Foreign Policy of the American Founders

Lecture delivered at the Hillsdale College Lifelong Learning Seminar.
Hillsdale, Michigan.

 

Let’s start by defining some of the terms I’ll be using to describe our foreign policy.

The word ‘policy’ comes from the same word as ‘politics.’ Politics means ruling and being ruled. The way we rule and are ruled depends upon the political regime under which we live. So, for example, if we live under a tyranny we won’t be doing much ruling, but we will be ‘doing’ a lot of being ruled. Aristotle explains that political regimes have four dimensions:

1. The persons who rule. One, few, or many? Good or bad? In the United States, “We the People” rule, albeit through our elected representatives. Thus we have a republic or representative government, but a democratic republic in the sense that almost all adult citizens can vote and hold office. Although contemporary critics of the 1787 Constitution point to the lack of suffrage for women and slaves, they seldom mention the fact that the United States had by far the widest franchise anywhere in the world at the time—far greater than the British House of Commons, for example.
2. The institutions, structures, or forms by which the rulers rule. The Constitution establishes three separated and balanced branches of government, establishes procedures for election to office, and generally provides the ‘power grid’ for the energies of the governing bodies.
3. The way of life, the habits of mind and heart, of the people who rule and are ruled. You’ll recall that in the Bible God often speaks of His “way,” sharply distinguishing the way he has prescribed for His people from the ways of other peoples. The American “way” includes freedom of worship and of speech, and freedom of commerce. America is a commercial republic, as distinguished from the soon-to-be established French republic, a military republic soon overthrown by the most gifted and ambitious military officer it would valorize.
4. The purpose or purposes of the political community. What are its founders trying to accomplish? For example, the purpose of the Islamic Republic of Iran is to advance the practice of Shi’a Islam. The purposes of the Soviet Union included the advance of socialism, the formation of the new ‘Soviet man,’ and the eventual establishment of worldwide communism. The purpose of the American regime, as stated in the Declaration of Independence, is to secure our natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These are the foundational principles of our regime.

Policy or the planned actions of a political community aiming at achieving the purposes of the regime does or should follow from the character of its regime. This goes for foreign policy as well as domestic policy. When a given policy—slavery, for example—contradicts the principles of our regime, debate will ensue. If sufficiently serious, the dispute might even culminate in civil war or, in foreign policy, international war.

When considering foreign policy, there are two more considerations to keep in mind in addition to regimes. The phrase ‘foreign policy’ implies that there is an ‘us’ and there is a ‘them’—insiders and outsiders, citizens and non-citizens. This in turn implies that the world’s human population finds itself divided among discrete populations, each in some significant degree independent of the others—self-governing or sovereign. To maintain their sovereignty, a people will need to achieve a certain size and also a certain degree of governmental centralization—enough in both instances to defend itself against the many ‘thems’ out there. So, we need to classify political communities not only in terms of their regimes but in terms of size and centralization. Let’s call that political form ‘the state.’ There are several kinds of ‘state’:

1. The ancient polis or ‘city-state,’ small but highly centralized.
2. The ancient empire, huge and decentralized. Typically, an emperor would extract tribute in the form of soldiers, slaves, and goods from the vassal-states he ruled, but otherwise would allow the local ruler or rulers to govern themselves under their own laws.
3. The feudal state, large and decentralized. If the feudal state were a liquid, we would call it a colloid: globs of more or less independently funded and defended in a condition of equilibrium.
4. The modern state, large and centralized. This is the state envisioned by Machiavelli, actualized by the Tudors in England and the Bourbons in France. Aristocrats and churches have been brought to heel under the rule of a central government, often with a system of bureaucratic overseers.

It turned out that State #4 defeated #3, just about every time. Europe quickly turned into a collection of modern states. The problem for those who wanted to preserve genuinely political rule—reciprocal rule, ruling and being-ruled in turn (in a word, political liberty)—sought a modern state that had the capacity to defend its sovereignty without succumbing to over-centralization. This led to

5.  The modern federal state—large, partly centralized (especially for foreign-policy purposes but also for commerce) and partly decentralized (retaining a substantial degree of local self-government).

