America, The Empire of Liberty

I consider myself to be a Neoconservative or better to be accurately described a 19th Century American Liberal. I don’t differ from Classical Libertarians and Paleoconservatives on many issues aside from Foreign Policy. The main issue is the flawed belief America was founded as a Non-Interventionist Isolationist nation which has only become warmongering either after World War I or World War 2. If one believes this myth one must also believe Non Interventionism and Isolationism is Conservatism as well, as that would be the Foreign Policy we would be conserving.

The common perception of 18th and 19th century American foreign policy, both for the public at large and also for the intellectual elite and foreign policy establishment, is that it was primarily isolationist. The early American settlers came to the New World to create a City Upon a Hill, separate and aloof from the rest of the world. Washington’s Farewell Address, with its warning against “political connexions” with other nations, and the Monroe Doctrine, with its insistence that Europe plant no more colonies in the Western Hemisphere are both seen as reaffirmations of this isolationist “tradition.” Most believe, therefore, that America’s first and natural posture in the world is one of passivity and introspection. If Americans do venture out into the world, it is only because they have been attacked or faced an imminent threat.

My argument is that, on the contrary, Americans are and always have been an expansionist people. From the time of the Puritans through the end of the 19th century, Americans were aggressive territorial expansionists, willing to use force when necessary to achieve their expansionist goals. From the 18th century to the present day, Americans have been commercial expansionists, seeking markets and resources wherever in the world these could be found. From the early 19th century until the present, Americans have sought to expand their power and their influence, seeking to shape the behavior of other peoples and nations in ever widening arcs.

Americans’ record is “far from unmixed” in their expansionism, but it is important to stress, is it not, that America, unlike many great powers, has brought freedom and liberty to the many lands that it touched (i.e. Germany, Japan etc.) rather than enslavement as in, for instance, the Soviet case.

And from the Revolution until today, Americans have been ideological expansionists, driven by the universal principles of the Declaration of Independence. They have sought to transform the world, or at least as much of the world as they had the power to transform, to conform with American principles, ideals, as well as American interests. Their record is far from unmixed in this effort. But they have had a profound impact on the shape of the international system. And it may surprise many Americans to learn that even the founders, including George Washington, believed that in time the become the most powerful nation in the world.

In his book, Dangerous Nation, Kagan posits that America has moved toward becoming an empire from its very founding, and tyrants the world over foresaw that reality immediately. His thesis is provocative to many. The paleoconservatives, for instance, are perfectly willing to pin the imperialist label on George W. Bush but will howl in protest to hear it applied to George Washington. It goes directly against their cherished notion that America was born as an isolationist nation that wanted nothing more than to be a “shining city on a hill.”

Much of the misperception of the Founding Fathers’ attitude toward foreign policy stems from Washington’s famous farewell address and its exhortation for the U.S. to avoid foreign entanglements. By showing all the ways Washington and the Founders expanded American territory and promoted American power, Kagan debunks the idea that they were isolationists.

Washington’s warning, he writes persuasively, specifically referred to France and the disaster he knew would result if Americans inflamed with revolutionary passions worked to get the militarily weak United States to join the French war against England.

That’s been noted before, but one of Kagan’s contributions is his assertion that America was made up of pioneering, entrepreneurial people who were constitutionally (small “c” intended) incapable of huddling in Fortress America. As individuals, they were the most expansionist people on Earth.

His other important contribution in Dangerous Nation is his view that the main reason early Americans are not considered expansionist is that most of their projecting of power took place within what are now the domestic borders of the United States. He asserts that considering the United States’ expansion from the Atlantic to the Pacific as a domestic matter and not one of foreign affairs is wrong. First, even the pioneers who considered the frontier to be “wasted” land considered the Indian lands to be foreign nations of sorts. Second, the United States was asserting itself against England and Spain (and, until the Louisiana Purchase, France), the other great powers with key interests in North America.

Kagan points out that, besides the standard conservative explanation that the most efficient society eventually wins, several factors doomed the American Indian nations. The Americans were pioneers by nature, and the government was neither big nor strong enough to force them to respect Washington-ratified treaties. On the other hand, the government was responsive to democratic pressures, so raids and massacres of settlers (voters) would be answered in kind. These two conditions meant Indian territory would be whittled away no matter what grand intentions might exist in Washington.

