No Higher Law

American Foreign Policy and the Western Hemisphere since 1776

Brian Loveman

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780807895986
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Nordamerikanische Geschichte

Dismantling the myths of United States isolationism and exceptionalism, No Higher Law is a sweeping history and analysis of American policy toward the Western Hemisphere and Latin America from independence to the present. From the nation's earliest days, argues Brian Loveman, U.S. leaders viewed and treated Latin America as a crucible in which to test foreign policy and from which to expand American global influence. Loveman demonstrates how the main doctrines and policies adopted for the Western Hemisphere were exported, with modifications, to other world regions as the United States pursued its self-defined global mission. No Higher Law reveals the interplay of domestic politics and international circumstances that shaped key American foreign policies from U.S. independence to the first decade of the twenty-first century. This revisionist view considers the impact of slavery, racism, ethnic cleansing against Native Americans, debates on immigration, trade and tariffs, the historical growth of the military-industrial complex, and political corruption as critical dimensions of American politics and foreign policy. Concluding with an epilogue on the Obama administration, Loveman weaves together the complex history of U.S. domestic politics and foreign policy to achieve a broader historical understanding of American expansionism, militarism, imperialism, and global ambitions as well as novel insights into the challenges facing American policymakers at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Chapter One
The Isolationist Myth

We are met together at a most interesting period. The situation of the principal powers of Europe are singular and portentous. Connected with some by treaties and with all by commerce, no important event there can be indifferent to us. — JOHN ADAMS, First Message to Congress, 1797

Making sense of U.S. foreign policy in the twenty-first century requires rethinking America’s historical role in the community of nations. It also requires understanding the connection between partisan and sectional politics and the foreign policy challenges confronted by the new nation in the first half century after independence.

The American colonies’ war for independence from Britain was part of a major conflict among European powers that stretched from India and the Mediterranean into the West Indies and North America. French and Spanish arms, supplies, money, naval assets, and troops deployed against the British made possible American independence.¹ In the decades after its independence, America’s leaders devised policies for inserting the country into an international system dominated by the European powers. Although never entirely consensual, the emerging policies were rooted in concerns for the new nation’s security, ambitious commercial and territorial aspirations, and an assertive nationalism. In its first half century, American foreign policy was expansionist, self-congratulatory, far reaching, aggressive, and sometimes idealistic — but never isolationist.

There is abundant scholarship debunking the myth of U.S. foreign policy isolationism after independence.² Yet there persists among many Americans the idea that until 1898 U.S. foreign policy conformed to an isolationist vision bequeathed by George Washington’s Farewell Address in 1796 or Thomas Jefferson’s admonition against “entangling alliances” in 1801.³ But Washington and Jefferson were not isolationists. They did not promote American disengagement and separation from international politics, international diplomacy, or international commerce or even from meddling in European politics and influencing the balance of power in European affairs. Neither did their successors in America’s first half century. As Alexander H. Everett, America’s minister to Spain, wrote in 1827: “A complete separation of our political interests from those of all other countries could only be effected by a complete abstinence from all intercourse with them; a plan which it would be extremely difficult to realise, which would be highly impolitic if practicable, and has never been avowed nor defended by anyone.”⁴

Given the historical record, the persistence of the idea that America had an isolationist tradition before 1898 is remarkable. It is not merely a curiosity or a semantic dispute over how best to characterize the United States’ foreign policy. Professional historians, political scientists, policy analysts, and popular writers insist on the reality of America’s isolationist past despite significant revisionist scholarship since at least the 1950s. Thus, historian Dexter Perkins, who spent much of his life writing about American policy toward Latin America, told readers in 1962 that during the first period of American foreign policy, before 1898, the country evolved “an isolationist viewpoint regarding Europe.”⁵ In 1966, political scientist Leroy Rieselbach wrote in a study on Congress and foreign policy that “isolationism has been a force in American politics since the founding of the nation.”⁶ Historian Howard Jones’s widely used textbook on American foreign relations notes in passing that “the war with Spain [in 1898] also furthered the decline of American isolationism.” In 2006, the author of a major study of American foreign policy and strategy declared that “when, toward the end of the nineteenth century, a united Germany proved to be too powerful to be restrained by its European neighbors without American help, America’s first strategy of isolationism became obsolete.”⁷ And a well-known policy analyst reminded readers in 2007: “Isolationism, recall, was America’s response to the wrangling world and remained so throughout much of the nation’s history …. The isolationist instinct lives in America.”⁸