The American Founders designed their state as a federal state. And the questions that arose from it were, first, can such a federal state avoid or at least survive civil war? and second, can it conduct a successful foreign policy against rival states that will attempt to split it up? If the answer to either of these questions had turned out to be “No,” America would have become what we now call a ‘failed state.’

The third and final element in considering the sources of foreign policy is what we’ve come to call ‘geopolitics.’ ‘Geo’ means ‘earth,’ as in ‘geography.’ Geopolitics means the territory of the country (its topography, its soils, its water resources and so on) as overlain by a given regime in state, in relation to all other such regimes and states with which it has relations. For much of human life geopolitics has been regional. For centuries, many American Indian tribes and nations had no idea that Europeans existed, and the ignorance was mutual; for a long time after that the Indians had no idea how many Europeans there were. But now geopolitics is truly worldwide, even if (as Mr. Putin has reminded us) one’s nearest neighbors often remain the most relevant ones.

Geopolitics takes note of a fact we sometimes forget in the age of the Internet, namely, the world is not flat. We do not really live in cyberspace, although at times we seem to. We live in a world where all territories are not created equal. When it comes to controlling key resources and strategic lines of communication, including military transport, the Straits of Gibraltar and of Hormuz, the Panama Canal and the Suez Canal are simply more important than, say, Hillsdale County. Such geopolitical ‘choke points’ will always be fought over in a way that Hillsdale County will never be.

When we think about the foreign policy of the American Founders, we need to think about all of these sources of policy: regimes, states, geopolitics. Let’s start with geography and look at the map. The United States that saw the inauguration of George Washington as its first president consisted of thirteen states strung along the Atlantic coastline in the middle of the North American continent. It was surrounded by regime enemies on all sides:

1. Many if not all of the American Indian tribes and nations. The regimes were warrior-oligarchies, but without modern centralized states. Some were settled in one location and were termed by the Americans the ‘civilized’ tribes, and some were hunting-and-gathering societies with no fixed territory—called by the Americans the ‘savage’ tribes.  When the Declaration of Independence refers to “merciless Indian savages” it does not mean Indians as such, but rather these latter groups. Today we usually don’t recognize that early Americans understood how the Indians, allied with European imperial powers, posed a considerable danger to the new republic.
2. The British Empire, consisting of Canada and the Caribbean colonies in this hemisphere, but perhaps above all with the great British Navy, which ‘ruled the waves’ in the Atlantic Ocean, making our extensive coastline vulnerable to attack. Great Britain was what Aristotle called a ‘mixed’ regime, with a monarch, an aristocratic legislative branch, and a ‘house of commons’ which enfranchised only about fifteen percent of the population of the country.
3. The Spanish Empire controlled Florida, Caribbean colonies, and Mexico. The regime was an absolutist monarchy.
4. The French Empire, which was about to re-acquire “Louisiana.” France during the American founding era was first an unstable absolutist monarchy, then an unstable military republic, and then a military despotism.

As for the key geopolitical points in early America, we had

1. Port cities such as Boston, New York, Baltimore, and Charleston. Today we are inclined to overlook the importance of Charleston, but at the time it was a major commercial site dealing in slaves and the agricultural products slaves produced; this accounted for what we sometimes think of as the curiously large influence wielded by South Carolina in the first 85 years of our independent existence.
2. The Appalachian and Allegheny mountains. In the days before railroads and good roads, these were substantial barriers to the expansion of the Americans into the west.
3. The Mississippi River flowing to New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico. The North American continent uniquely features the largest expanse of rich soil in the world, which we now know as our Midwest, overlain by a network of rivers flowing into one giant river, the Mississippi. Any people that could control this territory would becomes a major world power, but, as Thomas Jefferson said, any foreign power which controlled New Orleans was merely by reason of such control the enemy of the United States. Such a power would control the flow of commercial goods coming down the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico. As late as 1848, the Mexican government hoped to seize New Orleans as a prize in the ongoing war with the United States.

