Boot’s reading of American history

Re “Wilsonian -- that’s us,” Opinion, Oct. 11

Max Boot is right when he assigns the virtue of spreading liberty to U.S. foreign policy through the centuries. But he also should list the many nations that had to suffer oppression either directly from Americans or from autocratic governments supported by the U.S. Few Americans seem to understand why the U.S. is, for example, still unpopular in Greece, where the U.S. supported the military dictatorship until the end. As a German, I also would like to see the U.S. own up to the fact that, by agreeing to the division of Germany, the U.S. accepted that 17 million people in the east would be deprived of their freedom.

Nations have no virtues, only interests. Unfortunately, these days only Americans themselves believe that the U.S. is a natural do-gooder.

RONALD VOPEL

Brussels

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Boot asserts that it is OK to spread “democracy at gunpoint.” Fine, but his point might be better taken, and it might be a better world out there, if our motives were always so noble. Perhaps if Boot thinks hard enough, he might think of other examples in which the United States supported something other than democracy, also at gunpoint. I’ll give him some help: Hussein. Noriega. Pinochet. Batista.

Champions of liberty? On what planet, Mr. Boot?

GEORGE W. SERBIA

Irvine

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Boot’s reading of American history is suspect. First, the Manifest Destiny sensed by Thomas Jefferson and his successors envisioned expanding the U.S. into the lands of western North America thought to be reserved for Americans by providential design. Nineteenth century American statesmen in particular conscientiously refrained from pursuing policies of “democratic liberation” in far-flung corners of the globe. Certainly no American leader ever suggested that the Middle East should become a paragon of modern democracy!

Let’s not forget the historical legacy of Woodrow Wilson’s vaunted idealism: the president’s intractable position on the League of Nations and the Treaty of Versailles and the subsequent failure of the U.S. to join the league and ratify the treaty. Wilson himself contributed to U.S. isolationism and disengagement from the precarious politics of Europe in the 1930s.

WILLIAM L. CUMIFORD

History Professor

Chapman University

Orange