quote -- he didn't learn. he actually thought he was winning in afghanistan. i don't know what he thought he was winning, democracy? he thought the was winning. in 2011, when the april spring emerged. he did what any liberal internationalist would do. he saluted the arab spring -- so did i, have to admit -- and then intervened in libya. now, he calls that intervention in libya the biggesting my stake of his presidency. actually hillary's doing. wasn't his doing. but he had to -- i have quotes here from obama that it won't go over -- he put all kinds of suge sugar goetting on it about how the egyptian people are going to show the world that 6,000 years of history is behind them as they'll introduce democracy into egypt. 2011. okay. as far as libya goes, it would be in same, finally democratic. as for hillary, when in october of 2011 moammar gadhafi was killed, cbs daimler and say what you said? she said we came, we saw, he died. well, probably million people have died thanks to cad moammar gadhafi's fall. was mad main and a crew author tarynan. the would be nothing but anarchy in the country. this takess to the end of the line because by 2011, they were also saying, obama and especially secretary clinton, that assad had to go. he was unilaterally deposed by washington. had they contacted moscow? no. had they contacted? tehran, of course not. they decided themselves that assad had to go. so, go he would. and they were going to fund the so-called moderate arabs. by 2014, president obama admitted in public testimony that there were maybe five or six they had failed. five or six there was no such thing as the moderate arabs. there will a few but most of them were fronts for al qaeda that just wanted our weapons. the kurds are the single exception here. enough, i could get into why obama became a liberal internationalist, was one. part of it came from the fact he was been that way, as a black man, a constitutional lawyer, as a community organizer in chicago, what do you expect in but he also used all the buzz words of the time. he used words like, the universal appeal of democracy. the universal value of democracy. the nonnegotiable human rights that were everywhere in the world. if anything more than george bush did it. okay, so, we get to finally 2015, and the light comes on in obama's mind that this nation and state-billing this was a mistake. but it's too late. he only has a year and a few months left in his presidency. when he finally announce tout his cabinet the whole thing has been a mistake. they were -- the question was how the mistake took so long to be corrected. well, let me conclude by turning to your next subject, which is the first 100 days of donald trump. one of the ways they were corrected was by the election of donald trump as president of the united states. liberal internationalism in important ways did itself in. first of all it got involved in imperialist wars it could not win and that for good reason, angered and scared the american public. certainly angered and scared me. don't know about you. about three million american service members have now served in muslim countries since 2003. they come back to their families with post-traumatic stress disorder, they come back with all kinds of tales of suicides taking more of their colleagues than enemy fire. they come back with defeat written all over them because they have been defeated, by the way, sorry to tell you this. we have been defeated time and time again in these wars and gore together continue to be -- and we are going to continue to be defeated in these wars. afghanistan is going south for sure. look at iraq and -- the whole thing is unbelievable. it's not unbelievable. totally believable. at any rate, this scares and angers the american public, and donald trump says something very important. he says i'm not going to push human rights and democracy. we will defend the national interests but we're not going to , engage in this will of the wisp talk about human rights -- and monday when erdogan won the election in turkey, he called erdogan congratulated him. he was an authoritarian, don't pretend his not that she is not. he was contradicting his secretary of state when he said the election was rigged and all these people are in jail and torture is going on. didn't matter to donald trump. i have to tell you something, i don't think it would have mattered to woodrow wilson, either, for the simple reason that we cannot preach these things to people who are not ready to hear us. now, it doesn't matter -- we certainly would like them to become this bay but that they would respect human rights, give equality to women and so on and so forth. one of the best ways toern sure they won't do it is to try to force them to do it. in guatemala there's a statement, our culture is our resistance. and so you have the mayan communities that assert their mayan personality. that fine in guatemala. in the muslim world aid by becoming more muslim than they have in generations in part because of the pushes from outside. now, although i agree with donald j. trump on this, there's significant difference between trump and wilson. wilson was not going to engage in war to bring about -- he was not an imperialist. he was an idealist, moralist, but not a utopian and not an imperialist. therefore he would create something like the legal that would protect democracies and foster democracies where they had some chance of existing. but he one going to send in the troops with bayonets to force people to do this. trump so far as i can see