Given this geography, and given the nearby hostile regimes, American statesman saw that one of their most pressing needs was to acquire what we now call strategic depth. We needed to move west in order to become less exclusively dependent upon our vulnerable coastal cities and to control the Mississippi Valley and New Orleans.

The policies they settled on included Indian removal and regime change, along with the establishment of a standing army and a standing navy, obviating dependence upon state militias.

In terms of the American federal state, the principal need was union. How far could the extended republic extend? Would it be a republican empire? How could it be kept together, so that North American would not become another Europe, or even what it was under the Indians: a cockpit of war, prey for the European empires playing divide-and-rule with the aid of the Amerindian allies, eager to contain the ever-advancing Americans?

And in terms of the American regime of democratic, commercial republicanism aimed at securing our natural rights, on this point the philosopher Montesquieu had made a crucial observation, known to all the Founders. Commercial republics, Montesquieu argued, don’t fight wars with one another. To this day, it is simply a fact that commercial republics—republics defined in the American sense of representative governments elected by a very large portion of the adult population—have not fought wars with one another, although of course they have fought many wars against regimes organized around opposing moral and political principles: monarchies, tyrannies, oligarchies both military and religious. This means that Americans are likely to include regime change among their several instruments of foreign policy, on the grounds that the more commercial republics there are, the fewer enemies we will have and, consequently, the more peace and prosperity.

These aims of strategic depth, political union, and commercial republicanism can be seen in the two most important foreign-policy documents of the founding period: the Declaration of Independence and George Washington’s Farewell Address. And of course in between these documents we find the United States Constitution, which sets down the structures whereby our foreign policy shall be conducted.

I. The Declaration of Independence

The Declaration was of course the first act of truly foreign policy by the United States. The previous Continental Congresses had been congresses of colonies under the British Empire. There had been declarations of Americans’ rights as British citizens within that empire. But the Declaration of Independence makes a different kind of argument.

No document before 1776, anywhere in the world, had been called a “declaration of independence.” Since then, there have been more than 100 such declarations, as new states have emerged from old empires. But few of these have invoked natural rights as the moral foundation or justification of independence. Most such declarations assert national rights.

The great English jurist William Blackstone defined “declaration” as a legal complaint made by a plaintiff in court. In diplomacy, a declaration is a formal international announcement made by an official body and delivered by an ambassador. Taken together, the American Declaration is an appeal or complaint under the law of nations, that body of international customs and treaties governing the conduct of states with one another and with foreign peoples. The most recent and authoritative treatise on the law of nations at the time of the founding was written by the Swiss jurist Emer de Vattel. Titled The Law of Nations, its subtitle was On the principles of the laws of nature, applied to the conduct of nations and sovereigns. That is, the law of nations as understood by Vattel and his students, including the American Founders, had a standard, namely, the laws of nature and of nature’s God.

The United States Congress had already issued a declaration of war against the British Empire on July 6, 1775: “A Declaration Setting Forth the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms.” But this was a declaration of civil war—as it had to be, absent independence. The 1775 Declaration was distributed in London, Canada, and Jamaica—that is, within the British Empire. Not so the 1776 Declaration, which was distributed in many foreign capitals.

This leads to the second unique feature of the 1776 Declaration. It isn’t merely a series of assertions or claims. It is a logical syllogism. That is, it is an argument governed by the principle of non-contradiction. Socrates gives the first definition of the principle of non-contradiction in Plato’s Republic: the same thing won’t be willing to do or to suffer opposites at the same time, with respect to the same part, and in relation to the same thing. He gives the example of a child’s top, which can be said to move and stand still at the same time because its circumference rotates while its axis remains in one place. Another example would be the opposite shades of black and white, which can be combined in many ways but never to produce something ‘blackwhite.’ Nor is there anything that can rightly be described as a ’round square.’

Accordingly the Declaration follows the formula of a syllogism, beginning with the major premises of the argument—all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, along with other basic principles—going on to the minor premises of the syllogism—the charges against King and Parliament, stating actions they had taken which contradict the major premises, that is, violations of the laws of nature and of nature’s God—and then reaching a conclusion: that these states are, and of right ought to be free and independent states.

