The Foreign Policy of the Founding Fathers
O
ur Founding Fathers gave us excellent advice on foreign policy. Thomas Jefferson, in his first inaugural address, called for “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.” George Washington, several years earlier, took up this theme in his Farewell Address. “Harmony, liberal intercourse with all nations, are recommended by policy, humanity, and interest,” he maintained. “But even our commercial policy should hold an equal and impartial hand; neither seeking nor granting exclusive favors or preferences.” Washington added:
The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible. . . . Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground? Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor or caprice?
Unfortunately, we have spent the past century spurning this sensible advice. If the Founders’ advice is acknowledged at all, it is dismissed on the grounds that we no longer live in their times. The same hackneyed argument could be used against any of the other principles the Founders gave us. Should we give up the First Amendment because times have changed? How about the rest of the Bill of Rights? It’s hypocritical and childish to dismiss certain founding principles simply because a convenient rationale is needed to justify foolish policies today. The principles enshrined in the Constitution do not change. If anything, today’s more complex world cries out for the moral clarity of a noninterventionist foreign policy.
It is easy to dismiss the noninterventionist view as the quaint aspiration of men who lived in a less complicated world, but it’s not so easy to demonstrate how our current policies serve any national interest at all. Perhaps an honest examination of the history of American interventionism in the twentieth century, from Korea to Vietnam to Kosovo to the Middle East, would reveal that the Founding Fathers foresaw more than we think.
Anyone who advocates the noninterventionist foreign policy of the Founding Fathers can expect to be derided as an isolationist. I myself have never been an isolationist. I favor the very opposite of isolation: diplomacy, free trade, and freedom of travel. The real isolationists are those who impose sanctions and embargoes on countries and peoples across the globe because they disagree with the internal and foreign policies of their leaders. The real isolationists are those who choose to use force overseas to promote democracy, rather than seeking change through diplomacy, engagement, and by setting a positive example. The real isolationists are those who isolate their country in the court of world opinion by pursuing needless belligerence and war that have nothing to do with legitimate national security concerns.
Interestingly enough, George W. Bush sounded some of these themes when he ran for president in the year 2000. By that time, many Republicans had grown weary of Bill Clinton’s military interventions and forays into nation building and wanted to put a stop to it. Sensibly enough, Bush spoke of a humble foreign policy, no nation building, and no policing the world. In 1999, then Governor Bush declared: “Let us have an American foreign policy that reflects American character. The modesty of true strength. The humility of real greatness.”
In a debate with Vice President Al Gore the following year, Bush said: “I’m not so sure the role of the United States is to go around the world and say, ‘This is the way it’s got to be.’ . . . I think one way for us to end up being viewed as ‘the ugly American’ is for us to go around the world saying, ‘We do it this way; so should you.’”
Bush also rejected nation building. “Somalia started off as a humanitarian mission and changed into a nation-building mission,” he said. “And that’s where the mission went wrong. The mission was changed. And as a result, our nation paid a price. And so I don’t think our troops ought to be used for what’s called ‘nation building.’” He added, “I think what we need to do is to convince the people who live in the lands [themselves] to build the nations. Maybe I’m missing something here—we’re going to have kind of a ‘nation-building corps’ from America?”
Finally, when discussing other countries’ perception of the United States, Bush said: “If we’re an arrogant nation, they’ll resent us. If we’re a humble nation, but strong, they’ll welcome us. Our nation stands alone right now in the world in terms of power, and that’s why we’ve got to be humble.” We should be “proud and confident [in] our values, but humble in how we treat nations that are figuring out how to chart their own course.”
In other words, President Bush ran and won on a very different foreign policy from the one we are told all Republicans must support. We know what came later, of course. And by the 2008 Republican primaries, one of the front-runners had strayed so far from President Bush’s original platform that he was even saying that in the future, nation building should become one of the standard functions of the American military.
Some Americans may be familiar with the admonition of John Quincy Adams that America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. But his sentiments extended well beyond this oft-cited maxim. First, Adams considered what could be said in America’s defense if anyone were ever to wonder what she had done for the world:
[I]f the wise and learned philosophers of the elder world . . . should find their hearts disposed to enquire what has America done for the benefit of mankind? Let our answer be this: America, with the same voice which spoke herself into existence as a nation, proclaimed to mankind the inextinguishable rights of human nature, and the only lawful foundations of government. America, in the assembly of nations, since her admission among them, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity. She has uniformly spoken among them, though often to heedless, and often to disdainful ears, the language of equal liberty, of equal justice, and of equal rights; she has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining her own; she has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when the conflict has been for principles to which she clings as to the last vital drop that visits the heart.
Adams then described the foreign policy of the American republic:
Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. . . . She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit. . . .
This wasn’t “isolationism.” It was a beautiful and elegant statement of common sense, and of principles that at one time were taken for granted by nearly everyone.
