'Beyond what’s politically acceptable'

If George Washington and John Quincy Adams were in the Oval Office advising President Trump on whether to go to war with Iran, what would they have said? They would likely have argued that any American war in the Middle East—whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, or Iran, or in partnership with any ally that commits American money, armaments, or troops—is pure folly.

Both in theory and practice, early American political leaders unequivocally rejected the claim that America was an empire or world hegemon like those established by Alexander the Great, Imperial Rome, the Mongols, or Napoleon. Instead, America was a new kind of regime unseen in world history: a republican empire of liberty, limited in constitutional scope and political geography but unlimited in the power of her political spirit and her example to the world.

Equal Nations

The Preamble of the Declaration of Independence includes a curious phrase often overlooked by commentators: “and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them.” What did the founders mean by a “separate and equal station,” and what does this phrase tell us about their conception of America’s political regime?

The international relations paradigm the founders were working within was the jus gentium, or the law of nations. While it has an ancient pedigree, its modern formulation was established with the 1625 publication of Hugo Grotius’s magnum opus, On the Law of War and Peace. As articulated by Grotius and other thinkers, nations are “moral persons,” with a political ontology, duties, and rights of their own—in essence, the application of the law of nature (usually applied to persons) to nations. All nations (a specific people organized politically) possess a natural and intrinsic sovereignty, and the political institutions and leaders of each nation owe their allegiance only to the citizens of that nation—not to the citizens of other nations, nor to “humanity” writ large, nor to abstract principles of human rights, nor to international organizations in Brussels.

The jurist and philosopher Emer de Vattel argued that since all nations are equal, “none can naturally lay claim to any superior prerogative: for, whatever privileges any one of them derives from freedom and sovereignty, the others equally derive the same from the same source.” For Vattel, the rights of a nation included its domain, or the right a nation has to its land and its resources, and its empire (or imperium), or the right of sovereign command by which a nation directs and regulates its internal business.

At the same time, however, Vattel noted that a nation did not have the right “to extend by violence the bounds of empire.” Violence against other nations occurs either when a people are driven out of their domain or when a foreign power subdues them, abolishing their imperium (that is, their sovereignty)—both of which violate natural standards of justice.

The American founders uniformly held to these ideas. Their opposition to the abuses of Parliament was, in part, an objection to the British Empire’s illegitimate extension of its imperium—namely, its attempt to dominate the colonists without their consent by abolishing the legislatures and their right to control internal domestic policy, such as taxation and representation. The Declaratory Act of 1766 had proclaimed that Parliament was supreme in all matters. The American colonists, in effect, were no longer American citizens subject to British law. They were reduced to slavery in their own country by a violent, external imperium.

This reality is why the Declaration explicitly presents the justification for the separate and equal station of national state sovereignty: more than a fashionable theory or pragmatic play, national sovereignty was the right of every nation per the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” The Americans declared that this was right and just—guaranteed by natural and divine law to each people—and that the British therefore were accountable to the “Supreme Judge of the world” for their imperial ambitions and abuses.

The Alpha and Omega of Politics

The belief among the founding generation in national sovereignty under the jus gentium was not a flash in the pan in the Revolutionary era.

In his famous Farewell Address, George Washington exhorted his listeners to treat all nations fairly: “Observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all—religion and morality enjoin this conduct; and can it be that good policy does not equally enjoin it?” He warned about the kind of untoward attachments or hostilities toward other peoples that would corrupt the hearts of citizens and their officials, eventually leading to perilous foreign policies. “Nothing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations and passionate attachments for others should be excluded and that in place of them just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated.”

Washington’s warning was not primarily about policy or pragmatism but about how these attachments and animosities would corrupt the American people. “The nation which indulges towards another an habitual hatred or an habitual fondness is in some degree a slave,” Washington said. “It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest.”

Undue foreign hostility leads to “frequent collisions” and “bloody contests,” Washington noted. Nations possessed in this way will be “prompted by ill will and resentment” and be “impel[led] to war…contrary to the best calculations of policy.” Likewise, passionate attachments produce their own evils:

Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification. It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others, which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions…and by exciting jealousy, ill will, and a disposition to retaliate in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld.

The victims of these hostilities and attachments are the peace and liberty of all nations. For these reasons, Washington exhorted patriotic Americans “against the insidious wiles of foreign influence,” declaring that “the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government.”

