Wilson's Ghost: Reducing the Risk of Conflict, Killing, and Catastrophe in the 21st Century.

Wilson's Ghost: Reducing the Risk of Conflict, Killing, and Catastrophe in the 21st Century by Robert S. McNamara and James G. Blight Public Affairs, 2001, ISBN 1891620894, 288 pp, $24.00 (US).

The ghost of Woodrow Wilson, whose presidency encompassed the First World War and its immediate aftermath, has haunted world leaders from his day to ours, Wilson's vision -- of a collective international action to resist aggressive conflict after the carnage of the First World War --failed tragically, As a consequence, over 160 million people died in conflict during the 20th century, making it the bloodiest by far in all of human history.

In Wilson's Ghost former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara and Brown University Professor James G. Blight hold up the Wilsonian tragedy as a historical mirror in order to illuminate our own security risks, and as a stimulus to finding ways to lower those risks, In a provocative synthesis of the pragmatic, historical, and philosophical arguments for avoiding war and achieving a sustainable peace, McNamara and Blight put forth a multi-faceted action program for realizing Wilson's dream in our new century. The plan begins with a moral imperative that establishes the reduction of human carnage as a major goal of foreign policy across the globe, and details the necessity of adopting new policies to support that goal.

Topics covered in Wilson's Ghost include "A Radical Agenda: The U.S. Role in Global Security in the 21st Century," "Preventing Great Power Conflict," "Reducing Communal Killing," "Avoiding Nuclear Catastrophe," and "Reducing Human Carnage," Under these headings, McNamara and Blight explain how conflicts can be averted by collective security arrangements, avoiding conflicts between the great powers, and abolishing weapons of mass destruction.

An excerpt from Wilson's Ghost.

Whole nation-states are on the brink of collapse, At a minimum, they deserve our sympathy and whatever assistance we can give. But we must also consider the possibility that their fate and ours may be linked to a greater extent than we suppose. How much chaos, turmoil, and killing can occur before the cool islands of tranquillity in which we live begin to burn? The Canadian journalist Michael Ignatieff has written that "most of us persist in the belief that while the fires far away are terrible things, we can keep them from our doors, and that while they may consume the roofs of our neighbors, the sparks will never leap to our own." We suggest that the figurative "sparks" -- refugees, ethnic killing, disease, chronic political instability, perhaps leading to major war, even nuclear war -- will begin to burn down (or at a minimum, severely damage) our own abode long before 300 million people are killed in war in this century. We propose to confront this danger by action based on a moral imperative.