The persistence of the idea that America had a tradition of isolationism reflects crucial aspects of American national identity. Americans have been taught to think, and like to think, that the country did not meddle in the affairs of other nations, that in its dealings with other peoples the United States has been magnanimous, that, unlike other great powers, the United States has usually followed the moral high ground and resorted to force only in self-defense. Americans like to believe that the wars they have fought were provoked by other nations and that the United States has promoted freedom and liberty around the world, fighting against tyranny from the early nineteenth century to the first decade of the twenty-first.

Such premises mistake American unilateralism for isolationism. To defend the new nation and its supposed Providential destiny, the country’s leaders adopted a unilateralist foreign policy.⁹ Unilateralism is not an epithet; it refers to a principle that guided American policymakers, consisting of armed neutrality in European wars, autonomy, and refusal to join in alliances. Unlike the leaders of Europe, American statesmen, after allying with France and Spain in their global war against Britain to win their own independence, rejected formal alliances as an instrument of foreign policy, preferring instead unilateral action to achieve the country’s objectives.¹⁰ This made the United States a singular exception to the general practices of foreign policy of European nations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Nevertheless, the United States deployed naval forces around the globe, sent diplomats and a growing merchant marine to every continent, and “operated, in foreign politics, according to the assumptions of power politics that dominated contemporary European statecraft.”¹¹ As an American political scientist writing in 1940 put it, “Americans may do well to consider that the true objective of their historic caution was not isolation, a friendliness which may subject their destiny to their enemies, but an ideal interpreted to the nation by [George] Washington as ‘the command of its own fortunes.’”¹²

Americans inherited much of British political culture and legal institutions. They had also participated actively in Britain’s global commerce and empire. By fighting a war for independence and creating a federal republic, however, they challenged the hegemony and legitimacy of European monarchy and colonialism. The origins, political ideology, and very existence of the United States of America represented a threat to the colonial interests of major European powers, particularly in the Western Hemisphere.

George Washington, America’s first president, well understood that the United States operated in, not isolated from, a dangerous international system. Washington warned Congress: “The United States ought not to indulge a persuasion that, contrary to the order of human events, they will forever keep at a distance those painful appeals to arms with which the history of every other nation abounds. … If we desire to avoid insult, we must be able to repel it; if we desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity, it must be known that we are at all times ready for war.”¹³ Washington asked Congress in 1793 for a larger budget for munitions, armaments, and military stores specifically because “the connection of the United States with Europe has become extremely interesting.” Two years later, Washington returned to the need for military preparedness, partly to protect the country’s shifting and vulnerable frontiers against European nations and their Native American allies.¹⁴

George Washington was a realist. He presided over a militarily weak new nation in an international system dominated by European powers with which the United States had important commercial relations but also trade disputes and territorial conflicts. War between France and England threatened to involve the United States and divided its political elite between Anglophiles (Federalists) and Francophiles (Jeffersonian Republicans). Under these circumstances, Washington intended to avoid disunion and to achieve American foreign policy objectives through armed neutrality.¹⁵ In his Farewell Address, he defined his policy of neutrality as a temporary tactic not an enduring principle: “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 which is necessary to give it, humanly speaking, the command of its own fortunes.”¹⁶

Three months later, in his last annual message to Congress, Washington lamented the depredations of France on American commerce in the West Indies; he urged on Congress a program of naval construction and a policy of military deterrence to defend the country’s shipping, not only in the West Indies but in the Mediterranean: “The most sincere neutrality is not a sufficient guard against the depredations of nations at war. To secure respect to a neutral flag requires a naval force organized and ready to vindicate it from insult or aggression. This may even prevent the necessity of going to war by discouraging belligerent powers from committing such violations of the rights of the neutral party as may, first or last, leave no other option.”¹⁷ Washington believed in deterrence through military strength. He asked Congress to create a credible navy to defend the nation’s shores and deter attacks on its merchant ships around the world.