The principle of non-contradiction is the principle of human reason. Human reason or the ability to think logically is the distinctive characteristic of human nature as such. Not only do we need the capacity to reason in order to perceive and understand the laws of nature and of nature’s God, we need it to state our case to other human beings insofar as they are human—that is, insofar as they, too, reason, insofar as they, too, recognize those natural laws. The regime founded upon the rights of human beings as such will have justified the independence of the people who founded it by a declaration to its fellow human beings as such.

The Founders were not so naïve as to suppose that all human beings would recognize their claim. That’s why they say “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” They don’t expect King George III to hold them self-evident, and he didn’t. They submit their logical proof to “a candid world”—meaning, the world insofar as it is free from prejudice, from passion, ready to deliberate and to consider claims based on right, ready to follow a logical syllogism and to concur with it. This is why the Declaration can say that Americans hold all nations “Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.” To make war on this regime is to make war against a regime that aims at securing the natural rights of all human beings within its territory. To maintain peace with this regime is to recognize those rights and to endorse those rights—rights which, when secured, establish in practice the friendship among all human beings, which are by nature rational and civil beings.

Once the British Empire recognized American independence in 1783, European authorities on public law incorporated the Declaration into the law of nations. Previous discussions of international ‘recognition’ of states had concerned individual rulers’ rights of dynastic succession. For example, Henry III of France had been assassinated in 1589; as the last of the Valois line, he was replaced by Henry IV, the first king of the Bourbon line. Henry IV was duly recognized as the sovereign of France by the other European states, themselves monarchies. Now, in 1983, the law of nations needed to include recognition of a sovereign people.

A second consequence of American independence was our promotion of similar regimes of popular sovereignty in the Americas and in changing the way of life of some of the Indian nations. In 1786, the Articles of Confederation Congress signed a treaty with the Chickasaw nation in upstate New York, making them a protectorate of the United States. The Chickasaws also agreed to certain legal reforms, such as foregoing the practice of “punishing the innocent under the idea of retaliation”—the lex talionis—and the regulation of their trade by the United States. Several years later, President Washington’s Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, began pushing for the breakup of the Spanish and Portuguese empires in the New World. In 1786 he met secretly with a Brazilian medical student named José Maio de Barballo, who carried a copy of the Declaration to Brazil.

More importantly, Washington and his Secretary of War Henry Knox determined that “a system of coercion and oppression” regarding the Indians would “stain the character of the nation” and would also be far too expensive of blood and treasure. Washington wanted Army veterans to be granted some of the unsettled lands in the west, partly as payment to them for their services during the war and also, as Washington said, to have a population there “always ready and willing (in cases of hostility) to combat the Savages, and check their incursions.” The Indians, he said, should be given a fair price for the land “to induce them to relinquish our Territories, and to remove into the illimitable regions of the West.”

Meanwhile, the British took their time in turning over the western lands to the U. S. and in evacuating their extensive system of forts. They also encouraged the Indians to harass American settlers, practicing a ‘containment’ strategy in North America after the war was over.

Washington and Knox saw that they needed to form alliances with some of those tribes, but to do so they needed them to moved toward civilization and away from a way of life consisting of hunting, gathering, and raiding. They formulated a policy of regime change for those Indian tribes which did not want to move out. Knox wrote: “How different would be the sensation of a philosophic mind to reflect that instead of exterminating a part of the human race by our modes of population that we had persevered through all difficulties and at last imparted our Knowledge of cultivating and the arts, to the Aboriginals of the country by which the source of future life and happiness had been preserved and extended. But it has been conceive to be impracticable to civilize the Indians of North America. This opinion is probably more convenient than just.”

In his third annual message to Congress, Washington wrote: “Commerce with [the Indians] should be promoted under regulations tending to secure an equitable deportment towards them, and… such rational experiments should be made, for imparting to them the blessings of civilization as may, from time to time, suit their condition.” Therefore, Article XIV of the 1791 treaty with the Cherokee stated: “That the Cherokee nation may be led to a greater degree of civilization, and to become herdsmen and cultivators, instead of remaining in a state of hunters, the United States will from time to time furnish gratuitously the said nation with useful implements of husbandry, and further to assist the said nation in so desirable a pursuit, and at the same time to establish a certain mode of communication, the United States will send such, and so many persons to reside in said nation as they may judge proper, not exceeding four in number, who shall qualify themselves to act as interpreters.”

