This lecture was delivered at the Lifelong Learning Seminar at Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan.
With respect to geopolitics, the first several generations of Americans concerned themselves with achieving ‘strategic depth’—sufficient land and population to defend themselves against European navies along the Atlantic coast and American Indian nations, nations sometimes in alliance with European powers, along their western border. With respect to their new state, these generations were preoccupied with the maintenance of the Union in an effort to avoid the condition of perpetual warfare which prevailed among Europeans and the North American Indians. With respect to the regime of democratic and commercial republicanism they established for that state, they pursued an “empire of liberty” in the western lands and an improved navy to defend worldwide commerce. They also undertook a policy of regime change among some of the neighboring Indian nations.
By the time George Washington published his Farewell Address in September 1796, the United States had added three new states: Vermont, Kentucky, and Tennessee. The substantial Northwest Territory was waiting to be populated. Out of it would come the states of Indiana (1800), Ohio (1803), Illinois (1818) and, a generation later, Michigan (1837). Washington knew some of this land quite well, having surveyed and purchased Ohio property before the Revolutionary War. A major domestic and foreign-policy objective takes up the first half of his Address, namely, the political union of the United States, which he calls “the main pillar in the edifice of your real independence,” providing tranquility at home and peace abroad—the foundations of American safety, prosperity, and liberty. The Union provides safety by making the United States more formidable to would-be invaders; it provides prosperity by establishing a large free-trade zone; and it provides liberty because it obviates the need of “those overgrown military establishments” which “are to be regarded as particularly hostile to Republican liberty.” A broken-up North America would feature a collection of small and medium-sized states suspicious of one another, armed against one another, and (to the extent armed) prey to military coups d’état. No mere alliance among such a collection of states could substitute for their constitutional Union, Washington argues. Indeed, disunion or faction is by itself “a frightful Despotism,” quite apart from the threat of military oligarchies.
In terms of the first two considerations I mentioned in the previous lecture, Washington addresses the need for a unified, modern, federal state as the means to a stable republican regime—both at the service of securing Americans’ natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
The second half of the Address, which is now the most celebrated portion, addresses geopolitics. Unlike self-describe foreign-policy ‘realists,’ Washington regards geopolitics as no less a realm to be governed by moral standards as domestic politics. In fact, he regards so-called ‘idealism’ and ‘realism’ as indispensably linked, not contradictory.
Americans should observe good faith and justice to all nations while cultivating peace and harmony with all. As we’ve seen, this policy had governed his dealings with the Chickasaw and Cherokee nations, and it had also governed his insistence that the United States remain neutral regarding the wars attendant upon the French Revolution, during which the French ambassador to the United States, Edmond Genêt, had attempted to whip up sentiment for U. S. intervention on behalf of his country. Washington says that we should adhere to neutrality because “religion and morality enjoin” it and prudence does, too. In sharp contrast to the advice of Machiavelli, who contended that a prince must learn “how not to be good,” Washington’s anti-monarchic, non-‘princely’ republican foreign policy rests on the claim that it’s smarter to be honorable.
But how to bring this general set of rules into action?
The centerpiece of Washington’s advice to his countrymen is to avoid “permanent, inveterate antipathies” or “passionate attachments” to any particular nation. In the 1790s, with memories of the Revolutionary War still vivid, Americans understandably inclined toward antipathy regarding Great Britain—our “unnatural Mother,” as one patriot described her—and attachment to our ally, France, without whose naval intervention the war would have dragged on for years longer. But a policy—which, as we’ve seen, must derive rationally from the politics of the political community (its regime, its state, its geography)—must avoid such impassioned, unreasoning sentiments. Passions are slavish, not self-governing. Specifically, permanent antipathies and passionate attachments—hostility or alliance unrelated to changing circumstances—most likely will have bad economic and political consequences.
Economically, such sentiments put our trade at a disadvantage. If we favor one nation for reasons of sentiment alone over another, we will lose the vale of the free market, given the westward march of Americans that had already begun. Politically, our passions open us to foreign influences—Genêt had exemplified this—which exacerbate our own internal factions and thus threaten the Union.