is not interested in a league with anybody. he is leaving the paris climate accords, leaving the trans-pacific economic agreement, he is leaving the kinds of multinational organizations that can sponsor democracy and alliances among democratic people. for these reason, although you can see a superficial similarity between wilson and trump, in fact the differences outweigh the similarities. the second -- i'm going to kind of conclude on this -- is something that i haven't talk about all and that is the neoliberal economic globalization. now, this was something that you might say is liberal internationalist and in a way it, except that are not woodrow wilson democracy always had to be regular nateed. think canada, thing sweden, any of the scandinavian countries. had to be ways in which democracy wasn't going to be undermined by capitalism, but instead strengthened by capitalism. he was -- wilson was not against a free market. he was against an unregulated three market. think how many banks collapsed in united states between 2007 and 2009. not a single major canadian bank collapsed. they're regulated. that's the difference. also regulate their immigration. they don't have immigration problems because they regulate that, too. i won't get into immigration. the point here is that it was this economic globalization that was unregulated that created the extraordinary economic disparities in the united states, probably the largest that ever have existed in this country, certainly as great as any that ever existed, that is resulted in not only a relative but absolute decline in the purchasing power of at least 60% of our population. of course these people are going to vet for donald j. trump. he says they're globalizing the middle class while they're impoverishing our middle class. he is right. the trouble is he talks the talk but doesn't walk the walk. he -- what he does is, he allows crony capitalism to grow. he puts his daughter and his sons in charge of his businesses. i don't know how much money ivanka is now making with her line of clothes but seems to be considerable. the sons are doing much better. they did lose the huge deal with the chinese but something else will come along. he has honey-combed hit administration with former lobbyists who he said he would never hire. in other words sold out the very , people who thought that he was going to bring them help. yes, he helped the carrier people. but it looks as though both career and ford were going to bring investments home anyway. what about wilsonian reaction to this? wilson would have said, yes, it's fine to have open markets but they must be regulated and those who benefit from them must be taxed for the benefit of the entire country. this means, for example, that the 2.5 to $3 trillion in corporate profits abroad should be brought home and tacked. we should probably lower the corporate income tax from now to 10%. fine. but i think this is something that bernie sanders and senator elizabeth warren and nobody bell prize lawyer yets paul krugman and joseph stigly tz would agree with. there's something like agreement between people that economic globalization good at out of hand and agreement with trump but they have a solution that would re-enforce our democracy where i'm afraid that trump is going in the other direction. let me conclude by saying that wilson would say in effect, physician, heal thyself. we have another problem at home. the drug problem, the prison problem, the inequality and wealth -- that we'll always have with it bus the annual decline in the purchasing power of the lower 60 or even 80% of the population. so, would conclude by saying, why wilson matters, that wilson would have seen all of this. there's nothing new that wilson would not have seen in what is going on today. that's why i'd like to conclude find,k with a page i can which is the last statement on the handout sheet that i have, address.s do you have it, jeff? printed in "the nation's service," which i'm sure tom knows as a princeton graduate. this princeton motto. the world's memory must be kept alive or we shall never into an end to old mistakes. we're in danger lose our identity and become infantile in every generation. i need not tell you that i believe in full explicit instruction and history and politics. the experiences of people and fortunes of government and the whole story of what men have attempted and what they've have accomplished through the form of change and purpose. you do not know the world until you know the men who have given your brief run and there is no sanity operable to those schooled in the thought that we keep. do you wonder i ask for the old drill, memories of time again by, school offering present and tradition, keeping of faith with the past as a preparation for leadership in the day of social change. that's why wilson matters. thank you forrure attention. -- for your attention. [applause] >> thank you all. [inaudible] [laughter] [inaudible] >> you mentioned during your presentation wilson and calvinism. could you explain what you mean by the relationship between wilsonian internationalism and calvinism? what's the relationship there in the prerequisite for democracy? >> the interesting thing about wilson he was the son and grandparents or presence -- grandson of presbyterian minister. he played every day and read from the bible every day. the thing i found so interesting and terrific about the presbyterians was that they have two books, i think -- the epesto pailans do, too. one called the book of worship having to