The moral argument for American foreign policy is not so clear-cut in this period. For one thing, the United States in its first eight decades was both a liberal democracy and a slaveholding nation, which in the South required a quasi-totalitarian control not only of blacks but of whites. A good part of American expansion this period was partly, and sometimes largely, driven by a desire to spread slavery, not democracy. Then, of course, there was the matter of the Indians.

While I do not take a rosy-colored view of the Indians, who committed inhuman atrocities against one another as well as against white settlers, or a uniformly dark view of American policies toward the Indians, the fact remains that American desires for land justified by a Lockean liberal sense that land should be “improved” or it was wasted led to violent attacks on Indians, and of a ceaseless violations of treaties solemnly entered into by the U.S. government. This is what I mean by the record not being “unmixed.”

The two events that solidified American power on the continent Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase and Polk’s war with Mexico directly contradict the isolationist model. Kagan shows they were not exceptions, but more in keeping with the basic nature of the youthful U.S. He also points out that the Monroe Doctrine, though viewed today mainly as a defensive and anti-imperialist document, was an audacious and aggressive declaration for its time. Monroe initially planned for it to put the United States firmly on the side of republican movements sweeping Europe, thus involving America directly in a worldwide ideological struggle.

Kagan paints an early America burgeoning with energy, dynamism and idealism. Even when exercising power in rather ruthless ways, Kagan writes, Americans believed in an underlying justification to spread “the blessings of liberty.” Private citizens often were out ahead of the government in trying to change their surroundings for the better — not because of ideology but because that was their nature.

“For Americans,” he writes, “the unifying theme of the nation was that they were to be the vanguard of human progress. Their nationalism naturally led them to look beyond the natural boundary.”

This rhetoric began with Washington, Franklin and Jefferson and has been a reliable rallying cry with the American people ever since. Kagan calls it “liberal expansionism,” using the 18th century definition of the word. Those who reflect this attitude today are sneered at as “neocons” by the far right and the far left. Today’s “liberals” mock George W. Bush for saying the terrorists hate us for who we are. But as Kagan points out, foreign monarchs and despots considered the United States a threat from its birth because they feared the example it would set for their subjects. That alone made the United States a “dangerous nation.”

America’s expansion was not about territory alone but also about spreading liberal republican values. Liberal as Kagan uses the term refers to individual rights free from government control. This is not liberalism as it is understood in America today, usually meaning more government intervention. Kagan’s liberalism is to be understood in the original sense as Adam Smith used the term. Individuals unconstrained by government or tradition were free pursue weath and property to their fullest. It was right for America, and Americans believed it was right for everyone. Kagan views this kind of untrammelled liberalism as a good thing, others, however, view us as a dangerous nation.

One of the few periods in which American influence did not grow in the world — although Polk was still able to expand the nation from sea to shining sea — was in the decades leading up to the Civil War. Northerners blocked expansion into territory where slavery might be established, while Southerners felt increasingly isolated and paranoid.

Even before secession, Kagan writes, there were two American foreign policies, North and South. The North’s policy was containment, much like U.S. policy during the Cold War. Kagan believes it might have worked, as the South needed expansion to keep the slave system from imploding. However, the Kansas-Nebraska Act not only increased tensions between slave and free states, but it also ended any chance of containment being a solution. Kagan also shines a foreign policy lens on Reconstruction, pointing out: “The Civil War was America’s first experiment in ideological conquest, therefore, and what followed was America’s first experiment in ‘nation building.’”

A central theme of Dangerous Nation is that domestic politics have always affected U.S. foreign policy and often has been a partisan tool. The notion that American politics “end at the water’s edge” has been about as true as the avoidance of foreign entanglements.

It did not take long for America to extend its reach in the world, making its presence felt in the Caribbean, Latin America, Alaska, Hawaii and the Philippines. While there were inconsistencies in American foreign policy in the last part of the 19th century, there was one constant: a naval buildup. This was not without its critics who were content with “continental dominance” and worried that giving America the ability to project its power abroad meant it would begin to tamper in the affairs of other countries.