Notice that this policy of regime change aimed at altering the Chickasaw and Cherokee regimes and states in significant ways, but only so far as the current condition of those nations would make feasible. Policy as distinct from principle is contingent, a matter of prudential reasoning and not of theoretical reasoning, which is the kind of reasoning which discovers natural right. Regime change has remained one important instrument of U. S. foreign policy since independence, but as with all instruments, its use must be governed by both natural right and prudence, reasoning drawn from principle and reasoning drawn from practical experience and judgment.

II. The United States Constitution

With independence, American sovereignty—including the power to provide for the common defense and all other foreign-policy powers—went ‘from’ the King of England—the “defender of the realm”—to the American people. But how would the newly-sovereign American people allocate those powers in order to exercise their natural right to self-government, including self-defense, under the laws of nature and of nature’s God?

Our first constitution, the Articles of Confederation, proved inadequate to the task. Under it, all national powers—legislative, executive, and judicial—were lodged in one branch of government, the Congress. Most of the legislative powers remained in the states. One or more of the states might embroil the others in a war without their consent. Congress was charged with foreign-policy decision making, but lacked the legislative powers to carry out such decisions. In other words, the sovereign American people had failed to delegate enough foreign-policy power to Congress to make the United States especially united, and therefore credible, in international politics—giving it no power to regulate or tax foreign commerce. Further, Congress had no power to protect American rights under the law of nations; Congress could only recommend that the states pass laws on that. There was no way to frame and implement a coherent foreign policy. Hence the need for what the Preamble to the 1787 Constitution calls “a more perfect Union” to (among other things) “provide for the common defense.”

In addition to provision for the common defense, under the new Constitution Congress received the powers to legislate regarding foreign policy: to collect duties and imposts, regulate commerce with foreign nations and the “Indian Tribes,” to “define and punish piracies committed on the high seas, and offenses against the Law of Nations.” Also under the legislative powers were the power to declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal—that is, to authorize the use of privateers—and of course to raise and support armies and a navy and to regulate those services. States were not allowed to do most of those things, although they retained the right to raise militias.

The executive branch received the power to command the army, navy, and militia of the United States; the president also has the power to negotiate treaties and to appoint ambassadors  who negotiate them. Ratification of treaties and approval of ambassadorial appointments provides a check on these executive powers. The treaty power comes out of Locke; it is what he calls the “foederative” power: foedus in Latin means “treaty.”

For its part, the Supreme Court has original jurisdiction in all cases concerning ambassadors and consuls; cases involving treaties, maritime disputes, cases involving alleged treason, and the like go to the federal judiciary, with the Supreme Court enjoying appellate jurisdiction. Treason itself is defined narrowly: levying war against the United States, or adhering to our enemies, “giving them aid and comfort”—serving as a guide to an invading force, for example.

One of the most important features of the new Constitution—oddly overlooked by many commentators, but indispensable in understanding American foreign and domestic policies as they have intersected—may be seen in Article IV, sections 3 and 4, which govern the admission of new states into the Union. “New states may be admitted into this Union,” but only if they have “a Republican Form of Government.” We admit them as equals—two senators, the number of representatives apportioned according to population, and so on—but only as equal republics. James Madison and Gouvereur Morris both pointed out that insofar as a state was controlled by slave-owners it was an aristocracy, not a republic—a point that would turn out to make a difference that eventuated in civil war. But this also has implications for America as an empire. Jefferson called America an empire, but “empire of liberty.” Previous empires had founded colonies (such as the British colonies in North America) which were subordinate to the central, imperial power. But American territories were from the beginning acquired in order to be made into equal  states—consistent with a regime and an empire founded upon the principle, “All men are created equal.”