do with the beliefs be that all presbyterians must have. the other is the book of order, and the book of order readded like a constitution. what you find in this is that to be a minister you must be ordained in a seminary that is recognized by the presbyterian church, where princeton what the major seminary of the time. then once you passed all your exams and things like greek and lattin and hebrew and church history, you will be vetted, givennure ordaineds a a minister, and the ministers will propose you to congregations who are in need of a minister. my understanding is that reform jewry is very much like this, too, and i assume other protestant dedominations are as -- the other ministers will propose you to congregations who are in need of a minister. my understanding, by the way, is that the reform jewry is very much like this, too, and i assume other protestant dedominations are as well. you're saying yes? exactly. which they got -- it comes from the cincinnati movement in ohio. and the contact between the jewish germans and the protestant reformation. reformed jewry is the same way. you don't have to be a calvinist. my friend, dr. tucker, will say something like this. it worked before. congregation is empowered through deacons, elders who associate themselves with the minister where he or meetings to other ministers. the covenant, at the center of all this, is changeable. that a womankable .ould be a minister the same is true now of homosexual ministers in the presbyterian church and in the episcopalian church. and in reform judaism, too. what we see is a way in which the constitution changes over time. now, if you look at, i have a definition of the covenant the brother richard. if you look at the covenant and think about, if you get at one of the extraordinary books of orders that the presbyterians have, it's so democratic, you immediately want to convert. it's terrific if you are a democrat, that is, because they have checks and balances built into them. they have all kinds of information and freedom of speech built in. this, then, becomes a template for the american constitution. in many ways, it was these dissident calvinists who wage the revolutionary war against the anglican ritz. i can give many examples of this from boston, where the major founded byurial site calvinists was dug up by the anglican church. do you know what this does if you are a calvinist? you get mad, you enter a revolutionary force. princeton itself became a now, this then leads to the extraordinary history of princeton. i don't know how long i can go on before you cut me off, i'm really into this calvinist stuff. john witherspoon, who was -- one thing i found out in all of this was the greatness of the scottish enlightenment, which i hadn't appreciated before, and the presbyterians in the presbyterian church was most powerful in scotland. i there was early contact between enlightenment thinkers like adam smith and david hume and the church, so that by the time that witherspoon arrived at in 1773, he was a minister. he told his students that there is nothing that the states will teach you that reason cannot sustain. woe. nothing that feith -- faith can give you that reason cannot sustain. this was a mating of the enlightenment with faith. quite extraordinary, if you ask me. this is why if you see these various groups that go along with this, they have long sessions of prayer and religious meditation and then, again, they enter into conversation with one another. in many ways this is the constitution. if you look at the great statements by wilson on the covenant of the league of nations, it's all there. in kansas city, september 9, 1919, wilson got so excited that he held up -- he waved at the crowd his copy of "the covenant" and said that this was the covenant of the league of nations and that he was a descendent of the covenanters of scotland. he meant the constitution. the question is, what other peoples can become like this? you don't have to be christian or white. i mean, india, i don't know. we can argue about a lot of countries. tunisia could become a functioning liberal democracy. i happen to think so. maybe cuba. cuba has a lot of the ingredients that could lead to a liberal democratic takeover there. a white country and i don't think it's particularly christian anymore, either. is,e it is, but the point it's not particularly restricted. wilson was trying to overcome the idea you had to be white, a british dissent, christian, particularly not a catholic or , to be alical full-fledged american. it was enough to be a liberal democrat to be an american. that was one of his many great racers. sorry that i went on so long. >> i just had a couple of quick questions. number one, early on you mentioned that since wilson, every president that has farmers , tom has been with sony and a degree, more or less. how wilsonian was lyndon johnson? mr. smith: that's fair. first of all, it was since fdr. neither nixon nor lbj will wilsonian, that's quite right. in the book i do have reservations for these people. on the other hand, nobody talked so stridently against -- in other words, they would engage in open economies worldwide. they would serve these in late as important to us. the idea that either lbj or nixon would have said, voting trump, that nato is? that trump diluted the best saluted the british exit from , that trump law -- will eu.hat trump mocked the it's unlikely that they would have adopted as asians as extremely anti-liberal as all of that. to someone like me it is shocking. he has