America's Rise and Fall among Nations

Lessons in Statecraft from John Quincy Adams

Angelo M. Codevilla

• Publisher: Encounter Books
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781641772730
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Diplomazia e trattati

Minding our own business while leaving other peoples to mind theirs was the basis of the United States's successful foreign policy from 1815–1910. Best described in the works of John Quincy Adams and carried out by his successors throughout the 19th century, this is the foreign policy by which America grew prosperous and in peace. This policy also remains the common sense of most Americans. America's Rise and Fall among Nations contrasts this original "America First" foreign policy with the principles and results of the following 100 years of a "progressive" foreign policy which suddenly arrived with the election of Woodrow Wilson as President in 1912. The author explains why the many fruitless American wars—large and small—which followed Wilson's conduct of World War I always resulted in a failed peace and often more conflicts abroad, not to mention the loss of the domestic peace each failure caused among Americans.Finally, America's Rise and Fall among Nations examines how John Quincy Adams's insights are applicable to our current domestic and international environment and exemplify what "America First" can mean in our time. They chart a clear path to escape America's previous eleven disastrous decades of so-called "progressive" international relations.

PART I—THE FOUNDATIONS OF AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY

ONETHEME

What were America’s founders and their followers trying to foster and preserve by their conduct among nations? What were they trying to put first? Why did the Progressives turn away from these concerns? What did they put first? How dismissive were they of reality? What have been Progressivism’s effects on how America has fared among nations? How have changes in the world and in America itself made it impossible to continue on the Progressive course? How would John Quincy and those following his principles manage America’s present international situation? By what principles might today’s statesmen put America First?

In America, as everywhere else, a people’s choices and priorities reflect who they are. From the earliest settlements, Americans have thought themselves fortunate that they or their ancestors had distanced themselves from the rest of European civilization—and not just geographically. America was their final destination. They had not come on the way to anywhere else. Few went back. They left old quarrels and did not come to start new ones. They came because they expected America to be different, a nearly empty land where they would have peace, freedom, and the bread that their hands earned. And that is why Americans’ relations with foreigners were always premised on appreciation for what made America different. Putting America First meant more than natural self-interest. It meant putting a better, describably different way of life first.

The Americans

The Europeans who had come to America had not been great men—actual or would-be contenders in Europe’s partisan or national struggles. Although the Puritans were unusually concerned with spiritual perfection, most early arrivals were ordinary but adventuresome Brits and Germans, old-fashioned about their Christianity and morals. They had left the Old Country to escape its troubles, as well as to run their own affairs, and had become happily accustomed to running their own lives with a minimum of trouble from without. The Puritan strain has played a considerable role in America’s foreign as well as domestic affairs. But for most Americans, the overriding objective of American foreign policy has ever been, first of all, protecting a decent, autonomous way of life for our citizens.

Putting America First always meant defending that way of life. Until 1765, frontier life in New England and New York also meant serving in militias to fight the Indian tribes that slaughtered, enslaved, and retreated behind France’s protection. In 1812, the local militia was not enough to prevent Indians armed by Britain from massacring the inhabitants of the Chicago settlement. So long as Spain held Florida, it enabled deadly Indian raids into the southern United States. In west-central Texas, the Comanche held up the frontier for a half century. President Lyndon Johnson’s mother narrowly escaped being murdered by them as a baby. Neither the British nor the French, nor the Spaniards who controlled the exit from the Mississippi, nor the Barbary pirates who ruled the Mediterranean, were going to be nice to impotent Americans. The founders had won America’s independence by cruel war and were perfectly willing to make war for its honor and for the safety of Americans. Peace-loving Americans had no pacifist illusions.

Neither did they mean to “isolate” themselves. Americans may have been more dependent on international commerce than any other people in history, and at least as eager as any to explore the globe. Americans’ relations with peoples who differed from themselves in every way, whether ancient civilizations or modern despotisms, were easy and peaceful because Americans’ focus on their own business made them uninterested in others’ affairs. George Washington never lost an opportunity to urge his fellow citizens to view their concerns through the prism of their identities as Americans.

The Founders

In the first six of the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay summarized the opinions about foreign affairs common in the mass media of the day—sermons and newspapers. Foremost, Americans wanted peace. In No. 3, Jay wrote that peace being Americans’ objective, we must neither insult nor injure foreigners. That means minding our own business. And in No. 4, he wrote that peace would also depend on readiness to punish foreigners’ interference in our affairs. In No. 6, Hamilton pointed out that since wars arise from ubiquitous, unpredictable causes and circumstances, Americans must be ever ready to fight. The founders also knew that, as other nations were surely going to fight among themselves, Americans had better be careful lest they be drawn into others’ quarrels. More than a century later, Theodore Roosevelt summed all this up in homespun terms: “Speak softly and carry a big stick.”

