Archives for August 2016

This is the second of two lectures first delivered at Hillsdale College in the spring of 2016.

 

By the time George Washington published his Farewell Address in September 1796, the United States had added three new states to the Union: Vermont, Kentucky, and Tennessee. James Madison’s “extended republic” had begun to push west, adding to its strategic depth. And of course 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) and Wisconsin (1848). Washington knew some of this land quite well, having surveyed and purchased some 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 foundation of Americans’ safety, prosperity, and liberty. The Union provides safety by making the United States more formidable to would-be invaders; it provides prosperity be establishing a large free-trade zone; and it provides liberty because it obviates the need for “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 sovereign 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 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 oligarchy to republican liberty.

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, now the most celebrated portion, addresses geopolitics. Unlike so-called foreign-policy ‘realists,’ Washington regards geopolitics as no less a realm to be governed by moral standards as domestic politics. In fact he regards what academic and journalistic commentators now call ‘idealism’ and ‘realism’ as indispensably linked, not contradictory.

Americans should, he writes, “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 Cherokee, and it had also governed his policy of neutrality respecting the wars attendant upon the French Revolution. During those wars, the French ambassador to the United States, Edmond Genêt, had attempted to whip up sentiment for American intervention on behalf of his country. On the contrary, Washington says, 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 rested on the claim that it’s smarter to cultivate virtue than virtù.

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” toward and “passionate attachments” to any particular nation. In the 1790s, with memories of the Revolutionary War still vivid, Americans understandably inclined toward antipathy toward Great Britain—our “unnatural Mother,” as one patriot described her—and leaned toward sentimental attachment to our ally, France, without whose naval intervention the war would have dragged on for years longer. But a policy, a plan of action derived rationally from the politics of the national community (its regime, its state, its geography), must avoid such impassioned, unreasoning sentiments. Passions are slavish, not self-governing, in the soul of a creature capable of reason. Specifically, permanent antipathies and attachments—hostility or alliance unrelated to changing circumstances—will produce bad economic and political consequences, weakening our security in the enjoyment of our natural rights.

With respect to political economy, such antipathies and attachments put our trade at a disadvantage. If we favor one nation for reasons of sentiment alone over another, we will lose the value of the free market, wherein foreign nations compete for our market— a large and expanding market, given the westward march of Americans that had already begun, a march made possible by vigorous population growth. Politically, they open us to foreign influences—the likes of Genêt—which exacerbate our own internal factions and thus threaten the Union.

Therefore, Washington argues, “The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nation 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 no, 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—in which we might intervene.

Washington isn’t an ‘isolationist,’ opposed to all alliances, much less a pacifist, opposed to all war; he had not suddenly become ashamed of his status as a war hero and Commander in Chief of the United States armed forces. He rather opposed alliances committing us to war in advance and thus, as he puts it, “entangle war, 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.

Beyond Europe, and regarding 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 interests of the American commercial republic, specifically defying the principle of free commercial traffic on the open seas. Similarly, the War of 1812—the first of the five declared wars we’ve fought 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 political 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 friendship 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 great powers, governed American foreign policy for the next century. It isn’t at all clear how far west Washington himself would have wanted to go. For example, several decades later, the Whig Party tended to prefer not to go farther than the Mississippi River, whereas the Democrats—more favorable to the extension of slavery and also amenable to very substantial self-government by the states even at the expense of the coherence and indeed the perpetuation of the Union—optimistically pressed the nation ahead, through Texas and on to the Pacific Ocean. The resulting conflict over territorial expansion nearly split the Union, but by 1890, when we’d consolidated our 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 transplant to 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, Germany, 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 controlling 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 lay a political map over the map of the World Island, you see that the central flashpoint 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 within the flashpoint) is the space between Germany and Russia. World Wars I and II 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 forces confronted those of the Warsaw Pact.

Such a radically changed circumstances 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 the well-organized and trained mass armies raised by modern states. We needed to re-think the question of strategic depth, a question we thought we’d answered in turning the middle part of North America into an empire of liberty. And we also needed to re-think our policies regarding international commerce.

American strategists proposed several choice. The first, advocated by German immigrant and old Republican Party ally of Abraham Lincoln, Carl Schurz, was simply to continue the Washington policy: to reject not only empire beyond our own continent (“overseas empire,” as he called it) but even to reject any major strengthening of the military—this, on the traditional grounds that big military establishments threaten republican regimes and that a bigger navy would be a “dangerous plaything” in the hands of ambitious men. By far the most distinguished American statesman to carry this policy forward was Herbert Hoover, whose “magnum opus” (as he rightly called it), Freedom Betrayed, was published for the first time only a few years ago, after decades of suppression by the Hoover estate.

The second, opposite, policy was advocated by the young Indiana Republican Senator Albert J. Beveridge, who called for a vast imperial project based upon the alleged superiority of the white race, a notion itself based upon the ‘race science’ that formed part of early Progressivism. The most famous of Beveridge’s speeches remains “The March of the Flag,” delivered at a Republican Party convention in Indiana. In it, 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. Such an expression of racial superiority fit right into the Progressivism of the day, and Beveridge might be described as the most vocal representative of the militarist wing of the movement, which ranged from the militarism of Beveridge to the pacifism of Jane Addams.