begun to reverse himself -- good. just like that fleet going toward north korea reversed itself. i don't know. [laughter] >> my second quick question is can you define the difference between capitalism and corporpp -- corporatism? and give an idea of how it affects democracy, today? that is a really hard question. what i would say is that capitalism can be of many different types in many countries. it can be small capitalism or corporate. corporate capitalism has the capacity to bego multi nation lal be global. -- multinational, be global. that is at the point they find the cheapest resources. if they pollute that is up to the local people to decide. to pay the lowest wages and if it isn't unionized that is for local people to decide. if they park their profit abroad because they are taxed that is for the people to decide. -- for the corporation to decide. an example of this that took my breath away was last year, when apple corporation was told by the european commission it had to give $14 billion in profit do remember thisyone awful story? to the irish government. if you will recall, the irish government refused to except the taxes. they said absolutely not. we have all these corporate tax havens here. if we tax apple the others won't come. so, the european commission said, well, the united states should tax them. apple is an american company. the obama administration immediately said we don't tax corporate profits of growth. do you wonder why donald j trump had a concern appeal? -- had a certain appeal? it did to me when he gets angry at things like this. i hope he lowers corporate taxes. i personally think they are too high so more money is repatrioted at a reasonable rate and injected into the economy. where is the young lady from princeton who wanted to say something? i met her earlier. that is not the young lady from princeton, but. oh, he is from princeton. okay. good. >> you will be glad to know my question has nothing to do with princeton. my question is do you know if wilson read montesquieu? the reason i ask that is at the heart of his philosophy was what might be called the politics of place. he believed the right regime for any people was very much determined by their culture, religion, economy, environment. all of those factors mattered to what kind of government would actually succeed in that kind of context. now, monteskew was the thinker most often cited by the founding fathers, so i would imagine that wilson probably did know something about him who by the way was the source of the inspiration for checks and balances and the separation of powers in the u.s. constitution. but i wonder because that idea is actually at the core of what they are talking about it seems to me. mr. smith: it is at the core. he did not read montesquieu carefully. he knew of course about it. it would be impossible for him not to know about it. the spirit of the laws and that kind of thing. and like everybody, there was enormous respect for him and he was called one of the greatest thinkers. ore, but essentially he didn't like the french revolution so we avoided the french. the problem with the french illustrates your point again. they made the mistake of revolting against the thrown and the alter. they destroyed the catholic church and destroyed the monarchy. in the united states, the revolution was backed by the church for many of the leading churches, certainly the presbyterians and instead of , destroying the institutions, our revolution claimed the institutions of the english left us for their own. it is not evident he read him in the depth he did others. burke was the person he mentioned most and was the british historian. he kept a log of everybody he wrote. i looked for russo. he was mentioned once in the 70 volumes that were produced in the presidential writing. yes, sir? >> we will get you a microphone for the next >> i am going to one. push back a little bit. >> good. >> as they have not yet. you will get it on the way out. as a card carrying liberal internationalist, i want to push back and bizarrely enough i am going to defend the bush doctrine and defend the obama doctrine, as you put it, as one and the same, because it strikes me that one of the major critiques that our students and i think the general public has about wilson, when they think of wilson, they often times associate him with failure because obviously he did not achieve the world he wanted. he did not achieve the league of nations or american participation. i like to point out that, you know, if you try to remake the world and you get 94% of it right, that is pretty good. let's not focus on the 6% that went bad. i think the same could be applied to bush and obama in the sense that for all of their faults of exuberance for promoting democracy, it is true they were trying to promote the diamond as you described it. they are trying to promote a better world and create a world in the 21st century which is different in many ways than wilson but almost the same in the sense of trying to promote democracy and civil rights around the world and human rights around the world and free markets around the world all of which wilson in and of himself approved of. my critique is is it fair to look at the fault of the obama and particularly the bush years as since of comission which a one could argue their hearts are in the right place but b, and this is the kicker, if you primary critique as i understand it is we tried to create democracy in places where it naturally wouldn't fit, it is hard to know until you