Liberty's Surest Guardian

American Nation-Building from the Founders to Obama

Jeremi Suri

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781439141700
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

Americans are a nation-building people, and in Liberty's Surest Guardian, Jeremi Suri—Nobel Fellow and leading light in the next generation of policy makers—looks to America's history to see both what it has to offer failed states around the world and what it should avoid. Far from being cold imperialists, Americans have earnestly attempted to export their invention of representative government. We have had successes (Reconstruction after the American Civil War, the Philippines, Western Europe) and failures (Vietnam), and we can learn a good deal from both. Nation-building is in America's DNA. It dates back to the days of the American Revolution, when the founding fathers invented the concept of popular sovereignty—the idea that you cannot have a national government without a collective will. The framers of the Constitution initiated a policy of cautious nation-building, hoping not to conquer other countries, but to build a world of stable, self-governed societies that would support America's way of life. Yetno other country has created more problems for itself and for others by intervening in distant lands and pursuing impractical changes. Nation-building can work only when local citizens "own it, " and do not feel it is forced upon them. There is no one way to spread this idea successfully, but Suri has mined more than two hundred years of American policy in order to explain the five "P"s of nation-building: PARTNERS: Nation-building always requires partners; there must be communication between people on the ground and people in distant government offices. PROCESS: Human societies do not follow formulas. Nation-building is a process which does not produce clear, quick results. PROBLEM-SOLVING: Leadership must start small, addressing basic problems. Public trust during a period of occupation emerges from the fulfillment of basic needs. PURPOSE: Small beginnings must serve larger purposes. Citizens must see the value in what they're doing. PEOPLE: Nation-building is about people. Large forces do not move history. People move history. Our actions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya will have a dramatic impact on international stability. Jeremi Suri, provocative historian and one of Smithsonian magazine's "Top Young Innovators, " takes on the idea of American exceptionalism and turns it into a playbook for President Obama over the next, vital few years.

Chapter 1

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The American Nation-Building Creed

The same advantage which a republic has over a democracy, in controlling the effects of faction, is enjoyed by a large over a small republic—is enjoyed by the Union over the States composing it.

James Madison1

No legislative act, therefore, contrary to the Constitution, can be valid. To deny this, would be to affirm, that the deputy is greater than his principal; that the servant is above his master; that the representatives of the people are superior to the people themselves.

Alexander Hamilton2

American society has never lacked ambition. During the last two centuries the global reach of the United States has spread like rushing water, moving with ever-greater speed across the landscape, around barriers, and into the nooks and crannies of what were once distant locales. This dynamic dispersion of U.S. influence shows no sign of stopping in the twenty-first century. In recent years the nation’s soldiers, treasure, and social media have expanded into Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and other places Shakespeare described as “monstrous,” “desolate,” and largely inhospitable to foreign occupiers.3

Shakespeare never visited the exotic lands of his plays, but Americans have prodigiously trod in what the playwright called the “mudded” terrains. The growing presence of the United States in these regions transformed the applications of the country’s power beyond the dreams of the Founding Fathers. James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and their many contemporaries could never have imagined that their new nation would one day dominate all the oceans of the globe, with permanent military bases in more than fifty countries. Compared to its most powerful predecessors in Europe and Asia since the Middle Ages, the United States became a much larger and heavier global presence. “Soft” cultural power was both a product and a producer of America’s unprecedented “hard” economic and military might.S4

The Ever-Lasting Revolution

Despite the nation’s extraordinary growth, the early assumptions of American power remained fundamentally unchanged over more than two centuries. Basic ideas about politics transferred with consistency from generation to generation, and from territory to territory. The image of the American Revolution, and the founding of a new nation and a new government at the time, framed all future discussions in the United States about how to live with other societies. The Revolution was an experience, a myth, and also a paradigm for defining political mission.5

Nothing could exemplify this point more than the American reaction to the horrible terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. Amidst the smoking remains of New York’s World Trade Center, President George W. Bush memorably announced that “America today is on bended knee in prayer” for its people and its principles. In a two-minute pep talk to tired rescue workers he used the word “nation” four times, along with a flag that he proudly waved, to affirm American unity and power in the intrepid defense of individual liberty. Appearing before Congress less than a week later, the president spoke in revolutionary terms: “this country will define our times, not be defined by them. As long as the United States of America is determined and strong, this will not be an age of terror. This will be an age of liberty here and across the world.”6

In the most powerful pamphlet written to defend the war against Great Britain in late 1776, Thomas Paine had proclaimed the same militant American purpose in defending individual liberty against frightening enemies: “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. . . . Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated."7