No sooner had the Constitution come into being than the quarter century of the French Revolution’s wars became the crucible in which the American people’s international character was forged. George Washington’s 1793 proclamation of neutrality in those wars, seconded by Alexander Hamilton’s Pacificus and Americanus essays, and young John Quincy Adams’s Marcellus, laid the theoretical base. Washington’s 1796 farewell address warned against the domestic temptations that entice us to set aside our geographic good fortune and common sense. “Why quit our own to stand on foreign ground?” Washington asked. “Observe good faith and justice toward all nations,” he adjured. He argued that neutrality with regard to others’ business is the other side of intense focus on our own. By contrast, confusing other nations’ interests with our own, he said, sets us against one another.

Since Washington’s statecraft aimed foremost at uniting Americans, he was careful—even when waging a war in which a significant part of the population sided with the enemy—to treat all as if they were loyal citizens.

Washington never tired of urging his fellow citizens to have arm’s length relationships with foreign nations and to back them up with a respectable army. His successor, John Adams, fathered the U.S. Navy. The lead ship thereof, the U.S.S. Constitution, is still in commission.

In 1777, John Adams took his son, ten-year-old John Quincy, on his diplomatic mission to secure military aid from France and loans from Holland. The boy grew up fast—mastering perfect French and Dutch, helping his father, and conversing with statesmen. In 1781, when Charles Francis Dana was appointed to represent the United States in Saint Petersburg, fourteen-year-old J. Q. Adams accompanied him as his secretary. Since Dana spoke no French—the language of Russia’s elites—J. Q. effectively transacted the embassy’s business for two years. In 1784, when John Adams became America’s representative to King George III, seventeen-year-old John Quincy functioned as his father’s deputy. That was before entering Harvard, and then studying law. In 1794, George Washington appointed John Quincy Adams minister to the Netherlands. Successive presidents then sent him to represent the United States in Prussia, Russia, and Great Britain. In the course of these duties, he also became fluent in German, Russian, Italian, and Spanish. Since earliest youth, he had read the Latin and Greek classics.

As secretary of state (1817–1825), J. Q. Adams summed up and personified what America’s unique people would have to do to live peacefully among diverse nations. As we will see, although J. Q. Adams did not invent any principles of statecraft, neither adding to nor subtracting from what Washington, Hamilton, and his father had prescribed, his dispatches, diary, and memoirs specified and applied their principles in a way that constitutes a comprehensive course of instruction for international relations in general, and for American statecraft in particular.

Adams shared, specified, and conveyed to his successors the founding generation’s fundamental interest in preserving and enhancing America’s own character. He sought occasions for reminding other nations—but especially our own—of the principles that make America what it is. Doing this encourages us to carefully consider how any decision we make in international affairs affects what is most important to ourselves as well as to others.

Adams is the fount of American geopolitical thought. The reader should pay particular attention to Adams’s primordial distinction between America’s own interests—hence the “causes” for which Americans might fight—as well as to the (largely geographic) bases for evaluating the extent to which any cause or interest may be our own. The peoples on our borders and on the islands around us concern us most, followed by the oceans, then the rest of the world. Diplomatic experience had also taught Adams that, where the interests of nations coincide, negotiated agreements are scarcely necessary, and that when interests do not coincide, agreements are not worth the paper they are written on. That is why Adams practiced and taught a meticulous sort of diplomacy that aims at the mutual clarification of objectives.

John Quincy Adams considered the treaty that extended the United States’ border to the Pacific Ocean to have been his great achievement, alongside having established good relations with the governments of Britain, Russia, and so forth, in full acknowledgment of the radical differences between their regimes and ours. Adams had not invented the principle of mutual non-interference. That principle is, after all, the essence of the 1648 treaties of Westphalia. But Adams’s formulation of the Monroe Doctrine established non-interference as American foreign policy’s operational core.

The Legacy

Perhaps nothing shows how thoroughly Adams’s ways had conquered American statesmen’s minds as does his successor Andrew Jackson’s conduct. Jackson had beaten Adams in a bitter election. No two Americans could have been more different. Nevertheless, like Adams, Jackson combined commitment to peace and harmony with near-reflexive retaliation to physical attacks on Americans and on America’s honor. Like Adams, Jackson was about enhancing America. But despite being a man of the sword, his attempts to gain additional territory from Mexico were limited to offers of purchase, just as Adams’s had been. And though President Jackson owned slaves, his refusal to admit Texas as a slave state and his forceful stand against South Carolina’s attempt to nullify federal law were as forceful as Adams’s would have been. America’s greatness had been Adams’s great objective—a greatness that could not be purchased by unjust war or by any sacrifice of its principles.