The century culminated with the Spanish-American War, urged by cheerful imperialist and future President, Theodore Roosevelt. Interestingly, while most history texts refer to it as America’s first imperial war, Kagan makes the case that it was the first war the U.S. fought primarily for humanitarian reasons, President McKinley having reluctantly gone to war in response to massive death tolls in Cuba.

This is a large part of our history as a nation.

Ironically, the intervention most often cited as a blatant act of “imperialism,” the intervention in Cuba and war against Spain in 1898, was almost entirely fought for humanitarian and moral ends. And that began a fairly steady record, though again not an unmixed record, of American “expansion” for moral ends, which certainly included the two world wars and the Cold War. And here there needs to be a distinction made between the methods of expansion and the use of power and influence, on the one hand, and the goals of power and expansion. All great powers use roughly the same implements of power: they intervene and occupy foreign lands, they exert economic influence designed to shape the behavior of others to suit their own interests and principles. Aggressive dictatorships are usually more brutal in their actions than a democracy like the US, although it was the United States that dropped nuclear bombs on innocent Japanese civilians.

The distinction is not in means but in ends. I don’t think it’s defensible to assert that the US was not as expansionist as other powers in history. The question concerns the purposes of American expansion, which indeed, was not to enslave but to bring liberty and progress. I have always been amused by the endless debate over who started the Cold War, as if that could determine our innocence and guilt, or the justness of our policies. The truth is, both sides started the Cold War. What made our side right was not that the other guy struck first, but that the principles which we struggled for were right and theirs were wrong.

Americans have always had a missionary zeal when they travel abroad, whether it’s bringing Jesus, democracy or free trade. It is in our nature to try to improve the places we travel to, and brief bouts of isolationism are the exceptions to the rule of Americans spreading the “blessings of liberty.” In many ways, Power, Faith and Fantasy is an application of Kagan’s broader thesis to a particular part of the world.

America is not by nature an expansionist conqueror in the sense leftist critics claim. The U.S, is not a threat to world peace; instead, it tends to be the guarantor of peace.The U.S. does not go to war to hold and colonize territory, as examples from Mexico to Germany and Japan to Iraq make clear However, as Robert Kagan points out in Dangerous Nation, to get from sea to shining sea, the U.S. had to buy, occupy and conquer territory from foreign countries, and dealings with the Indian nations could also be considered “foreign policy.”

Outstanding histories of American foreign policy such as Robert Kagan’s Dangerous Nation and Michael Oren’s Power Faith and Fantasy have shown that U.S. foreign policy has always been more robust and interventionist than either the realists or the liberal internationalists would have us believe. Both Reagan and Bush 43 may have broken with the foreign policy elite of the last half-century, but they are in a long and robust American tradition.They did more to expand freedom abroad through the assertive use of military force than any others.They expanded freedom on behalf of self-government, local or national, not on behalf of central or international government, as liberal internationalists advocate, and they used force to seize related opportunities to spread freedom, not to maintain the status quo, as realists recommend.

Kagan also does an excellent job of demolishing the myth that idealism in U.S. Foreign policy is some sort of new idea that began with the neo-conservative “takeover” of the Bush administration. In fact, for good or for ill, U.S. foreign policy has always been largely, perhaps even primarily motivated by concern for the spread of our republican political system and the universalist principles concerning Liberty set forth in the Declaration of Independence.

This often came at the expense of more prosaic concerns to the chagrin and utter confusion of the European powers with which we dueled throughout the 19th century. Kagan maintains that the driving force behind much of U.S. foreign policy throughout the early to mid-19th century was concerned with checking the forces of reaction in Europe, as absolutist monarchs, horrified by the spread of republicanism, consolidated their power and sought to expand their influence in the new world.

To the extent that the U.S. did maintain a hands off approach to foreign policy in the early to mid 19th century, Kagan argues this was largely due to the domestic political question of slavery. It has become fashionable for the public to dismiss slavery as a secondary cause of the civil war in favor of other material issues (northern desire to economically dominate the south, federalism/state’s rights, etc.)

