Wonks only, below the break.A low-grade epiphany of sorts while reading the chapter for tonight’s class, last of the semester, during which we are to continue discussion of the Progressive movement of the early 20th century.

The reading, by historian Robert N. Crunden, was about Woodrow Wilson and his secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan; the Progressive impulse in foreign affairs, primarily. And you know how, these past seven years, we keep hearing how Il Dunce’s foreign policy was “Wilsonian?” Here’s the original, in all its moralistic glory.

The more I read, the more I realized that I would have absolutely loathed Woodrow Wilson.

I riff on it a bit in the print edition this week; suffice to say that the idea of what we might call an evangelical foreign policy has always struck me as ludicrous. It was George Will who, in The Atlantic’s 150th anniversary edition earlier this year, wrote this line (about “The American Idea”):

It has been often said that any idea is dangerous if it is a person’s only idea. Talk about “the” American idea is dangerous because it often is a precursor to, and an excuse for, the missionary impulse that sleeps lightly, when it sleeps at all, in many Americans. After all, if the essence of America can be distilled to a single idea, it must be supremely important, and there might be a moral imperative to export it.

Nod head furiously. This might be a direct criticism of Wilsonism - and of the Bush foreign policy, as well.

Yet at the same time, I’ve always detected an insincerity in Il Dunce’s professed foreign policy motivations. I mean, I detect an insincerity in everything the administration does, true; but this idea that the invasion of Iraq was motivated only by altruism, by a selfless interested in elevating people so they might be free - it was, and is, an obvious lie.

In fact, the real rationale of what we’ve done in Iraq hearkens back before Woodrow Wilson, to William Howard Taft’s “Dollar Diplomacy” - the idea that the goal of U.S. foreign policy ought to be creating “stability and order abroad that would best promote American commercial interests.”

We obviously are in Iraq due to commercial interests - our own but also, as the Wilsonians would say, the world’s. By bringing Iraq into the economic community of nations and more importantly tapping its vast natural resources, its people become more free, Iraq becomes a rational player in the global economic game. Or something like that.

So what we have, then, is a sort of Wilsonian dollar diplomacy - a foreign policy animated first and foremost by commercial interests, which just happen to be national security interests (if you think of oil as vital to national economic security), all conducted beneath this cynical veneer of preening morality.

The worst of both worlds, really.

As for the low-grde epiphany: The point’s been made many times elsewhere that what passes for “conservative” foreign policy today is very much non-conservative; the notion, as Will writes, that we should export the American ideal used to be specifically the provenance of liberals - Progressives, call them what you will. It was an evangelical impulse, America as this shining city on the hill, a model among nations, one that should be emulated, and let us help you emulate it, by force of arms as necessary.

Conservatives used to oppose such things. Some still do. But the broader “conservatism” has come to embrace this foreign policy evangelism. As detailed at length over the past four years, I detest it.

That, today, makes you a “liberal.”

But does it really make one a conservative?