From Thomas Paine to George W. Bush, Americans have reaffirmed their sense of purpose as defined in their Revolution. When threatened, Americans have mobilized around the global expansion of freedom—protecting their rights by ensuring that foreign peoples accept them. Americans have consistently emphasized their common identity as a single people, and they have militantly fought to destroy evil enemies who would deny their rights and their unity. Most significant, Americans have done all of these things by working to build new nations with constitutional governments, like their own. That is the history of the late eighteenth century that the United States has replayed from the Constitutional Convention through Southern Reconstruction after the Civil War, and all the conflicts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Crises consistently produce war and constitution-writing in American history. Scholars have, in fact, contributed to this process as they have told the story of the Revolution during each of these moments to remind citizens of their inherited purpose, born of political ambition.8

For some observers, the constant reinforcement of American ideals is a source of strength; it makes the United States a global force for progressive change. Robert Kagan writes: “Americans believed the world would be a better and safer place if republican institutions flourished and if tyranny and monarchy disappeared. Americans believed a world reformed along liberal and republican lines would be a safer world for their liberal republic, and that a freer and multiplying commerce would make them a more prosperous nation. They were arguably right on both counts."9

President Bush obviously agreed. His Second Inaugural Address captured the most radical American revolutionary urges in the face of foreign threats: “From the day of our Founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value, because they bear the image of the Maker of Heaven and earth.” “Advancing these ideals is the mission that created our Nation,” Bush reminded listeners. “[I]t is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.”10

Bush’s ambition to shine the light of American democracy on the entire world struck some observers as a dark nightmare. The problem for most critics was not the revolutionary principles articulated by the president, but their applicability to hostile circumstances in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other distant societies. Could the United States really overcome the Shakespearean difficulties of managing “desolate” lands? Was the image of the American Revolution really an accurate map for international change? Shouldn’t Americans more wisely focus on fulfilling the ideals of the Revolution in their own society?

Skeptical voices have a long lineage in American history, with as much claim on the nation’s past as the revolutionary zealotry exhibited by President Bush and so many of his predecessors. Advocates of a more limited American global mission—John Jay, Robert La Follette, George McGovern, Patrick Buchanan, and others—gained popular appeal in each generation as ambitious foreign adventures, predictably, failed to live up to their promise. Since the eighteenth century, strong assertions of American revolutionary principles have accompanied every war and smaller foreign intervention. Angry dissent against the application of those principles to the conflict at hand has also accompanied every war, with the notable exception of the Second World War. Americans continually replay not only the rhetoric of their Revolution, but also the early debates about the meaning and the application of the Revolution to contemporary society.

The clear pattern is that in moments of crisis the images, claims, and ambitions of the Revolution win out over more cautious voices. This is true in the history of the United States, almost without exception. “At times of heightened threat perception,” Melvyn Leffler explains, “the assertion of values mounts and subsumes careful calculation of interests. Values and ideals are asserted to help evoke public support for the mobilization of power; power, then, tempts the government to overreach far beyond what careful calculations of interest might dictate.” The goals of the United States in spreading a particular model of government are remarkably resilient, especially in the face of a fast-changing world. The willingness to use force for revolutionary purposes remains pervasive in the American experience.11

Making the “American Nation”

Despite its wide, repeated, and controversial applications, the enduring sense of American mission is firmly rooted in unique historical circumstances. The constitutional innovations of James Madison and Alexander Hamilton reflect these roots and their continuing influence in the United States and abroad. Madison, Hamilton, and their many literate counterparts in late-eighteenth-century British North America invented a new kind of government, fusing complex ideas about republics, democracies, and empires. Their creation drew its legitimacy not from tradition, from religion, or from the existing administrative units in the thirteen colonies. The Constitution challenged all of these inherited anchors of authority.12

Madison, Hamilton, and their fellow framers built not only a new edifice of government, but also a new foundation for that edifice. In this sense, they were at least as radical as the Thomas Paines who provoked the Revolution in the first place. The Constitution for the United States, jointly written, widely debated, and ultimately ratified in 1789, asserted that the power of American government rested on the definition of a new people—an “American nation.” Free men, living in diverse geographic, economic, and religious circumstances across an already vast territorial expanse, provided the wellspring for shared rule. No king would enforce authority, as was traditionally the case. No religious deity would promise eternal salvation from collective sacrifice. The citizens, defined as a single community, would constitute the sovereign basis for political authority that would supersede all other bodies, institutions, and claims. The government would come from a common people. This was a very surprising idea, especially since no one really knew who these common people were.13