Nothing could be farther from the case. Throughout the 19th century, slavery was *the* dominant issue leading up to the Civil War. Kagan provides important insight into how the slavery question deformed every important political decision during that time period, both in foreign and domestic policy. To some extent, the U.S. did curtail its pursuit of the expansion of the “American System” because the dominant political culture of the South feared a stronger federal government that could limit and eventually abolish slavery.

Although the South did favor expansion into the Caribbean or Mexico in order to create a “slave empire,” for the most part, Southern fears of the “American System” (in which, they realized, lay the seeds of the destruction of their way of life) worked to block any move away from the status quo. Northerners blocked expansion into Cuba and Santa Domingo because they feared the expansion of slavery.

Southerners blocked settlement on the issues of Oregon, California and the Nebraska territories for the opposite reasons. Texas became an independent republic, not because they didn’t want to join the Union, but rather because the Union couldn’t figure out how to assimilate it. Settlement of even the original Louisiana purchase was fraught with peril because every question that arose had to answered in the light of the one issue no one could solve.

America, Empire of Liberty

Thomas Jefferson outlined a philosophy for Americans at the beginning which can be described as the Empire of Liberty. This philosophy was based upon his view of reality at that time (along with countless supporters). The Empire of Liberty was based upon each ‘individual’ living life as ‘self’ governing persons under a ‘limited’ and ‘subservient’ State. Jefferson envisioned this situation as growing over time and expanding to the World community. For Jefferson individual ‘liberty’ was at the core of his reality and he concluded that ‘everyone’ is endowed by The Creator as having this ‘right’ called ‘liberty’ (including pursuing ones ‘life’ and ones ‘happiness’ as an ‘individual’). Let’s think about the core philosophy of our founding Fathers (especially Thomas Jefferson who wrote the Declaration of Independence).

Jefferson used this phrase “Empire of Liberty” in 1780, while the American revolution was still being fought. His goal was an empire dedicated to liberty which could stop the growth of the British Empire, which he hated and feared.

Even in his later years, Jefferson saw no limit to the ‘expansion’ of this Empire, writing “where this progress will stop no-one can say. Barbarism has, in the meantime, been receding before the steady step of amelioration; and will in time, I trust, disappear from the earth”.Jefferson envisaged this “Empire of Liberty” extending Westwards over the American continent, expansion into which he saw as crucial to the American future. The core philosophy of Jefferson and most of our ‘founders’ was ‘liberty’ and/or ‘freedom’ for each ‘individual’. The purpose of government was to promote this philosophy globally.

The Empire of Liberty is a theme developed first by Thomas Jefferson to identify the responsibility of the United States to spread freedom across the world. Jefferson saw the mission of the U.S. in terms of setting an example by ‘her’ behavior. Major exponents of the theme have been Abraham Lincoln (in the Gettysburg Address), Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Ronald Reagan, and many others.[1]In the History of U.S. foreign policy the Empire of Liberty has provided motivation to fight the Spanish–American War (1898),[2] World War I (1917),World War II (1941–45), the Cold War (1947–91) and the War on Terror (2001–present).

The other theme of America has been this concept called ‘Manifest Destiny’. Historian William E. Weeks has noted that three key themes were usually touched upon by advocates of manifest destiny:

• the virtue (the rightness) of the American people and their institutions;
• the mission or goal (given by Providence) to spread these institutions, thereby redeeming and remaking the world in the image of the United States

The origin of the first theme, later known as American Exceptionalism, was often traced to America’s Puritan heritage, particularly John Winthrop‘s famous “City upon a Hill” sermon of 1630, in which he called for the establishment of a virtuous community that would be a shining example to the Old World.

In his influential 1776 pamphlet Common Sense, Thomas Paine echoed this notion, arguing that the American Revolution provided an opportunity to create a new, better society: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand.” Many Americans agreed with Paine, and came to believe that the United States’ virtue was a result of its special experiment in freedom and democracy. Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to James Monroe, wrote, “it is impossible not to look forward to distant times when our rapid multiplication will expand itself beyond those limits.”

For around the past 100 years, in the wake of the Fall of Empire, we have seen the rise of what Jefferson called for: an “Empire of liberty.” While the process hasn’t been pretty, the outcome for those of us who love liberty has been gratifying.