Two in-between policies also emerged, and from them flow the American versions of foreign-policy ‘realism’ and foreign-policy ‘idealism.’ Heading the realist camp was TR, who advocated the use of a greatly-expanded navy, which he eventually succeeded in obtaining, 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. These 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 refusal to repay loans, if they became “chronic,” invited European military intervention into the Western Hemisphere—which the original Monroe Doctrine was intended to discourage. If looked at from this perspective, TR’s foreign policy becomes quite coherent: drive the weakened Spanish imperialists out of the Caribbean and the Philippines, avoiding the acquisition of such countries by other empires (especially the Brits and the Germans) while eventually spurring the newly-acquired countries to govern themselves. The policy deploys the old Washingtonian policy 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 Pacific oceans for both trading and military purposes, and you see that TR aimed at recovering America’s strategic depth under new circumstances.

As an aside, I should mention that Roosevelt’s ‘realism’ differed sharply from the academic schools of foreign-policy ‘realism,’ seen (for example) in the writings of the late Hans J. Morgenthau. Academic realism focuses entirely on economic, military, and political ‘power relations’ among states; as such, it is amoral. TR on the contrary was nothing if not a moralist. His geopolitical calculations aimed at the promotion of what he described in one essays as “realizable ideals”—policies that were informed by such general moral principles as honesty and human rights, but which were at the same time practicable. Up to and including his years in the presidency, TR did not assume that the realization of such ideals could be complete, nor did he assume that something called ‘History’ would inexorably deliver them. Statecraft depended upon “fearing God and taking your own part,” to cite one of his many book-titles.

The other policy, advanced most conspicuously by TR’s great rival, Woodrow Wilson, has come to be called ‘liberal internationalism.’ Wilson’s phrase, “The League of Nations,” comes from the famous essay “Perpetual Peace,” published by the German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, in 1795. Someday, Kant predicts, the European system of sovereign states, solemnized by the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, will break down as the result of a cataclysmic war. All the major powers will exhaust themselves. Seeing the error of their ways, they will form a League of Nations to prevent any future wars. Wilson evidently saw in the Great War exactly this Kantian apocalypse. As the war dragged on, he proposed what he originally 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 needed—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, President Franklin Roosevelt’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 would involve 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. 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 on the belief that peace can be made permanent because human nature isn’t, because we are near ‘the end of History.’ Wilson’s ideals, always more ambitious than those of TR, seemed realizable to him because ‘History’ was on his side. For a League of Nations really to enforce peace around the world, wars would need to become not only small but rare.

With these innovations—some consistent with American principles, some not—we see clearly the elements of American foreign policy today. The undermining of European imperialism continued, as the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires collapsed in the First World War; the German Empire went down, too, then reconstituted itself before collapsing again in the Second World War; the British and French empires were the next to go, critically weakened during that same war;  the Russians expanded, then lost their empire at the end of the Cold War. The United States had a hand in hastening the demise of each of these empires. Although one piece of TR’s policy—routine intervention in Latin American affairs—was bridled, the centerpiece of that policy—a network of naval bases supporting an extensive fleet (later supplemented with air forces) endures to this day. 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 it under contemporary conditions.

On the other hand, liberal internationalism would have been viewed by the Founders with much more suspicion. Such a strong and continuous requirement to intervene may strike one—as it did indeed strike the majority of U. S. senators during the League of Nations treaty debate—as a weakening of American sovereignty. Since the end of the Cold War, every president and Congress have been forced to choose the places in which we intervene, although the principles of liberal intervention open the possibility of such intervention in any instance of cross-border aggression. But what liberal internationalist principles do is to bias the debate in favor of economic, military, and diplomatic intervention, thereby distracting statesmen from their 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 opined that, first, foreign policy is preeminently the domain of the executive 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 in fact the duty, as Commander in Chief, to take immediate action against enemy attack without a declaration of war by Congress. Of the roughly 200 wars the United States has fought since the ratification of the Constitution, only five were formally declared.

But the decision in Curtiss-Wright had nothing to do with U. S. military action. 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 in 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) have inclined toward the practice of generous transfers of authority to the executive branch—whether to the executive branch proper, that is, the White House, or to the administrative agencies, which have become a sort of fourth branch of government. 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 quasi-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 be less than pleased about all of that.

As to Washington’s policy prescriptions, we have mostly avoided permanent, impassioned attachments or antipathies toward any nation, although our ‘special relationships’ with Canada, the United Kingdom, and Israel have become partial exceptions to that rule. These partnerships are far less worrisome than they would have been in the 1790s, given the similarity of the regimes involved and also given American power, which far exceeds that of any of the countries in question. And of course all of these countries continue to serve our strategic interests. Washington’s policy of avoiding all but necessary political relations has been violated or upheld, depending on whether you regard the United Nations, the North Atlantic Alliance, SEATO, and other such organizations as necessary to the defense of American rights. The Founders would have examined each of these alliances carefully, probably regarding the United Nations as the most dubious.