Therefore, Washington urges, “The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations but to have with them as little political connection as possible.” He is thinking particularly of Europe, which “has a set of primary interests, which to us have none, or very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence therefore it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves, by artificial ties, in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships, or enmities.” Fortunately, we are “detached and distant” from Europe; our geographical position across the Atlantic Ocean affords us the capacity to “choose peace or war, as our interest guided by justice shall counsel.” That is, under ordinary circumstances we will stay out, although there may be extraordinary circumstances—presumably, a situation directly affecting our safety and happiness—where we might intervene. Washington isn’t opposed to alliances, much less war (he was, after all, the Commander in Chief of U. S. armed forces and the hero of the Revolutionary War). He is against alliances that commit us to war in advance and thus, as he puts it, “entangle our peace and prosperity” with European ambitions and interests. Two decades later, Washington’s former protégé James Monroe and Monroe’s Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams, would formulate the Monroe Doctrine, intending to limit the expansion of Old-World empires of monarchy and aristocracy in the New World, where the Empire of Liberty was beginning to see republican regimes—friendly regimes—replacing Spanish imperial rule to the south of us.
Beyond Europe, and respecting the foreign world generally, we should also “steer clear of permanent alliances” and “safely trust to temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies.” A good example of this policy was the war against the three Barbary States—Morocco, Algiers, and Tripoli—which sponsored piracy against our Mediterranean shipping. The Jefferson and Madison administrations fought those states in the early 1800s, and rightly so, by Washington’s standards. The Barbary States were attacking the commercial dimension of the American commercial republic by defying the principle of free transport on the oceans, which Jefferson called “the great highway of the nations.” Similarly, the War of 1812—our first of five declared wars under the 1787 Constitution—was fought in defense of the principle, “Free ships, free goods, free men.”
Washington concluded his address by explaining, “With me, a predominant motive has been to endeavor to gain time to our country to settle and mature its yet recent institutions, and to progress without interruption, to that degree of strength and consistency”—the foreign-policy equivalent of moral character—”which is necessary to give it, humanly speaking, the command of its own fortunes.” Unlike Machiavelli, who claims that the prince can determine his own fortunes and those of his principality, Washington understands that the laws of nature and of nature’s God have a moral content, that foreign policy can issue in peaceful friendships and not a perpetual war of all against all.
Washington’s policy of gaining time, extending the republican “empire of liberty” westward while avoiding major wars with major powers, governed American foreign policy for the next century. It is of course not at all clear how far west Washington himself would have wanted to go—for example, the Whig Party tended to prefer not to go farther than the Mississippi River. The Democrats—more favorable to the extension of slavery and also amenable to very substantial self-governance by the states even at the expense of the coherence of the Union—optimistically pressed the nation ahead, through Texas and on to the Pacific Ocean. This conflict over policy regarding the western territories nearly split the Union, but by 1890, when we’d consolidated Pacific claims and the frontier was judged to be ‘closed,’ we had some very substantial choices to make.
As far back as 1787, in The Federalist, Alexander Hamilton had argued that oceans are as much highways as they are barriers. As a Caribbean-born immigrant to the port of New York, he knew that very well. By 1890, technology had made this much more so, with steam-powered vessels having replaced the old sailing ships and telegraphs making ‘messaging’ nearly instantaneous. These improved means of transportation and of communications had strengthened European empires. By Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, Britannia not only ruled the waves but about one-fourth of the land on earth and about one-fifth of its population, while France, Russia, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, and even Belgium had substantial holdings as well.
Also as a result of these technological advances, rulers were beginning to reconceive the world as one ‘system’; our term ‘geopolitics’ was invented at this time. The leading naval strategist of geopolitics was the American, Alfred Thayer Mahan, among whose readers and correspondents numbered an ambitious and vigorous young American politician, Theodore Roosevelt. In the English-speaking world, the leading geopolitical writer who concentrated his attention on land masses was Halford Mackinder. Whereas Mahan focused on the importance of control of key oceanic chokepoints as indispensable to world commerce, Mackinder pointed to what he called the “World Island”—the giant land mass comprised by three interconnected continents: Asia, Europe, and Africa. Mackinder understood that if you laid a political map over a map of the World Island in 1900, you would see that the tinderbox for conflict in the twentieth century would be the large, flat European plain running from the Atlantic to the Urals; along this plain, the central region (the flashpoint in the tinderbox) was the space between Germany and Russia. World Wars One and Two would in large measure be ‘about’ control of that Heartland of the World Island, and the Cold War would ‘freeze’ rival forces in that place, too, as NATO confronted the Warsaw Pact.
Such a radically changed circumstance presented American strategists with a set of problems noticeably different from those seen by Washington and his successors. Would the strengthening empires block American trade? Would they once again threaten American shores, as they had not done since 1812? Further, having fought a devastating civil war, a war on our own territory, we were less likely than ever to want to fight a war on our own territory—especially given the increasingly devastating power of modern weapons and of well-organized and trained mass armies, one result of modern statism. In other words, we needed to re-think the question of strategic depth, which we thought we’d settled in turning the middle part of North American into an empire of liberty. And we also needed to re-think our policies regarding international commerce.