If American leaders wished for the country to command its own fortunes, then it followed that their foreign policies and decisions on military preparedness would depend partly on changing perceptions of threats to national security and also on economic opportunity and possibilities for territorial expansion. Among themselves, however, Americans disagreed on how to define and achieve the country’s foreign policy objectives. They disagreed also on the desirability of territorial expansion. And, among the expansionists, there existed no consensus on which territorial annexations had priority. America’s leaders also contested alignment, alliances, and ideological affinity with the conflicting European powers. The two political parties that competed for control of the Union from the early 1790s, the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans (or Jeffersonians), emerged in part from these differences on foreign policy. Likewise, Americans had not yet firmly established the workings of their new constitutional system. Conflicts over foreign policy would contribute to defining the nature of congressional-executive relations. Gradually, contentious partisan politics and congressional debates, in which the contending parties and factions sought to “out-patriot” their competitors, contributed to the consolidation of unilateralism as a first principle of American grand strategy.

Washington’s successors aspired to expand American commerce around the globe and to wrest control of much of the North American continent, including Canada and the Floridas, from European powers and Native Americans. There could be no isolation from trade negotiations, nor from the need to counter European political, economic, and military initiatives in the Western Hemisphere.¹⁸ Even before independence, the North American colonials participated actively in international trade; Thomas Jefferson had written in A Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774) that the colonists had a “natural right” to trade freely with all parts of the world.¹⁹ British North American colonial traders defied European mercantile restrictions in the Caribbean, Asia, and Africa, carrying American cargoes along with the commodities and manufactures of other nations to all points of the compass. In this enterprise, they enjoyed the protection of the British navy until they struck out on their own in 1776. After independence, the new nation would have to defend its own commerce, in competition with the British and other European powers.

The Founders’ generation thus gave priority to international trade. America’s first treaty — an independence war alliance with France in 1778 — adopted free trade and reciprocity as the cornerstone of the country’s commercial policies. Tariff policy and customs revenues occupied George Washington in the first moments of his administration. He signed legislation imposing duties on imported goods on July 4, 1789. Customs revenues became the most important source of federal government revenue until World War I.²⁰

In the Washington and John Adams administrations, the annual value of American exports almost quadrupled, from 22 million dollars in 1790 to 81 million in 1800, and then fluctuated, with some declines, during the Napoleonic wars (1803–15), which involved major European powers and commercial warfare in the West Indies.²¹ For the period 1790 to 1814, approximately one-third of American exports went to European colonies in the Caribbean and South America.²² Perhaps more important, the American merchant marine and receipts from shipping services made possible, along with European loans and investment, the relatively high level of imports experienced by a predominantly agricultural nation, thus making the protection of neutral shipping a key to the American economy and balance of payments.²³

Defense of neutral rights and commerce would become a primary concern of American foreign policy. This commitment took the country into war against France, the Barbary powers (Morocco, Algeria, Tunis, and Tripoli), and Britain in the first decades after independence.²⁴ The new nation could not isolate itself, or the Western Hemisphere, from international conditions that defined its commercial opportunities, constrained its territorial expansion, and, sometimes, directly threatened the very survival of the Union.²⁵ In this context, America adopted unilateralism as the first principle of its foreign policy.

Beginnings

When the United States gained its independenc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• No Higher Law
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations, Maps, and Tables
• Introduction
• Chapter One The Isolationist Myth
• Chapter Two The Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny
• Chapter Three Providential Nursery?
• Chapter Four The Good Neighbor
• Chapter Five The New Manifest Destiny
• Chapter Six The New Navy
• Chapter Seven Protective Imperialism
• Chapter Eight Return to Normalcy
• Chapter Nine Independent Internationalism
• Chapter Ten Not-So-Cold War, I
• Chapter Eleven Not-So-Cold War, II
• Chapter Twelve American Crusade
• Chapter Thirteen Not the End of History
• Chapter Fourteen The New Normalcy?
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index