And finally, on the matter of immigration—unmentioned by Washington in his Address but of great interest to the Founders generally from the Declaration of Independence on—the questions remains as it was: Who do we want as fellow-citizens in our shared enterprise of self-government under the laws of nature and of nature’s God? We have usually wanted immigrants, as the Declaration makes clear. At that time, we wanted Europeans because Europeans were understood to be civilized, ready for self-government, to a degree that most likely immigrants from other countries were not. This no longer holds, to the degree that it did. But we are unquestionably entitled to control our borders, to enforce the laws that the representatives of “We the People” as sovereigns have enacted, and to be the final judges of the criteria for citizenship. Insofar as we depart from those principles, the Founders would once again demur.

This lecture was first delivered at Hillsdale College in 2016. It is the first of a set of two lectures, the second being “American Foreign Policy Today.”

 

The word ‘policy’ comes from the same Greek root as ‘politics.’ Politics means the way in which a people rule and are 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 have a lot of ruling being done to us.

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.

2. The institutions, structures, or forms by which the rulers rule. Separated and balanced powers, for example.

3. The way of life, the habits of mind and heart, of the people who rule and are ruled. In the Bible, God’s regime is His “way.” The American “way” includes freedom of worship and of speech, and freedom of commerce. American is a commercial republic.

4. The purpose or purposes of the political community. The purpose of the Iranian regime is to advance the practice of Shi’a Islam, with the intention of hastening the advent of the Hidden Imam. The purpose of the Soviet Union was to advance socialism, form the new ‘Soviet Man,’ and eventually establish 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 four dimensions combine to shape a certain ethos or character in the citizens or subjects of the regime. Policy or the planned action of a political community 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 arise. If sufficiently serious, the dispute might even culminate in civil war, or, if a foreign policy, international war.

But when considering foreign policy, there are two more considerations to keep in mind. The phrase ‘foreign policy’ implies that there is ‘us’ and there is ‘them’—insiders and outsiders, citizens and non-citizens. This in turn implies that the world’s human population finds itself divided among discrete if sometimes related populations, each in some significant degree independent of the others—self-ruling 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. I’ll call that category ‘the state.’ There are several kinds of ‘states’:

1. The ancient polis or city-state, a small and highly centralized self-governing community. In it, the regime can readily ‘reach into’ nearly every aspect of a family’s life; this makes the question of the character of the regime of a given polis highly ‘interesting’ to its citizens, and very often a matter of intense controversy among them.
2. The ancient empire, huge and decentralized. In it, the regime could not rule its sprawling domain so minutely as in a polis, instead contenting itself with exacting tribute from its possessions in the form of supplies, slaves, and soldiers. The political sociologist Michael Mann has compared the modern Austro-Hungarian Empire to a protection racket, which is exactly how the empires of antiquity ran their domains.
3. The feudal state, large and decentralized. It usually had a king or queen, but this person was only ‘first among equals.’ Other rulers included landed aristocrats, the Catholic Church, and the larger cities. Each of these rulers enjoyed their own sources of soldiers and revenues, independent of the others, including the monarch. If this were a liquid, chemists would call it a colloidal suspension; more-or-less self-ruling globules of power float in a changing but usually stable equilibrium.
4. The modern state, large and centralized. In it, no matter what its regime, we see a powerful capital city which extends its governing tentacles throughout the community to its borders. These ‘tentacles’ are the bureaucracies. Typically, the bureaucrats who staff these governing agencies are loyal not so much to the persons in charge of the regime but to their functions within the bureaucracies. In a modern state, a bureaucrat/administrator/civil servant rules impersonally, thinking of his or her functions as scientific/rationalist in character.

As things worked out, #4 defeated #3, more or less every time. The modern state raised revenues and organized military and police forces more effectively than feudal states did. Once the modern state was introduced, its rulers could dominate neighboring feudal states, forcing those rulers to institute their own centralized or ‘modern’ state apparatuses.

This raised a political problem for non-monarchic regimes and also for limited or ‘constitutional’ monarchies. How could they run states that were sufficiently centralized to stay independent without succumbing to over-centralization and its attendant oppressions? For the American Founders, the answer to this question led to a fifth kind of state: the federal state. Large and partly centralized (especially for foreign-policy purposes but also for commerce) and partly decentralized, leaving important powers in the hands of municipal, county, and state officials), the federal state retained a considerable degree of self-government, which comported well with the American regime of republicanism.

For the American Founders and for the generations that followed them, the questions that arose from federalism were: first, can such a 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?