try. >> okay. okay. good. you are on my side. [laughter] let me answer both of these, briefly. >> i'm just glad for a discussion. oh, boy.: oh, boy. good. yeah, the gentlemen that talks about the spirit of the laws had it right. i am afraid you have it right. -- it wrong. wilson is seen as failure but was redeemed by fdr in the 1940s. that is my point. that is why people like professor knock and i are trying with a few others to rehabilitate him. we see in a longer historical perspective that allows us to see the 40s and the 80s as times in which there was triumph only to be undercut by its own pride. hubris, i think. a tragic flaw. to this thing, and i am glad you agree with me, what i lay out in the book, is the number of -- you are young. you weren't in political science. it'slitical science, divided into a bunch of different domains, but one of them is called comparative politics. comparative politics is the study of individual countries. wilson was a comparative political scientists. in this, he came to what in the cold war the establishment of you and comparative politics called preconditions and sequences for democracy. now, there were a long list of them. they included such things as a middle class. some tradition of consent of the government. some limits on central government. some kind of social contract that provided for tolerance. they had a long list of these inthey had a long list of these things. and what happens is that only in the late -- it starts in 1970. but with the change in the ibarian peninsula and everyone thought this is going to be easy , look at what happened in portugal and spain overnight but it wasn't overnight. it was a long process. now, what occurs is you need the equivalent of this. in the book i try to lay out the , between the democratic chance igs crowd and what you should look for. it's not a mystery. if you had known about germany, let's take a country no better than japan. if you'd looked at germany, you would have said the ingredients are here for germany to be a democracy. it's not a matter of the german government, it's a matter of the german people having the ability to make this transformation. to compare as these people did is just unbelievable to see it. germany with afinogenov? germany with afghanistan? germany with iraq? i have a whole list in the book about the differences between the two. if you want to wage war, fine. i'm not a pass fist. i'm for -- pacifist. i'm for waging a war to get rid of al qaeda, not in the name of democracy. i'm for waging war against isis but not in the name of creating democracy in iraq. that's a pipe dream. i want to get rid of isis. that's what i want to get rid f. jim has something. a two finger one. huntington agrees with me completely from the grave. no, no, no. sam huntington is the most -- yeah, sam huntington is the most famous -- comparative political person going. he died several years ago. i'm one of the two people who were academics who creditized -- -- criticized -- read his third wave in 1991. are you another? i don't remember your name in there. in 1986 he wrote a book called "the clash of civilizations." and in the book he made exactly this point. he book went down in flames. huntington was right. islam has bloody borders. it's probably the most famous line from the book. launch words, if you -- the clash of civilization is going to be our fault. i don't know when it's going to happen but i see all this growing up, all this pride in the united states, all this self-confidence and self-righteousness. yes, we did win the cold war. yes, the right side won. yes, we should be proud of who we are, so on and so forth. but don't think these other people are going to be like us or with an to be like us or respect us. they may strike -- there may be an authoritarian backlash. he was right. in 1994 i said the same, don't play with the muslim world, china, russia, sub-saharan, they don't have the ingredients. eastern europe, perhaps, south europe, perhaps. latin america, let's hope so. the rest of the world, forget it. we just want to get along with them as they are and hope for the best. if they turn out to be mad dogs like the germans, let's fight. the ottoman empire or austria or hungary, they were like stuffed animals. you could admire them for their strudel. i don't know. hey weren't good people. but what about you us and our african-americans or native americans and our drug problem. let's not worry about setting other people's houses straight. let's get ours straight unless they attack us. if they attack us, we'll take hem on, of course. >> when you were talking about the middle east, i thought you to say unless a country has a cultural affinity or a history with democracy, they're not going to be democratic. i said ok, otto turk proved he tried to take turkey out of the middle east buttered juan -- t erdogan said he can't take turkey out of the middle east. thought you were urging for a isolationism. but how do you explain countries like japan and south korea, asian countries which have embraced democracy, or is russia a western country that's failed? >> yeah. that's a good question. but each of these, the comparatives would say has to be looked at individually. and what you'll find in most of these countries is first of all, either an american or british influence. those are outside influences that are very important. you'll usually find the middle class which is educated in cosmopolitan. you'll often find a movement as in south korea of presbyterians. presbyterians are big in south korea. i don't