In the same way, Henry Clay was merely repeating George Washington’s wise sentiments, rather than giving voice to isolationism, when he urged this piece of advice upon his countrymen: “By the policy to which we have adhered since the days of Washington . . . we have done more for the cause of liberty than arms could effect; we have shown to other nations the way to greatness and happiness. . . . Far better is it for ourselves . . . and the cause of liberty, that, adhering to our pacific system and avoiding the distant wars of Europe, we should keep our lamp burning brightly on this western shore, as a light to all nations, than to hazard its utter extinction amid the ruins of fallen and falling republics in Europe.” Thus we should strive to lead by example rather than force, and provide a model for the world that other peoples will wish to follow. We do no one any good by bankrupting ourselves.
Richard Cobden was a nineteenth-century British statesman who opposed all of his government’s foreign interventions. In those days, though, people understood the philosophy of nonintervention much better than they do today, and no one was silly enough to brand Cobden an isolationist. He was known instead, appropriately enough, as the International Man.
There are those who condemn noninterventionists for being insufficiently ambitious, for their unwillingness to embrace “national greatness”—as if a nation’s greatness could be measured according to any calculus other than the virtues of its people and the excellence of its institutions. These critics should have the honesty to condemn the Founding Fathers for the same defect. They wouldn’t dare. But it would be refreshing to hear it stated in so many words: our current political class is blessed with historic genius, and Jefferson, Washington, and Madison were contemptible fools.
What the Founding Fathers have to teach us about foreign policy became all the more important, and yet all the more ignored, in the wake of the horrific attacks of September 11, 2001.
In the weeks that followed that fateful day, most Americans’ focus was on identifying the sponsors of the attacks and punishing them. That was sensible enough. I myself voted to track down al Qaeda in Afghanistan. But people were bound to start wondering, eventually, why we were attacked—not because they sought to excuse the attackers, of course, but out of a natural curiosity regarding what made these men tick. Looking for motive is not the same thing as making excuses; detectives always look for the motive behind crime, but no one thinks they are looking to excuse murder.
Seven years later, though, our political class still refuses to deal with the issue in anything but sound bites and propaganda. The rest of the world is astonished at this refusal to speak frankly about the reality of our situation. And yet our safety and security may depend on it.
One person to consult if we want to understand those who wish us harm is Michael Scheuer, who was chief of the CIA’s Osama bin Laden Unit at the Counterterrorist Center in the late 1990s. Scheuer is a conservative and a pro-life voter who has never voted for a Democrat. And he refuses to buy the usual line that the attacks on America have nothing to do with what our government does in the Islamic world. “In fact,” he says, those attacks have “everything to do with what we do.”
Some people simply will not listen to this kind of argument, or will pretend to misunderstand it, trivializing this profoundly significant issue by alleging that Scheuer is “blaming America” for the attacks. To the contrary, Scheuer could not be any clearer in his writing that the perpetrators of terrorist attacks on Americans should be pursued mercilessly for their acts of barbarism. His point is very simple: it is unreasonable, even utopian, not to expect people to grow resentful, and desirous of revenge, when your government bombs them, supports police states in their countries, and imposes murderous sanctions on them. That revenge, in its various forms, is what our CIA calls blowback—the unintended consequences of military intervention.
Obviously the onus of blame rests with those who perpetrate acts of terror, regardless of their motivation. The question Scheuer and I are asking is not who is morally responsible for terrorism—only a fool would place the moral responsibility for terrorism on anyone other than the terrorists themselves. The question we are asking is less doltish and more serious: given that a hyperinterventionist foreign policy is very likely to lead to this kind of blowback, are we still sure we want such a foreign policy? Is it really worth it to us? The main focus of our criticism, in other words, is that our government’s foreign policy has put the American people in greater danger and made us more vulnerable to attack than we would otherwise have been.
This
is the issue that we and others want to raise before the American people.
The interventionist policies that have given rise to blowback have been bipartisan in their implementation. For instance, it was Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, who said on
60 Minutes
that half a million dead Iraqi children as a result of the sanctions on that country during the 1990s were “worth it.” Who could be so utopian, so detached from reality, as to think a remark like that—which was broadcast all over the Arab world, you can be sure—and policies like these would not provoke a response? If
Americans
lost that many of their family members, friends, and fellow citizens, would they not seek to hunt down the perpetrators and be unsatisfied until they were apprehended? The question answers itself. So why
wouldn’t
we expect people to try to take revenge for these policies? I have never received an answer to this simple and obvious question.
This does not mean Americans are bad people, or that they are to blame for terrorism—straw-man arguments that supporters of intervention raise in order to cloud the issue and demonize their opponents. It means only that actions cause reactions, and that Americans will need to prepare themselves for these reactions if their government is going to continue to intervene around the world. In the year 2000, I wrote: “The cost in terms of liberties lost and the unnecessary exposure to terrorism are difficult to determine, but in time it will become apparent to all of us that foreign interventionism is of no benefit to American citizens, but instead is a threat to our liberties.” I stand by every word of that.
To those who say that the attackers are motivated by a hatred of Western liberalism or the moral degeneracy of American culture, Scheuer points out that Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini tried in vain for a decade to instigate an anti-Western jihad on exactly that basis. It went nowhere. Bin Laden’s message, on the other hand, has been so attractive to so many people because it is fundamentally defensive. Bin Laden, says Scheuer, has “spurned the Ayatollah’s wholesale condemnation of Western society,” focusing instead on “specific, bread-and-butter issues on which there is widespread agreement among Muslims.”