John Locke had justified imperialism under certain conditions. Locke argued that God gave the world to men in common for “the Support and Comfort of their Being.” The right to property derives from this common gift: In order to survive in nature, each person takes what he needs; this act of taking, this labor, makes wheat we take our property, and no one needs the consent of another in order to appropriate needed natural objects. Having “mixed his labor” with nature, man adds to nature; the common possession of nature is of no real use to human beings if they as individuals do not undertake this appropriation. You can eat my lunch, but not on my behalf. Thus the Indian who kills a deer owns that deer. By nature, such appropriation is limited to one’s own use; no waste or destruction can be rightful, inasmuch as it depletes the common natural storehouse without producing any benefit to human beings.

This goes for the appropriation of land as well. You own it if you mix your labor with it, thereby “inclos[ing] it from the Common.” No one else has just title to that land. Civilization occurs because the natural plenty that supported such free acquisition prevailed in “the first Ages of the World,” but subsequent population increase required civil laws governing and protecting the property so acquired. Such laws allow the increase in the value of the property. Man as such is “the great foundation of property”; it is better to have a large population than al large territory because human labor is more valuable than the land it works; “of the Products of the Earth useful to the Life of man 9/10 are the effects of Labor.” (Locke subsequent revises this estimate upwards to 99/100). He that “incloses Land” has “a greater plenty from the conveniences of life from ten acres, than he could have from an hundred left to Nature, [and] may truly be said, to give ninety acres to Mankind.”

This is why “The great art of government” is to employ “established laws of liberty to secure protection and encouragement to the honest industry of mankind.” That is to say, natural right can be enhanced by conventional or positive right. What is more, thanks to the invention of money—a thing that exists by civilizing convention or human law, not nature—human beings can engage in extensive commerce without the risk of spoilage, inasmuch as money, for which perishable goods can be exchanged, cannot spoil. By establishing civil property rights for English settlers and guarding them by absolute monarchic rule over Indian tribes and nations which had a sense of territory but not of property, the British Empire advanced human prosperity and liberty. The British settlers objected most when the king started to treat them like Indians.

Locke concludes that land rightly belongs to the industrious and rational, not the idle. This is the basis of the right to conquer nomadic and hunting peoples. American Indians, he writes, “are rich in Land, and poor in all the Comforts of Life” because they unknowingly leave vast tracts of land in a condition of relative waste, thus depriving mankind of the best use of that land. They are rather like the aristocratic idlers of Europe—a point Tocqueville would note, more than a century later. Notice that this is a regime conflict, a clash of opposing opinions about the best way of life and the right purpose of life for human beings.

Thus Jefferson’s “empire of liberty” had two foundations: one was the political and Constitutional/legal foundation of conquering territories in order to elevate them to equal status as states of the Union; the other was the civilizational/economic foundation of the cultivation of land for human use. Both of these foundations in turn had a moral foundation, namely, the industrious and rational securing of natural rights.

American foreign policy from 1776 to today has been anti-imperialist in the sense that it denies the right of any person or people to subordinate another people perpetually. The foundation of this right to self-government is natural, not ‘nationalist,’ although of course by nature human beings group together into social and political communities, sharing a language. This gives nations a right to self-government not because they are nations but because they are human, regardless of their nation. None of this precludes conquest, if such conquest occurs as the result of a just war and aims at either incorporating the conquered territory into the United States as an equal state or raising it to the status of an independent but friendly state. A friendly state is likely to be a fellow commercial republic, although not necessarily. This depends upon the condition of the people conquered and the disposition of the regime in place toward the United States. The exact limits of the American empire itself would prove controversial, as would the policy of regime change as the result of victory in war. These are matters of prudence, not principle.

 

Suggested readings

The best general account of early American foreign policy is Patrick J. Garrity: In Search of Monsters to Destroy? American Foreign Policy, Revolution, and Regime Change, 1776-1900 (Fairfax: National Institute Press, 2012).

There are several informative recent studies of the Declaration of Independence: David Armitage: The Declaration of Independence (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007); Allen Jayne: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence: Origins, Philosophy, and Theology (Lexington: The University of Kentucky Press, 1998); and Danielle Allen: Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2014).

On the United States Constitution, see Michael D. Ramsey: The Constitution’s Text in Foreign Affairs (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007).