Woodrow Wilson in Our Time: NATO's Goals in Kosovo

Confronted with the political disintegration of the Yugoslav federation in the early 1990s, historian John Lukacs observed that Woodrow Wilson was in retrospect beginning to make Lenin look like a small fry."The ideas of this pale Presbyterian professor-president," he wrote, "were more revolutionary than those of the Bolshevik radical from the middle Volga region."[1] It's hard to argue with that.Just as Wilson's propagation of national self-determination destroyed European empires in 1918, it also demolished states Wilson helped to create--Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia--and it continues to pose challenges to the sovereignty of states that did not exist in Wilson's time.For all the mischief and misery it begat, the Soviet Union is gone.The ideas upon which it was founded are today taken seriously by nobody of consequence.Lenin is dead, but Wilson lives as possibly the most vital force in the international relations of our time.