In a well-known speech for the 1821 Fourth of July celebration, John Quincy Adams echoed the principles Washington laid out. He drew a distinction between a nation and an empire, asserting that America was not like other empires in world history, gobbling up neighboring peoples and subsuming them into an ever-expanding imperial sovereignty. Rather, she would maintain her separate and equal station while defending the same rights of others. “She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own,” Adams averred.

If America “enlists…under the banners of foreign independence” and interferes in the concerns of others for the sake of slaying “monsters” abroad, Adams argued, she will become forever entangled beyond her own powers of extrication. And worse yet, her people will no longer be free and independent, no longer the defender of liberty and an example to the world of a just and righteous nation. Instead, she will have traded her national sovereignty for a sickly imperial crown of conquest and power, dominated by a libido dominandi fit for slaves who have allowed their baser passions to master reason and wisdom.

Behind Washington’s and Adams’s articulations of the American regime and way of life lay a common assessment of the ends of foreign policy. Rather than being about overseas adventure, a quest for natural resources, or the accumulation of power and fame, foreign policy should always serve domestic policy. As Thomas G. West has succinctly put it, the “purpose of foreign policy should be limited to self-preservation or necessity…because all policy, foreign and domestic, should be in the service of one thing: the well being or happiness of society.”

A well-ordered and excellent human life—the very purpose of politics—precludes the domination of others through slavery, heavy taxation, wealth extraction, or military impressment—what empires notoriously do. As Plato and Aristotle taught, every political regime begins as a “city of pigs” for the sake of mere survival. But every good and completely self-sufficient kallipolis (beautiful city) transcends material needs for the sake of living well. Foreign policy is critical to both ends, but it is primarily oriented toward the former, while domestic policy is oriented toward the latter. It is for this reason that the American founders rejected Machiavelli’s claim in the Discourses on Livy that all republics must expand or die. Likewise, they rejected the argument of Montesquieu (embraced by many Anti-Federalists) that republics must remain small if they are to succeed.

Instead, Alexander Hamilton appealed to Montesquieu in Federalist 9 in contending that the solution to the problems inherent in both small and large republics is a confederate republic, which combines the strengths of monarchies (command and defense) with those of traditional republics (virtue and homogeneity). The Constitution sought to establish this political form—a partially consolidated confederate republic—splitting the difference between small republics vulnerable to external conquest and large republics (that is, empires) vulnerable to internal corruption. It extended the republican sphere in terms of both geography and the people’s interests—but it did so without creating a traditional empire. As Hamilton argued in Federalist 22, the American empire would not exist by force. Instead, “the fabric of American empire ought to rest on the solid basis of the consent of the people.”

Understanding America’s unique political regime is the only way to make sense of her behavior during the ensuing decades of the early republic. American foreign policy was characterized by a principled neutrality that refused to become entangled in foreign affairs or expand an imperial footprint abroad. Yet at the same time, America expanded westward, adding new states as she increasingly became a continental empire.

Washington’s Lesson

During the French Revolutionary Wars, which involved France, Great Britain, Austria, Prussia, and Russia, George Washington issued his now-famous Neutrality Proclamation, declaring that both “the duty and interest of the United States require, that they should with sincerity and good faith adopt and pursue a conduct friendly and impartial toward the belligerent powers.” Since America was not at war with any of the European powers, Washington applied the principle of the Declaration to “hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.”

Appealing to the jus gentium, the Proclamation further announced that “prosecutions [will] be instituted against all persons, who shall, within the cognizance of the courts of the United States, violate the Law of Nations, with respect to the powers at war, or any of them.” In other words, Washington was placing the American nation under international natural law rather than international legal positivism (a “rules-based” order) or the will of a stronger imperium. And it was a principle he was willing to enforce. When the French envoy Edmond-Charles Genêt arrived in America in 1793 and began stirring up trouble, Washington demanded his recall.

The most famous statement of America’s principled neutrality, of course, was the Monroe Doctrine, issued by President James Monroe in his seventh message to Congress in late 1823. Monroe declared that Europe must stay out of the affairs of the Western Hemisphere and that, likewise, America would not meddle in European matters. This was not merely a judgment of national security or foreign practicality, but a principled political decision given that Europe was geographically distinct from America. European nations with shifting borders required standing armies for continual enforcement and protection; standing armies required powerful central governments like monarchies to command their loyalty; monarchies were supported by the aristocracy and class distinctions, while the people were often heavily taxed (to pay the soldiers) and unrepresented.