The third and final source of foreign politics is what we’ve come to call ‘geopolitics.’ ‘Geo’ means ‘earth’—as in ‘geography.’ So geopolitics means the territory (topography, soils, water resources, and so on) as overlain by a given regime and 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, American Indian nations and tribes had no idea that Europeans existed, and for a long time after they did know they had no idea how many Europeans there were. But today geopolitics is truly worldwide, even if—as President Vladimir Putin of Russia has reminded Ukraine and Georgia—one’s nearest neighbors often remain the most relevant ones.

Geopolitics concentrates our minds on a fact we sometimes forget in the age of the Internet, namely, the world is not flat. We do not really lie in cyberspace, although we sometimes feel as if we do. As I sit here, peacefully tapping away on a keyboard, I easily forget that I need a safe space in which to do so, complete with a network of satellites and electrified wires, along with the scientific, manufacturing, and commercial networks that have invented, marketed, and delivered the computer and its keyboard for me and to me in the first place. We still 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 Strait of Gibraltar and Hormuz, the Panama and Suez canals, are simply more important than, say Hillsdale County. Such geopolitical ‘choke points’ will always be fought over in a way that Hillsdale County will not be.

So, when we think about the foreign policy of the American Founders, we need to think about all of these sources of their policy. 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 of the middle of the North American continent. It was bordered by regime enemies on all sides:

Amerindian nations and tribes: warrior-oligarchies, but not centralize states, some settled in one location (the ‘civilized’ tribes), some not (the ‘savage’ tribes).

The British Empire: Canada, the Caribbean, and perhaps above all ‘ruling the waves’ in the Atlantic Ocean and in much of the Caribbean. A mixed regime (consisting of a monarchy, an oligarchy [the House of Lords] and a much larger but still minority of the non-titled [the House of Commons]).

The Spanish Empire: Florida, most of the Caribbean, Mexico, and with claims along the Mississippi River. A monarchic regime and a semi-modern imperial state.

The French Empire: ‘Louisiana,’ with more power to rule it than Spain could muster. An unstable republic, then a military oligarchy, then a military despotism. Statist and imperial.

The Americans were also looking at key geopolitical points: their port; the Appalachian and Allegheny mountains, the Mississippi River flowing to New Orleans and into the Gulf of Mexico; the Hudson River, which gave British troops in Canada a straight shot to New York City and a chance to divide New England from the rest of the country.

Thus the geopolitical need of Americans was strategic depth. Americans wanted western lands not only as a place to settle their burgeoning population; they also wanted them in order to make America harder to overrun militarily.

Americans formulated several policies to satisfy this need: Indian removal and regime change; a standing army and navy to supplement local militias; commercial treaties with foreign countries. In other words, James Madison’s “extended republic,” described in the tenth Federalist, would continue to extend, at least to the lands surrounding the Mississippi River and New Orleans—a task completed with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Such an enlarged America would then prove difficult to conquer and desirable to trade with.

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 America would not become another Europe, or even what it was under the Indians—a cockpit of war, prey for European empires playing divide-and-rule with the assistance of their Amerindian allies, both eager to contain the ever-advancing Americans?

And in terms of the American regime of democratic, commercial republicanism aimed at securing our natural right, on this point the philosopher Montesquieu had made a crucial observation known to all of 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: kingships, 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 we will enjoy.

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. Between these documents we see the United States Constitution, which sets down the ruling structures whereby our foreign policy shall be conducted.

I. The Declaration of Independence

The Declaration was the first act of a 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, these two elements mean that the American Declaration is an appeal or complaint based on 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 an extralegal criterion, 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 o 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.

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, etc.), going on to the minor premises of the syllogism (the charges against king and parliament, stating actions in contradiction to 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 and have the capacity to recognize those natural laws. The regime founded upon the rights of human beings as such will justify its independence by a declaration to its fellow human beings as such.

The Founders were not so naïve as to suppose that all human beings will 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’s 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 jurisdiction. To maintain peace with this regime is to recognize those rights and to endorse those rights—rights which, when secured, establish in practice friendship among all human beings, the species by nature capable of reason and civility. Crucially, the Americans do not say, ‘Those who violate our natural rights are subhuman.’ They say, ‘Those who violate our rights are treating us as subhuman, and we will defend ourselves until they stop doing that.’ Our enemies may act as if they are beasts, but they are not beasts, and with the restoration of peace friendship may be restored with them.

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, Henri III of France had been assassinated in 1589; the last of the Valois line, he was replaced by Henri IV, the first king of the Bourbon line. Henri IV was duly recognized as the sovereign of France by the other European states, themselves monarchies. Now, in 1783, the law of nations also needed to include recognition of a sovereign people.

A second consequence of American independence was the 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 Chickasaws 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” and accepting the regulation of their trade by the United States. Several years later, George Washington’s Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, began working for the breakup of the Spanish and Portuguese empires in the New World. He met secretly with a Brazilian medical student named José Maio e Barballi, who carried a copy the Declaration of Independence to Brazil.