When my father was born, in 1910, 80% of the world was ruled by emperors. Only 13 years later four empires had been toppled and the British Empire’s descent became inevitable. Less than 100 years ago Lenin overthrew the Czar (a title derived from Caesar). Sun Yat-sen overthrew the Qing Dynasty. Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Ferdinand, precipitating World War I and leading to the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The great Atatürk transformed the Ottoman Empire into modern republican Turkey.

Humanity has experienced thousands of years of Empire but less than a century without emperors. Civilizations are massive. Culture changes slowly. The collapse of the imperial world led first to the rise of dictators rather than republicans. If World War I was the war to make the world “safe for democracy” it was, like so much President Wilson did, well meant but ineffectual.

America, its allies, and other anti-imperial forces, did bring about the collapse of empire.

Emperors were however succeeded by dictators, not republicans: Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao and others.

It took World War II to bring democracy and human rights to Western Europe, and to Japan and to the world’s largest democracy, India. America was the force, intellectual and military, that brought this about.

It took American victory in the Cold War, World War III, led by Reagan and proclaimed by him at Moscow State University, to bring basic democracy and human rights to the former constituent republics of the USSR and to Eastern Europe. Victory brought republicanism to Latin America, no longer a venue of proxy wars dominated by military dictatorships, ruling juntas, and corporals’ coups. Latin America, in the wake of American victory in the Cold war, is a continent full, the atavistic despot Hugo “Huey Long” Chavez, aside, full of vibrant republics.

After the Cold War China, beginning with Deng Xiaoping, liberalized. China embraced capitalism and was moving toward democracy when the USSR broke up. China too is vulnerable to break up, which would be bad for China and for the world. China is far more fragile than it might seem. Moving from within a 6,000 year history China moves far more deliberately than the impetuous West. Yet China reveres Sun Yat-sen. Dr. Sun left an unambiguously republican testament. China leans toward reform.

Since the earliest days of the republic American traders, missionaries, and solider have penetrated to the farthest corners of the world. America even has a long record of military action abroad. In the book, The Savage Wars of Peace, there is 180 landings of U.S. Marines abroad between 1800 and 1934. Think about that: 180 landings in 134 years, more than one a year. And this at a time when most of us have been conditioned to think of America as isolationist. Far from isolationist, American soldiers, sailors, and marines were landing and fighting in all sorts of places: Sumatra in 1832, or Korea in 1871, Samoa in 1899. If you look at this pattern it does not suggest an isolationist nation. Far from it.

America started out not as an empire but as the colony of an empire, and fought an anti-colonial war to gain its independence. Jefferson termed America an “empire of liberty.” He said this not to promote American empire, but rather to insist that, if America be termed an empire, it would be an empire unlike any previous one. While other empires extended their influence in the name of acquisitiveness and power, America would extend its influence on behalf of liberty. America, in other words, would be an empire that promoted selfrule rather than foreign rule. In 1821, John Quincy Adams then secretary of state asserted that America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy,” adding that America is a friend to liberty everywhere but the custodian only of her own. We see here the distinctly un-imperial objective of American foreign policy. Unlike virtually every other empire, America seeks to eschew conquest and show others the way of liberty and national independence.

This reluctance and this objective of promoting liberty extends throughout the twentieth century right up to the present. America was certainly reluctant to get into World War II. Even this “good war,” to defeat Nazi expansionism, was one in which America refused to intervene. Sure, Churchill wanted America to help Britain, and President Roosevelt was sympathetic, but still the forces of non-interventionism were too strong. Only when Japan attacked America directly at Pearl Harbor did America get into the war. Certainly America’s motives had nothing to do with looting or theft.

America was protecting itself, and the best way to do that was to defeat the totalitarian alliance of the Nazis and the Japanese. While America’s motives were certainly self-interested, America’s actions also helped the world by ridding it of two expansionist tyrannies, that of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Who can deny that the world was better off because of what America did? One shudders to think what may have transpired had America not gotten involved, or had there been no America to get involved.

After World War II, America reconstructed Germany and reorganized the Japanese system so that today both countries are capitalist democracies allied with the United States. Our former enemies are now our friends. This is worth remembering not only as an unrivalled example of American munificence it is very rare in history for a victorious nation to level its enemy and then rebuild it but also as an example of how America can use its power to advance both its ideals and its interests.