Yet America was fundamentally different. She was buffeted by thousands of miles of oceans, and there were no imperial powers or peer competitors in the West to challenge her expansion and peaceful prosperity. Accordingly, she relied more upon citizen state militias for the enforcement of internal order, which cultivated the martial virtues of the American people. This gave them independence in thought and strength in action. Americans were vigorous economically and politically, asserting the right to control their own political officials, to keep and put their private property to good use, to protect their liberties against undue encroachments, and to refuse to bend the knee to would-be despots or enslaving taxes.

Understood in this light, the Monroe Doctrine was an example of foreign policy in the service of the well-being and happiness of the American people, of preserving their way of life. The author of Monroe’s speech was, we suspect, none other than John Quincy Adams, Monroe’s secretary of state at the time and perhaps America’s finest statesman on matters of foreign policy.

An example of Adams’s preeminence and wisdom was his handling of the Greek revolution, in which he stated that the chief aim of U.S. foreign policy had “been founded upon the moral principle of natural law—peace with all mankind.” Seen from that light, before America would acknowledge the revolutionaries (by giving them financial or military aid) and deal with them as a separate, sovereign nation, the Greeks would need to win their revolution and establish a de facto government.

As Adams wrote to Andreas Luriottis, the agent for the Greek provisional government,

But while cheering with the best wishes the cause of the Greeks, the United States are forbidden, by the duties of their situation, from taking part in the war, to which their relation is that of neutrality. At peace themselves with all the world, their established policy, and the obligations of the law of nations, preclude them from becoming voluntary auxiliaries to a cause which would involve them in war.

The principled restraint of John Quincy Adams is shocking to American ears and, quite frankly, lies far outside the current Overton Window. Over the past 80 years, America has been the world’s foremost superpower, exerting hegemonic control at will—economically, financially, and militarily. Principled neutrality was abandoned long ago.

A Republican Empire of Liberty

Curiously, while the founders most often referred to America as a republic, they did not shy away from speaking of her as an empire as well. By “empire,” however, they meant what Montesquieu called a “society of societies,” or a confederate republic. The American empire would be unlike any other empire in world history: an empire founded upon “reflection and choice” and not “accident and force,” in the words of Hamilton in Federalist 1. Since empires by definition are regimes of crushing force and imperial conquest, an “American Empire” characterized by reason and virtue would be a novelty in world history.

Thomas Jefferson is renowned for describing America as an “empire of liberty.” In a letter to George Rogers Clark during the Revolutionary War, he declared that “we shall form to the American union a barrier against the dangerous extension of the British Province of Canada and add to the Empire of liberty an extensive and fertile Country thereby converting dangerous Enemies into valuable friends.” Later, during his second presidential term and shortly after the acquisition of the Louisiana Territory in 1803, Jefferson wrote to Benjamin Chambers, saying, “By enlarging the empire of liberty, we multiply its auxiliaries, and provide new sources of renovation, should its principles at any time, degenerate in those portions of our country which gave them birth.”

Jefferson reflected this understanding in another 1803 letter—this time to John Breckinridge—as he described the process of adding new territories and states to the Union. Instead of viewing them as resources to be conquered and exploited or persons to be colonized and enslaved—as was so often the case in imperial and European history—the American approach was that of a father to a son: the engrafting of peoples who would be made into fellow kinsmen and incorporated into an existing constitution and way of life—a life of virtue, liberty, and happiness. As Angelo Codevilla explained, Jefferson’s view was that “America would be the first empire that acquired territories not to rule them but to be ruled by them.”

This did not mean, of course, that every western territory and its people were fit for state incorporation. One of the thorny issues in the mid-19th-century debate over Manifest Destiny and westward expansion was whether the Mexican territories taken in the Mexican-American War (known as the Mexican Cession) ought to be included in the Union. But it did emphasize that America was willing to incorporate only those who were capable of virtuous self-government and an orderly and peaceable life—in other words, those capable of being Americans.

In the early decades of the republic, America and her founders had done what political philosophers had long thought impossible: they established an extended yet limited republic, secure against conquest from without and protective of virtuous citizenship within. America was a republican empire of liberty.

The post A Separate and Equal Station: The Founders’ Case Against American Hegemony appeared first on The American Mind.

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