More importantly, Washington and his Secretary of War Henry Knox determined that “a system of coercion and oppression” imposed on the Indians would “stain the character of the nation” and 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 to 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 Brits took their time in turning over western lands to the U. S. and in evacuating their numerous forts. They also encouraged the Indians to harass American settlers; that is, they practiced a ‘containment’ strategy in North America after the war was over.

Washington and Knox formulated a policy of regime change regarding those Indian tribes which did not choose 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 conceived 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 said, “Commerce with them 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.”

For this reason, Article XIV of the 1791 Treaty with the Cherokee said: “That the Cherokee nation may be led to a greater degree of civilization and to become herdsmen and cultivators, instead of remaining in the 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.”

This policy aimed at altering the Chickasaw and Cherokee regimes insignificant ways but only so far as the current condition of those nations would make feasible. Policy as distinguished from principle is contingent, a matter of prudential reasoning and not of theoretical reasoning, which is the kind of reasoning that (for example) discovers natural right. Regime change has remained one important instrument of U. S. foreign policy since independence, but, as with all such instruments, its application must be governed by both natural right and by prudence.

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 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 actually 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 power to make the United States sufficiently united, and therefore credible, in international politics—giving it no power to regulate or tax foreign commerce. Further, Congress had no power to protect U. S. rights under the law of nations; Congress could only recommend that the states pass laws to do so. 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 perfection Union” to (among other things) “provide for the common defense.”

Under the new Constitution, Congress received the powers to legislate regarding foreign policy: to collect duties and imposts; provide for the common defense; regulate commerce with foreign nations and the “Indian tribes;” and to “define and punish piracies committed on the high seas, and offenses against the laws of nations.” Also among 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, the navy, and the militia of the United States; the president also has the power to negotiate treaties with the advice and consent of the Senate and to appoint ambassadors under those same constraints. The treaty power had been enunciated by John 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 receiving 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—overlooked by many commentators, but indispensable to understanding American foreign policies as they intersect with the American regime—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, and representatives apportion according to the population—but only as equal republics. James Madison and Gouverneur Morris both observed 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 had implications for America as an empire. Jefferson called American an empire, but “an 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—as befits a regime and an empire founded upon the principle, “All men are created equal.” In addition, the Northwest Ordinance, passed by Congress in the same year the Constitution was framed, stipulated that American citizens in the territory were to be educated in public schools, readied for participation in American civic life at such time as the several parts of the Northwest Territory were sufficiently populous to warrant accession to statehood.

John Locke had justified imperialism under certain conditions. Locke argued that God gave the world to men in common not only for self-preservation but for “the Support and Comfort of their Being.” The right to property derives from this common gift. To survive in nature, each person takes what he needs; this act of taking, this labor, makes what we take our property. No one needs the consent of another to appropriate natural objects needed for survival, for the sustenance of the life to which we have a right. Having “mixed his labor” with nature, man adds to nature; the common possession of nature is of no use to real 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.

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 of the value of the property. Man as such is “the great foundation of property”; it  is better to have a large population than a 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.” 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, natural right can be secured and 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, doesn’t spoil and isn’t hard to carry. In Locke’s estimation, by establishing civil property rights for English settlers and guarding them by absolute monarchic rule over the Indian tribes and nations (which had a sense of territory but not of property), the British Empire advanced human prosperity and liberty. The settlers objected 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 not, more than a century later.

Thus the American “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 the use of settled families. Both of these foundations had a moral foundation, namely, securing natural rights.

From this we see that 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. This doesn’t preclude 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 a 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 State. The exact territorial limit of the American empire would prove controversial, as would the policy of regime change as the result of victory in war. But if the Founders’ way of understanding moral and political life is correct, these become matters of prudence, not principle.

In the next lecture I will turn to the closest thing to a comprehensive statement of the foreign policy of the American Founders: George Washington’s Farewell Address. I will then conclude with remarks on the continuities and changes we have seen in our foreign policy, especially since our imperial project essentially ended in 1890.

This lecture was first delivered at Hillsdale College in Spring 2016.

 

For a generation now, Americans have confronted terrorists acting in the name of Islam. Self-described Muslim organizations using terrorism as a tactic are rare in American experience, but neither terrorism nor Muslims were unknown to the generation that founded the American regime. They fought a war with the Muslim states of Algiers, Morocco, and Tripoli in the first decade of the nineteenth century. These states sponsored not terrorism but piracy against our shipping. No isolationist when it came to the defense of American commerce on what he called “the great highway of the nations”—the open sea—President Jefferson sent the Navy to the Mediterranean.

As for terrorism, our first act of foreign policy—the Declaration of Independence—describes the depredations of what it calls “the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.” That is as good a definition of what we now call terrorism as we’re likely to see, and we’ve had it since 1776. Terrorism is savagery deployed as a technique of domination by rulers or would-be rulers.