Several choices were formulated. The first, advocated by a German immigrant and old Republican Party ally of Abraham Lincoln, Carl Schurz, was simply to continue the Washington policy: to eschew not only empire beyond our own continent (“overseas empire,” as he called it) but even to eschew any major strengthening of the military—this, on the traditional grounds that big army establishments threaten republican regimes and that a big navy would be “a dangerous plaything.” By far the most distinguished American statesman to carry this policy forward was Herbert Hoover, whose “magnum opus,” Freedom Betrayed, was published for the first time a few years ago, after decades of suppression by the Hoover Estate.
The second, and opposite, policy was advocated by the young Indiana Republican Senator Albert J. Beveridge, who called for a vast, renewed imperial project—this time based upon the alleged superiority of the white race as claimed by the ‘race science’ then predominant in the universities. The most famous of Beveridge’s speeches remains “The March of the Flag,” delivered in 1900 at a Republican Party convention in Indiana and reprinted widely for years thereafter. Beveridge called for American conquest of the rest of the Americas and their incorporation into the United States—not, to be sure, as equal states, but as colonial territories. At the time, ‘scientific’ theories of racial superiority were very much a part of the Progressive movement, and Beveridge became the most vocal representative of the militarist wing of Progressivism. Although this is now usually forgotten, Progressivism was a very broad movement when it came to military and foreign policy, ranging from the militarism of Beveridge to the pacificism of Jane Addams, the prominent Chicago social worker.
Two in-between policies also emerged, and from them flow the American versions of foreign-policy ‘realism’ and foreign-policy ‘idealism,’ respectively. Heading would evolve into the realist camp was TR, who advocated the use of a greatly-expanded navy, which he eventually got, and peacetime military conscription for the army, which he hinted at but never formally proposed. These forces, but especially the navy, would be used not so much for imperial expansion but for obtaining naval bases throughout the world, usually but not always with the consent of foreign governments. U. S. naval bases would counterbalance the much more expensive (and, as it turned out, untenable) imperialism of the Europeans. To reinforce America’s opposition to European imperialism in the New World, Roosevelt also propounded his well-known “Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine—stipulating an American right to intervene in Latin American countries if they fell down on their debt payments to European nations. Such a refusal to repay loans, if “chronic,” invited European military intervention into the Western Hemisphere, which of course the Monroe Doctrine was intended to discourage. If looked at from this perspective, TR’s foreign policy becomes quite coherent if controversial: drive the weakened Spanish imperialists out of the Caribbean and their redoubt in the Pacific, avoiding the acquisition of those countries by any other empire (especially the British or the Germans) while eventually standing them up to govern themselves, thus using the old ‘Washington’ technique of regime change to obviate any need to (quite implausibly) make them into U. S. states while also avoiding their (un-American) use as permanent colonies of our own. Add the Panama Canal, linking the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans for both trading and military purposes, and you see that TR aimed at recovering America’s strategic depth under new circumstances. TR himself, it should be added in fairness, was himself no simple-minded devotee of Realpolitik. He understood his policies as advancing America’s rightful interests in the world. Subsequent American geopoliticians were less principled.
The other policy, advanced most conspicuously by TR’s great rival, Woodrow Wilson, has now come to be called ‘liberal internationalism.’ Wilson’s phrase, “The League of Nations,” comes from the well-known essay “Perpetual Peace” published in 1795 by the German philosopher, Immanuel Kant. Kant argues as follows. Someday, he predicts, the European system of sovereign states, solemnized by the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, will break down into a cataclysmic war. All the major powers will exhaust themselves. Seeing the error of their ways, statesmen will form a League of Nations to prevent future wars. Wilson evidently saw in the Great War (as it was then called) exactly this Kantian apocalypse. As the war dragged on, he proposed what he initially called a “League to Enforce Peace,” which was actually more descriptive than “League of Nations,” inasmuch as the League did in fact commit its members to intervention—diplomatic at first, but military if necessary—to stop cross-border wars and to punish “aggressors.” What Wilson called “the organized major force of mankind” would be rapidly mobilized to prevent another world war, making this one (he hoped) a “war to end war.” Although the United States Senate refused to ratify the treaty that would have brought us into the League, FDR’s subsequent plan for the United Nations amounts to essentially the same thing. That is, instead of avoiding “entangling alliances” in order to avoid unnecessary wars, the United States involves itself in a sort of comprehensive entanglement in the hope of preventing small wars from becoming world wars.