know how many of you know that. presbyterians are big and so are catholics. and since the vatican reforms, democracy has been very important to both catholics and presbyterians in south korea. none of this is to be found in mother russia. it's crony capitalism. it's traditions of absolute us will. -- absolutism. and they had absolutism in other places, too. and when we see south korea, we should salute it. chile is another one we can see. all the ingredients were there. it was terrible when nixon and kissinger pulled the rug from under a guy none of us need to have liked, i'm forgetting his ame. yindi and put agust us pinochet in its place and chile is a functioning stable democracy and all power to chile. we can undermine democracy, too, and we have. i'm afraid to go back to this gentleman's point. the nixon years, like the l.b.j. years were not the happiest. >> i think we have time for one more question and sir, can i just say you get to have his space at dinner with me tonight. ust so you know. in the back. >> would you agree, sir, that the philosophy and wilson's statement that we were going to -- america is going to make the world safe for democracy was, looking back now, terribly misguided to the point of disastrous for us because you had a succession of presidents buying into this, kennedy, for example, will go anywhere, bear any burden, bush, same, was going to invade iraq. the modern day kizer, make them in a democracy and do the same thing there we did in world war ii and it's been a succession of disasters when the philosophy has been applied way too broadly. >> that's an excellent point. i wonder if wilson hasn't been taken out of context. let me put it this way. think no phrase has been more debated in the wilson literature than what he meant, the world must be made safe for democracy. now, my interpretation of it after long readings about the league is that he was very worried in 1919 that democracy was going to fail most places. when he went to paris, he was hocked the way the french, the british and italians didn't cooperate with each other but didn't cooperate with him either. he was going to create a league of democracies with governments, all of which were thinking in terms of balance of for him, evenge therefore, the league had to be run by the united states or as he put it in his famous words that became the title of one of john milton cooper's books, we would break the heart of the world. well, break the heart of the world we did because we didn't join. and by not joining the league became too weak. by being too weak it became a total failure. ok. so your question is nonetheless -- you see from my point of view, and i don't want to put words in tom -- i know cooper agree with me, the league was seen as a protective or defensive organization, circling the wagons, if i can put it in texas terms. it was not we'll pay any price and bear any burden. that was what people like lodge said was implied in article 10 of the league of nations. but if you read article 10, you and i may disagree on this, i don't see it in article 10. it says that the council of the league will consult with the member government. it does not say we are pooling our -- the council is going to override the american congress. this goes back to the whole illness of wilson and all the rest we don't have time to get into here. the major point here is that these later expressions of faith had to do with i think an exaggerated fear of communism but nonetheless a fear of communism that i think all liberal internationalists shared. liberal internationalism understood that communism was a dire threat to liberal democracy. you're not going to find liberal internationalists liking communists. in fact they'll work with the authoritarian government against the communists in hopes eventually the authoritarian government will mend their way. crocker put it in south africa that way, we'll put our arm around the south african apartheid regime and by reassuring them, they can get rid of apartheid. that kind of thing. so the question is a good one but i really think wilson is protected from it. the defensive, not offensive nature that he placed on -- he really was worried about democracy, surviving. in another war. >> as we all are. thank you for giving us that. thank you all for coming. >> thank you. [applause] let me quickly remind you there are copies of the book available for you to get and get signed. let me also remind you that i spent the whole weekend with a -- it's really, really deep and really good and really thoughtful as a work and also therefore will see you next week for trump's 100 days. thank you. >> >> in the olympics do we see what the football players are seeing today with the national anthem in the olympics with raising the fist. >> we have a long history of -- >> you can be featured in our next live program. join the conversation on facebook at face book.com/c-spanhistory. and on twitter @c-spanhistory. >> our communications cable partners work with c-span city tour staff when we travel to fayetteville, arkansas, home too sage and chairee -- to owes age and cherokee indians. learn more about fayetteville this weekend on american history tv. >> so this is a house that belonged to a family who lived in fayetteville, arkansas, in the 1850's and 1860's. they were here during the civil war and they experienced the war and they loved fayetteville and then when the war came, it just changed everything. >> we're at headquarters house in fayetteville, arkansas. headquarters house is the home t