In a speech delivered in Whitehall in 2003 George Bush made much of the fact of the fact the he was the first U.S. President to stay in Buckingham Palace since Woodrow Wilson. He goes on to celebrate Wilson at some length:
The people of Great Britain also might see some familiar traits in Americans…We’re sometimes faulted for a naive faith that liberty can change the world. If that’s an error, it began with reading too much John Locke and Adam Smith…The last president to stay at Buckingham Palace was an idealist without question. At a dinner hosted by King George V in 1918, Woodrow Wilson made a pledge. With typical American understatement, he vowed that right and justice would become the predominant and controlling force in the world…Free nations failed to recognize, much less confront, the aggressive evil in plain sight. And so, dictators went about their business, feeding resentments and anti-Semitism, bringing death to innocent people in this city and across the world and filling the last century with violence and genocide.
Bush often pointed out the necessity of free markets if we’re to have a free world with free nations. Again, echoes of Woodrow Wilson:
Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and the doors of the nations which are closed must be battered down … Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process. Colonies must be obtained or planted, in order that no useful corner of the world may be overlooked or left unused. (Lecture, Columbia University, 1907)
Maybe Bush was a Wilsonian after all.