WASHINGTON ¨C When U.S. President Barack Obama moves two miles from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to 2446 Belmont Road in Washington¡¯s Kalorama neighborhood, he will live half a mile from 2340 S Street, where Woodrow Wilson spent his three post-presidential years. Wilson¡¯s embittering foreign policy failure was the Senate¡¯s rejection of the U.S. participation in the embodiment of Wilsonian aspirations, the League of Nations. Obama leaves office serene because ¡°almost every country on Earth sees America as stronger and more respected today than they did eight years ago.¡±
Two seemingly unimpressed nations are Russia, which is dismembering a European nation (Ukraine) and China, which is shredding international law by turning the world¡¯s most important waterway, the South China Sea, into militarized Chinese territory.
Obama¡¯s policies that brought America to a pinnacle of admiration, as he sees it, were an amalgam of Wilsonian and anti-Wilsonian elements. Wilson¡¯s grand ambition for America was to reorder the world in a way that would make it unnecessary for America to have grand ambitions. He thought America could lead a restful life after strenuous diplomacy had written rules for the game of nations.
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