When thinking of this new (to us) conjunction of terrorism and what the terrorists call Islam, we need to recognize the distinctions the Founders made in both of these conflicts. In the Barbary Wars, Jefferson didn’t fight against all Muslims; America fought only against those who had attacked our shipping. When fighting the American Indian nations during and after the Revolutionary War, George Washington and the other Founders distinguished between what they understood as the “savage” nations and the “civilized” ones. For example, they referred to the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole nations as the “Five Civilized Tribes.” Civilized Indian nations that were not allied with the British Empire against us were not the enemy; some of them even fought on our side.

To understand the moral foundation of these policy distinctions, we look to the Declaration, which lays out the fundamental principles of American self-government and therefore of any American policy, foreign or domestic. As we know, the Declaration of Independence isn’t just a list of assertions and complaints. It is a logical syllogism leading to a reasonable conclusion: that these States are and ought to be free and independent. The first premise of that syllogism is that all men are created equal in the sense that their Creator has endowed them with unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Governments aim at securing those right. In framing any policy, American citizens will seek practical means of securing those rights we share, first as human beings simply, and second as citizens, as Americans. Our government is to secure those rights first and foremost for those it governs, although the rights themselves are shared by all human beings, including our enemies. We respect those rights in foreigners while securing them for ourselves.

As political creatures—as members of this community and no other—Americans have gathered in a network of communities extending from towns to counties to states to the national government. We have constituted a—an orderly governing structure—for this network. What is a ‘regime’?

A regime is the most authoritative form of ruling in a political community. The form of our government, the structure of our ruling institutions, is best called a democratic republic: democratic in the sense that no monarchic dynasty or aristocratic ruling class has title to rule over the rest of us; republican in the sense that on most levels of government “We the People” don’t rule directly but instead frame and execute our laws through representatives we elect for that purpose.

The supreme law of this land, this American political community, is of course the Constitution of the United States. The Constitution doesn’t constitute us as a people—the American people already existed before it was framed. The Constitution constitutes the uppermost of our ruling institutions, the institutions that govern the union of our people and their more local political communities. As the Founders understood, the Constitution also influences the character of the American people by providing us with certain pathways of conduct as we go about our business of governing ourselves. for example, the Constitution sets down certain ways in which ambitious citizens may rise to positions of prominence and authority while closing down other ways.

So we can say that although our Constitution doesn’t constitute us as a people, it helps to define us as a people by reinforcing in us certain habits of conduct—ways of thinking and acting—that conduce to the securing of natural rights for American citizens—what the Declaration identifies as the purpose of government. The Constitution does this in part by expressing our natural rights in terms of civil or legal rights, as seen in the Bill of Rights. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the right to bear arms are all legal guarantees of what we already have ‘in principle’ by the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.

More subtly, but also more powerfully, the Constitution secures our natural rights by getting us to rule ourselves along the pathways of self-government just mentioned. Such legal practices as elections to governing offices by means of voting and trials of accused criminals by jury get us into the habit of ruling ourselves by speech, reason, and ballots, rather than by command, demagoguery, and bullets. Those habits are the habits of mind and heart suitable to a self-governing people, a people that rules itself with respect to its members’ own natural rights and those of others—the habits of a democratic republic that nonetheless avoids the passionate misrule, the majority tyranny, of the direct democracies seen in ancient Greece.

In addition to being a democratic republic we are also a commercial republic, and on the same natural-rights foundation. Commerce or trade is the practice of self-government in the realm of economic life. Commerce and trade operate by persuasion not command and coercion. In both our political life and our political economy, Americans rule themselves by consent. Consent isn’t mere assent or acquiescence. Consent means reasoned assent, whether it comes to selecting a Congressman or buying a house. Consent can never mean acquiescence to sheer coercion (necessary though that might sometimes be) if that coercion violated our innocent enjoyment of our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness because that would contradict, logically violate, the purpose of government itself.

A regime consisting of a tyrant or an oligarchy commanding a military and a secret police enforcing edicts respecting what we buy and sell—with most of the profits going to the tyrant or the oligarchy—would leave a people with very different habits of mind and heart than a people that has established a democratic and commercial republic. To live in a tyranny or an oligarchy is to experience a different mental and moral environment, and the founders of such regimes know that.

What do these remarks on American civics have to do with terrorist organizations fighting under the banner of Islam? Pretty much everything.

As a form of warfare and of ruling that refuses to distinguish ages, sexes, and conditions, terrorism aims at ruling not by reason but by fear. Terrorists attack civilians. This is true of terrorist organizations that do not control territory—the old Irish Republican Army, for example—and those that do, and indeed control sovereign states—the Nazis in Germany, the Bolshevik Party in the Soviet Union, and the Maoists in China. More than that, terrorism is anti-civilian in a much deeper sense. Terrorism attacks civility itself, the habits of self-government by reasoned persuasion. It seeks command with no ‘back-talk.’ And it does so because whether it’s deployed against civilians and civility by the Nazis and Communists of yesterday or the jihadis of today it denies the principle of the American founding—that all men are created equal. Alternatively, it may deny that all those we call men are really men, really human at all.