Why did Wilson suppose that this would be feasible rather than exhausting? He does not say. And, again in fairness, Wilson did not lack ‘realism’ altogether; after all, he chose the winning side in a worldwide war. But given his confidence in historical progress, my guess is that he believed that human nature was getting the aggression bred out of it, that ‘History’ was ‘moving on’—progressing—beyond war-consciousness and towards peace-consciousness. That is, liberal internationalism in its more buoyant forms may depend upon the belief that peace can be permanent because human nature isn’t. For a League of Nations really to enforce peace around the world, wars will need to become not only small but rare.
With these innovations—some of them consistent with American principles, some not—we see the elements of American foreign policy today. The undermining of European imperialism continued to be discouraged by the United States and, indeed the Austro-Hungarians and the Turks went down in the First World War along with the Germans, with the Germans then reconstituting a new empire before losing that one in the Second World War. That war put the British and French empires on the path to extinction, too. The Russians expanded after the both the First and Second World Wars, then lost their empire at the end of the Cold War, in large measure due to the containment strategy enacted by the United States in conjunction with all of the above-mentioned ex-imperialists.
Without the British Empire to patrol the seas and protect commerce, this left the American navy as the ‘last man standing’ in that role, which we continue to play. (In the decades to come, the main challenger is likely to be China, at first regionally, and eventually worldwide). Although the other piece of TR’s policy—routine intervention in Latin American affairs—has been bridled, the centerpiece of his policy—the network of overseas naval bases—remains. I am not sure that Alexander Hamilton would have disapproved and, given the Jeffersonian/Madisonian defense of U. S. shipping in the Mediterranean, even the old Democratic Party might have hesitated to condemn us.
On the other hand, liberal internationalism would have been viewed by the Founders with much more suspicion, even with the substantially changed circumstances of the 20th and 21st centuries. Such a strong and continuous obligation to intervene may well strike one—as indeed it did strike the majority in the U. S. Senate during the League of Nations treaty debate—as a weakening of American sovereignty. It is safe to say that the Founders tended to frown upon any weakening of American sovereignty. Since the end of the Cold War, every president and Congress have been forced to choose which places we intervene, although the principles of liberal internationalism open the possibility of such intervention in any instance of cross-border aggression. What liberal internationalist principle do is to bias the debate on behalf of economic, military, and diplomatic intervention, arguably distracting the government from its more fundamental task of defending the self-government of the United States.
In terms of our self-government, the U. S. Constitution has also seen a subtle but profound alteration, at least in the way it is interpreted or perhaps misinterpreted by the Supreme Court. The pivotal case here was U. S. v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corporation. In this case, decided in 1936, the Court handed down an opinion holding that, first, foreign policy is preeminently the domain of the executive branch and, second, that the necessary and proper clause applies only to domestic matters and not to foreign policy. This gave President Roosevelt and subsequent presidents very great discretionary powers indeed, powers they have at times not hesitated to exercise. Now, once again, it should be noticed that in the case of war a president has always had the right and indeed the duty, as Commander in Chief, to take immediate military action against enemy attack without a declaration of war by Congress. Of the some 200 wars the United States has fought since the ratification, only five were formally declared. But the decision in Curtiss-Wright had nothing to do with U. S. military action; rather, it authorized the president to embargo two Latin American countries that were at war. While Congress continues to exercise the power of the purse, and thus can shut down presidential ventures into foreign policy in due course, ‘due course’ may take a lot of time.
In both foreign and domestic policy, the new constitutional dispensation under the aegis of Progressivism and its several variants (New Deal-ism, Great Society-ism, and so on), a dispensation makes full use of what President Wilson called “the Elastic Constitution,” has inclined toward the practice of rather generous transfers of authority to the executive branch—whether the executive branch proper, that is, the White House, or the administrative agencies, which have become a sort of fourth branch unto themselves. This was recognized by President Eisenhower in his own ‘farewell address’ on the ‘military-industrial complex.’ That is, we have moved some distance from a regime of democratic republicanism, and from a federal state, toward a centralized state governed by a mixed regime featuring an executive who enjoys somewhat monarchic powers in foreign policy and an administrative elite or ‘meritocracy’ which reminds one a bit of Old-World aristocracy, absent the blue blood. The Founders would have their reservations about that.
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