Consider the Marshall Plan. Admittedly it was in the long-term interest of America to have trading partners in Europe. Even so, there is something incredible in the idea of America investing to rebuild not just the nations of Europe but of its former enemies Germany, Austria, and Italy. Instead of taking what it could from a defeated opponent, a victorious America instead helped Germany become a postwar economic powerhouse. This is the very opposite of theft it comes close to a rare case of philanthropy

Germany and Japan benefited not merely from American financial assistance but from the adoption of American ideals and American-style free institutions. We hear from President Obama that democracy cannot be imposed at the point of a bayonet. Obama writes in The Audacity of Hope that “when we seek to impose democracy with the barrel of a gun” we are “setting ourselves up for failure.”Some progressives say there is something contradictory in attempting to force other countries to be free. Yet we imposed democracy at the point of a bayonet on both Germany and Japan we forced both countries to establish free institutions and the results have been excellent. After the war, America actively pushed for the dissolution of European empires, in particular the British Empire. In the Suez crisis, for instance, America backed the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser over the British. Both publicly and privately,

America sought self-government for the nations of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, just as it had for South America with the Monroe Doctrine. This liquidation of European power is precisely what James Burnham termed the “suicide of the West.” In the sense just described, America did indeed aid the suicide of the West. America’s willingness to push its wartime ally Britain to jettison its worldwide colonies was especially brave considering that America was starting to fight a cold war with the Soviet Union. Many of the newly independent nations declared themselves “non-aligned” states that were often socialist or even pro-Soviet.

From World War II to the Cold War to innumerable smaller involvements, America has simultaneously protected its selfinterest while also making the world a better place. While America has made its mistakes, in no circumstance over the past hundred years has it gone abroad to conquer and plunder. In no case has America stolen the wealth of any other country. The allegation of some progressives that America is an evil empire is not simply wrong it is obscene. For foreigners to make such allegations is one thing; for Americans to falsely accuse their own country is another. If America declines, new powers will rise to take its place. Then the world and perhaps even the progressives will miss the leadership of the kindest, gentlest superpower in world history.

So how does this relate to the War on Terror today? America is clearly confronting a totalitarian ideology, Islamism, which, like Nazism and communism, seeks to expand its doctrine of enslaving humans throughout the world. America is a defender of individual freedom and liberty in this case, as it was in the Cold War and Second World War.

Once again we have been surprised to find out that others hate us precisely because of the doctrines we aim to spread, and sometimes spread unconsciously.Obviously, the Islamists have long felt that American power, as well as American culture, Americans’ support of progress, liberalism, and modernity have undermined the conservative attempts to turn back the clock in the Islamic world. This was precisely how Metternich, Alexander, and the other conservative monarchies of Europe viewed the United States in the early 19th century. Their fear of America’s revolutionary liberal doctrines made them consider the young US a “dangerous nation,” hence the title of the book.

Now, when critics of American foreign policy point out that American actions in the Middle East helped spur Osama Bin Laden to action, they usually mean to suggest that the United States should stop acting in ways that offend Islamists. I would argue that:

• We should not stop attempting to spread our principles and our influence

and

• We could not stop it even if we wanted to, because ideological expansionism is embedded in the American DNA.

What I would suggest is that Americans stop letting themselves be surprised by the reactions they, often unconsciously, provoke in others. American actions with regard to Manchuria in the 1930s did help convince the Japanese to launch an attack of our Pacific Fleet. That does not mean we were wrong and they were justified. Nor, certainly, does it mean that Al Qaeda’s actions are in any way justified. What it does mean is that, as we make our way through the world, shaping it both consciously and unconsciously to conform to our principles, we must be prepared for the reaction and prepared to act, preventively at times. We should not kid ourselves that if we only sit back passively, we will not become the target of others’ anger and sometimes of their military aggression.

Americans still believe their nation’s natural tendencies are toward passivity, indifference, and insularity. (But Americans) have not anticipated, therefore, the way their natural expansiveness could provoke reactions, and sometimes violent reactions, against them.