Popular sovereignty made the American Revolution a permanent part of nationhood and governance. It framed much more than a philosophy or a constitution. The creative work of designing democratic institutions continued because the figures assembled in eighteenth-century Philadelphia, and subsequent meetings around the country, developed a new language to transform the appearance, the feel, and ultimately the function of politics. Madison, Hamilton, and others designed a new reality from scattered materials—“Americans”—that did not yet exist as a coherent whole. The act of making the institutions for government created the people, just as the people made the government.14

This is what Hamilton meant, in the debates surrounding the ratification of the Constitution, when he called for the citizens of the states to approve this foundational document both to build a national government and to affirm the primacy of their collective will. You could not have a national government or a collective will without the other. The Constitution empowered the “people themselves,” just as the “people themselves” made the Constitution. The relationship between nation and state—Americans and their government—was symbiotic in the late eighteenth century. It has remained so ever since.15

Most residents of North America were, of course, excluded from Madison’s and Hamilton’s definitions of the people and the nation. The institutions created by the Constitution remained extremely limited in their early influence within society. Perhaps most significant, the Constitution affirmed the continuation of slavery, with guaranteed protection from the national government, despite the widespread recognition of its evil and the worldwide efforts to eliminate it. The popular consensus behind the new American national government was neither as popular nor as consensual as the rhetoric, then and now, has claimed.16

These are important points, but they often receive too much emphasis in a twenty-first-century context that embraces, at least rhetorically, strong presumptions about inclusiveness. The creation of the American nation and government in the late eighteenth century unleashed an outpouring of participation on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean that forever changed the fabric of modern politics. “The Revolution,” one historian writes, “resembled the breaking of a dam, releasing thousands upon thousands of pent-up pressures . . . suddenly it was as if the whole traditional structure, enfeebled and brittle to begin with, broke apart, and people and their energies were set loose in an unprecedented outburst.”17

The energies of citizens found collective voice in the constitutional institutions created to manage them. As “Americans,” literate individuals were now part of a national debate about a common government. “Public opinion”—measured in tone and attitude, rather than surveys or elections—shaped a national identity, government policies, and much more. The United States emerged as a new kind of broad and yet ordered democracy in action. “The Revolution,” Gordon Wood writes, “rapidly expanded this ‘public’ and democratized its opinion.

Every conceivable form of printed matter—books, pamphlets, handbills, posters, broadsides, and especially newspapers—multiplied and were now written and read by many more ordinary people than ever before in history. . . . By the early nineteenth century this newly enlarged and democratized public opinion had become the ‘vital principle’ underlying American government, society, and culture.”18

People felt they mattered as they had not before. Government now had to serve the people. Farmers and merchants, not kings and aristocrats, made the government. For these revolutionary circumstances to endure and prosper, nation and government had to remain closely tied together. The alternative was a reversion to separation and despotism. The alternative was a return of European empire on the ashes of the revolutionary experiment. American-style nation-building looked to many participants like the only viable alternative—then and now.

For the new nation to survive, the world had to be made safe for it not through war or imposition, but instead through a gradual nurturing of similar experiments far and wide. Thomas Jefferson, for example, hoped that the contagion of liberty would spread both to Indian “savages” and to French aristocrats. His Notes on the State of Virginia are filled with references to the “manners” and “moral sense of right and wrong” among Indians. Jefferson believed that a more organized government could transform Indian “aborigines” into modern citizens, enjoying what he envisioned as a peaceful and prosperous way of life—including Indians and whites side by side. Jefferson similarly wrote to James Madison, from France, of the goodness that could come from destroying European “degeneracy” and building new nations: “I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. . . . An observation of this truth should render honest republican governors so mild in their punishments of rebellions, as not to discourage them too much. It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.”19

The spread of the American Revolution was the best security for the American Revolution in a hostile world. If Americans looked only within, they quite reasonably feared that powerful foreign actors would exploit and ultimately destroy them. They were probably correct in this judgment. The country’s alleged ocean “isolation” was far narrower than many historians have admitted. British military forces occupied fortifications on the northern and some western borders of the new nation, while Spanish and French soldiers maintained a strong presence on the southern rim of the North American continent. European military, economic, and cultural influences s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Description
• Back Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The American Nation-Building Creed
• Chapter 2: Reconstruction After Civil War
• Chapter 3: Reconstruction After Empire
• Chapter 4: Reconstruction After Fascism
• Chapter 5: Reconstruction After Communist Revolution
• Chapter 6: Reconstruction After September 11
• Conclusion: The Future of Nation-Building
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index