Around the time of the 9/11 attacks, an Arab television station aired a film in which a three-year-old girl was asked, “What are the Jews?” “The Jews,” she answered dutifully, “are apes and pigs.” Such a catechism of contempt flows from the rejection of natural right; it forms habit of mind and heart consistent with a regime of tyranny. Tyranny enshrines not the natural right to life but the right to kill. Sure enough, in places where the rejection of equal natural rights prevails—specifically, in those countries where Islam is understood to subordinate non-Muslims—the legal code enforces the status of dhimmitude upon non-Muslims, who are entitled to live only on condition of strict subordination, enforceable by penalty of death. Exclusion from citizenship is the price of survival. Your life depends upon giving up the means of defending your life. a full civic life may be lived only if you believe rightly—’rightly,’ that is, according to the one or the few who rule you. To be religiously incorrect is to be politically incorrect, and to be politically incorrect is to be treated as less than fully human.

The Declaration of Independence concludes with the foundational principle of American foreign policy. Americans regard other countries to be “Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.” Those who make war against the United States have invariably been those who deny that all men are created equal and reject the regime animated by that ‘equality principle,’ the regime of democratic and commercial republicanism. The United States has fought more than 200 wars in the 240 years since independence, since it first needed a foreign policy. It has never fought a war against any democratic and commercial republic. Today, the main geopolitical rivals of the United States—China, Russia, Iran, and the several jihadi-terrorist organizations—all reject the founding principle of the American regime, reject the regime itself, and adhere instead to some principle that denies natural rights, whether on the basis of Marxism, nationalism, or Islamism.

During his presidency, George Washington—hailed as ‘first in war and first in peace,’ first in dealing with both enemies and friends of the regime founded upon natural right—enunciated the basic terms of American policy, foreign and domestic. Like all policies, they were intended to fit the circumstances of the time and place in which they were advanced, but their guiding principles are as permanent as human nature. The principles underlying his domestic and foreign policies were the same.

How, then, would Washington think about Islam? There were few if any Muslims in the United States in the 1790s, but we do know what Washington thought about religious congregants generally. Among his first acts as president were his letters to the major American religious congregations—his own Episcopalians, but also Presbyterians, Methodists, Catholics, Quakers, and, perhaps most importantly, Jewish congregants in Newport, Rhode Island. Although European regimes had established one or several types of Christianity as politically privileged, Washington’s America was having none of that. The government o the United States, he told all of them, welcomes members of any religious confession insofar as they conduct themselves as good citizens of the United States. Although many American Protestants had looked with asperity at Catholics, and peoples around the world had persecuted Jews, Washington and the other founders cared only that citizens act like citizens—obeying the laws enacted by their legislatures, respecting the civil and natural rights of their fellow-citizens. No set of religious practices consistent with American constitutional law will be grounds for denial of civil rights by the American federal government.

Notice the great advantage to thinking and arguing this way. Washington and his fellow Americans didn’t need to decide who is a real Christian, a real Jew, or a real Muslim. Europeans needed to do that because once they had established a particular church or religious confession as politically relevant to the question of who gets to rule and who must obey they needed some way of separating the sheep from the goats. Americans need look only at conduct.

This means that Muslims who are citizens in American today must never be denied their civil rights—deprived of life and liberty, including the civil liberties of voting, serving on juries, and holding property—so long as they abide by American law. Conversely, any attempt to substitute laws that contradict American law without the consent, the reasoned assent, of their fellow non-Muslim citizens must not be permitted. Europe has attempted to live a civic life that allows enclaves of Muslims to frame their own laws, some of which contradict the laws of France, Germany, and the other countries where they live. That’s not for America, where all men are recognized as having been treated equal, entitled to equal protection under the laws.

So, that is how Washington and the Founders would understand Islam and anyone who describes himself as a Muslim. A person who sincerely regards himself or herself as a faithful Muslim will have nothing to fear from the regime of the United States insofar as he or she refrains from attacking American citizens or otherwise undermining their natural and civil rights. This principle holds in policy foreign or domestic, and it holds in regard to any system of religious or political beliefs. If you disagree with American principles, you are free to do so peacefully—that is, in speech—although of course this will alert American citizens to your opposition to their principles, just as it would if you were espousing monarchism, fascist or communist tyranny, or any other regime hostile in principle to our regime.

What about the ‘terrorist’ end of the equation? There is a moral question here as well as a political and military dimension.

In terms of morality, it’s sometimes said that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom-fighter. It’s usually Americans who say that, not our enemies, who aren’t stupid enough to leave themselves morally indecisive when targeting us. Empirically speaking, it’s true enough to say that the people we call terrorists often call themselves freedom-fighters, or soldiers of God, or some such thing. But let’s follow that thought to the end. It’s equally true, empirically, that one man’s freedom is another man’s slavery. What the late Osama bin Laden called freedom was tyranny to the late Dr. Albert Einstein, and vice-versa. By the same token, we’ve seen that one man’s man is another man’s ape or pig. While Dr. Einstein may have been a man to us, to that Muslim three-year-old and her educators he was an unclean animal, and deserved to be treated as an unclean animal.

