Carrying Democracy to the World

The world must be made safe for democracy.

--Woodrow Wilson’s Declaration of War
April 2, 1917

This blog is about the world's best hope: expanding democracy and capitalism to achieve peace. Mandelbaum published The Ideas that Conquered the World in the aftermath of 9.11, a time when “every significant government” (p. 4) had rallied behind the U.S., and we had just achieved our quick victory over the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Mandelbaum is an overt Wilsonian. He credits Wilson with bringing democracy, free enterprise, and peace together in what he calls the “Wilsonian Triad” (p. 6). When Mandelbam's book came out in 2002, it seemed we had indeed made the world “safe for democracy.”

That was then. Now it’s late 2007. After our struggles in Iraq, making even just one other nation (never mind the world) “safe for democracy” is out of fashion everywhere.

Yet the Muslim extremist threat that destroyed the World Trade Center—the heart of global capitalism—remains the chief obstacle to world peace. Muslim extremists are absolutely opposed to capitalism, democracy, and peace, and will die to destroy the modern world these concepts have built.

Our world is very much smaller than it was in Wilson’s time—even flat, in Tom Friedman’s terms. So those unhappy Muslim extremists truly do threaten us all. Hard as it may be to do so, we must take them on, as Wilson took on evil in 1917, when he said:

It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance. But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts—for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.