Zipp argues convincingly that Willkie, through his world tour, rejected one side of the American exceptionalist equation: the idea that Americans are a uniquely capable and virtuous people. But he never rejected the other side—the idea that the world should look to the United States as its guiding light.
The Idealist is far more sophisticated than the recent outpouring of political commentary—very often historically impoverished—that has been anxious to characterize Trump’s “America First” foreign policy as an abrupt departure from U.S. political traditions. Zipp rightly rejects nostalgia for a postwar “liberal international order” that was nothing of the kind. He admirably criticizes his subject’s blind spot when it came to the U.S. territorial empire in Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and elsewhere. He sees the Cold War and the U.S. rise to unquestioned global supremacy as a regrettable turn, not as what enabled the country to fully embrace its inclusive promise. His goal of finding an alternative to the pursuit of U.S. primacy is worthy, even if the object of his recovery is not.
But in elevating Willkie’s brand of internationalism as a great missed opportunity, Zipp fails to reckon fully with the consequences of Willkie’s faith in the presumptive universality of official American ideals. In the end, One World only reinforced what Aziz Rana has called the “creedal” narrative of America. In the classic account of the “American Creed” by Swedish social scientist Gunnar Myrdal, American power in the world can be redeemed because the United States “feels itself to be humanity in miniature.” Willkie represented this viewpoint perfectly. As much as Willkie encouraged Americans to have sympathy for foreign peoples struggling under European colonial regimes, he portrayed the unfolding worldwide revolt against empire as a mere continuation of 1776. He based his model of global cooperation on the thirteen colonies that became the United States. His sensitivity to the aspirations for freedom in the colonized world was joined to a popularized version of the “convergence theory”—the notion that the ultimate destination of human societies looked something quite like midcentury America. Willkie’s “diagnosis of the value of global interdependence,” as Zipp calls it, never fully imagined a globe not tilted on its axis toward the United States. America was still first: the model and leader of the world he envisioned.