So the real question is, which are we? Will we acquiesce in being classified as apes or pigs? Will we acquiesce if others are? Will we accept the consequences of such classification, consequences we all see very plainly?

The Founders refused classification as mere subjects of the British king and his empire. He and it acted tyrannically, in their judgment, and their foreign policy toward him and it was to deny that classification and to fight that rule. Insofar as the British, the Spanish, the Germans, the Russians—all ruled by regimes opposed to the democratic and commercial republican regime of the United States, regimes denying the existence of natural rights for human beings as such—insofar as those nations made war against us, we treated them as enemies. The same goes for regimes claiming to be Muslim, whether or not those regimes have organized themselves into sovereign states or networks of ‘non-state actors.’

With regard to terrorism, seen by the Founders in the actions of those Indian nations who violated the natural-rights standards of just war by deliberately killing the innocent, the American policy that defeated it was imperial rule or removal of the uncivilized nations or tribes and regime change for the civilized tribes and nations. Washington developed his policy toward the civilized tribes with the help of his Secretary of War, Henry Knox. The administration provided them with tools of agriculture in order to settle them on the land so that they no longer needed to range widely over poorly defined territories to hunt and to gather. With such settlement, within well-defined borders, Amerindians could in principle live in peace with the United States as sovereign nations on the North American continent. This is the origin of the foreign policy we now call ‘regime change.’ Then as now, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.

With the inveterately savage tribes, however, war and conquest, followed by American territorial expansion into the conquered lands, was the Administration’s policy, and remained America’s policy from then on. And rightly so: empire means rule, and if an enemy intends either to rule or to ruin you, you had better defeat him and rule him or ruin him, until he changes his ways. Territorial seizure has always been recognized by the law of nations—itself derived from the law of nature—as a legitimate punishment for those who fight unjust wars. The great period of American imperialism did not begin with the Spanish-American War in the 1890s, as so many textbooks foolishly say. American imperialism flourished between 1790 and 1890; it went from sea to shining sea, as the song goes. The difference between it and the British and other European empires Americans abhorred was that it was, as Secretary of State and then President Thomas Jefferson called it, an empire of liberty—meaning, the new territories incorporated into the American Union as states enjoyed equal status under the Constitution with the original thirteen states. In the United States, there was no distinction between an imperial center or ‘metropole’—say, England—and its colonies—America or India.

It is important to acknowledge that Americans sometimes violated their own imperial principles. The Creek and Cherokee nations, civilized nations which had agreed to settle within recognized territorial boundaries, were driven from their rightful lands along the infamous “Trail of Tears.” Then and on other occasions, it was the Americans who acted as savages. Tyranny and savagery have no racial or religious boundaries, any more than liberty and civility do.

American foreign policy—imperialist and often but not always justifiably so, on this continent, politically isolationist but commercially and sometime militarily wide-ranging elsewhere around the world—changed as our circumstances changed, as any policy must. By 1900, modern technology—telegraphs, steam-powered warships, and soon the first weapon of mass destruction, poison gas—forced Americans to reconsider their preference for military non-involvement in overseas conflicts. Our foreign policy regarding political and military alliances could no longer follow a fixed rule but rather became more than ever a matter of prudential reasoning: Is it wise to enter the Great War because Imperial Germany is sinking our merchant ships? (It was, Jefferson thought, in the Mediterranean when the Barbary States were plundering them). Is it wise to re-arm as fascists rampage through Europe and militarists in Japan set out to conquer East Asia? What about Soviet-backed Communist revolutionaries in Greece and Turkey, Korea and Vietnam? And today, we look for a policy against Muslim terrorists.

This policy won’t be an imperial project, as we have no interest and little capacity from which the terrorists seek to strike at us. The regime-change strategy pursued by the Bush Administration was animated by the right principle, but in practice it failed—perhaps because Americans had forgotten exactly what a regime is, and how hard it is to change one. That strategy worked in the aftermath of the Second World War, but those circumstances differed from the ones that prevailed in Afghanistan and Iraq sixty years later, and it may also be that the Americans of ‘the greatest generation’ had a clearer sense of what they were about.

Any American foreign policy must first understand what America is, what we stand for. Confusion on that basic point can only yield confused policy. After clarifying who we are, the next priority for American citizens who think about our foreign policy must be to identify the primary enemies of our regime and rank them in order of danger. Clearly, China is the most powerful of these potential threats; Russia ranks second; Iran and the terrorists it sponsors (as well as those it doesn’t sponsor) come in third. In dealing with the terrorists we must take care not to exhaust ourselves, leaving our country vulnerable to more formidable powers. The last priority is the strategic one: choosing allies, calibrating diplomatic, economic, and military actions to weaken and eventually defeat the terrorists. No simple rule can guide us in that strategy because it’s a matter of practical judgment under circumstances that change. In such judgments we should take care to guard our sovereignty, our self-government, by recurring to the principles of the Declaration of Independence, which can and should both animate our actions and restrain them.