In short, John Quincy Adams had codified the founding generation’s principles in foreign affairs into a set of practices by statesmen and expectations on the part of the public. That is why even the far-lesser statesmen in the years preceding the Civil War adhered to the Adams Paradigm, if—as in the case of the Mexican War (1846–48)—only ineptly and hypocritically. To wit: President Polk did not intend to start the Mexican War; he resisted pressures to take over Mexico for nation-building, and paid Mexico the price he would have paid to purchase what he conquered. Meanwhile, presidents between Jackson and Lincoln delivered peaceful adjustment of interests with the rest of mankind.

Abraham Lincoln’s first major speech expressed his quintessentially American approach to international affairs: “All the armies in the world led by a Bonaparte, disposing of the earth’s treasure, our own excepted, could not take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years.” Only Americans, he said, can truly hurt America. And they can do that only by putting their own passions and interests against America itself. That is why, as discord led to secession, Lincoln adjured the South not to start the war. Both Northerners and Southerners, he said, must think of themselves as Americans, first.

Because Lincoln kept in mind Washington’s commitment to treating fellow Americans as citizens, he aimed his conduct of the Civil War at reconciliation from start to finish. All manner of war aroused Lincoln’s deepest fears. “Peace among ourselves and with all nations” was the star by which he steered.

Following that star and the American people’s sentiments, William Seward, secretary of state and Lincoln’s closest adviser, helped return America to a path of peaceful, righteous greatness. Having eulogized John Quincy Adams, Seward showed what the Monroe Doctrine can mean by helping drive French imperialism out of Mexico. Like Jefferson and Adams, Seward built up America by purchasing a big chunk of territory (Alaska). He grew it also by recruiting immigrants who could contribute talent and effort. His frank, generous diplomacy with China laid bases of friendship that more than a century’s vicissitudes have never wholly erased.

Temptations

As Seward and the statesmen of the following half century tried to practice the founders’ statecraft, they had to deal with the new temptations that stemmed from America’s growing power. Principle, not national weakness, had led George Washington, John Quincy Adams, and Andrew Jackson, the American lion, to practice “good faith and justice” to all nations. Nevertheless, temptation to throw America’s weight around had not presented itself to them. Starting about 1880, it did.

The temptations of big-country status first presented themselves in the Western Hemisphere. In the 1880s, the U.S. government’s attempt to mediate a border dispute between Guatemala and Mexico produced only trouble with Mexico. Peru and Chile sought U.S. influence against one another. What were the limits of U.S. concern with foreign lands? Geography always meant that it would be dangerous for Hawaii to come into a hostile power’s possession. By the late nineteenth century, American sugar planters had come to dominate there and wanted to be annexed. But Hawaii had a native government that prized independence. Justice was on one side, interest on the other. Meanwhile, either or both France and Britain considered digging a canal across Nicaragua or Colombia as they had at Suez. Surely, this would impact America’s security. But what right had Americans to prevent such a thing? As these things were happening, Germany was building coaling stations on South Pacific islands where similar U.S. facilities were located. How could Americans secure themselves against being denied trans-Pacific coaling?

To roughly sum it up, U.S. foreign policy in the two decades between the 1877 withdrawal of Union troops from the South and the imperialist fever that briefly infected America at the turn of the century, resulted from the countervailing influences of radical Republican James G. Blaine and conservative Democrat Grover Cleveland—the first more active and intrusive than the second. As presidents and secretaries of state alternated, U.S. policy swayed gently from one side to the other of the Adams Paradigm, never exceeding its bounds. In the South Pacific, Americans reached an “understanding” with German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. Quietly but surely, America let the world know that any canal across the Americas could only be part of the U.S. coastline. Inevitably, Hawaii was becoming part of the United States. Americans reciprocated Japan’s friendship. American missionaries flowed to China, as U.S. policy tried to limit European powers’ exploitation of it. U.S. policy for Latin America focused on J. Q. Adams’s original concern: limiting European influence. In short, as the century was closing, America reaped peace from a foreign policy of peaceful benevolence.

Imperialism

Few could imagine that peace would turn into war from an excess of benevolence. But that is what happened.

The European virus of imperialism struck America’s upper classes, whose hearts and minds had already been infected with Progressivism. That social-moral disease had been present among the Northerners and Southerners who had integrated their contrasting senti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I—The Foundations of American Foreign Policy
• Part II—Twentieth-Century Policy in Perspective
• Part III—Return to Reality
• Index
• A Note on the Type