The Renovation of American Foreign Policy

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Fifty years of struggle against totalitarian powers have given American foreign policy an outlook and set of maxims profoundly at odds with those that animated the founders of this nation. We have assumed traits against which they consciously rebelled; our distinctive raison d’état has been lost. To recover an appreciation of that original reason of state and to apply it creatively to the challenges of the present are the great tasks confronting contemporary American policymakers.

It is obvious that such a foreign policy renovation must take account of the nation’s vastly changed circumstances; contemporary policy must address risks and opportunities unknown to the founders of the American state. But it is a great mistake to believe that their vision is irrelevant or that they failed to anticipate many of the dilemmas we face today. Even if ultimately rejected, their outlook reflected a certain belief about the significance of America in world history that became deeply embedded in the nation’s consciousness for 150 years. It reflected an understanding of when and why the nation might make war that was highly sophisticated in the way in which it accommodated the sometimes conflicting claims of American security and national purpose. It was based on an appreciation of the factors governing the rise and fall of republics and empires that is, in fact, quite relevant today. If we are now to abandon that outlook, we ought at least understand that we are doing so, and that we thereby risk a betrayal of the distinction America once coveted among the nations.

II

The United States was established in conscious flight from European precedents. For the Founding Fathers, as well as for the generations that followed, the workings of the European state system gave rise to a predicament not unlike the anarchical Hobbesian state of nature. The founders recognized the sequence by which republics caught in the maelstrom of that system succumbed to war, debt and standing armies, and whose participation in the system thereby became the primordial cause of their corruption. With the breakdown of the Articles of Confederation and the impending division of the continent into rival regional confederacies, they feared that America would suffer that same fate...