Endless Trumping...

Why George Washington Would Have Agreed With Donald Trump

Watch Out, Hillary: The Founding Fathers would have loved “America First,” and they might have been right.

By Michael Hirsh

For all the lamentation about the level of rhetoric in this Trumped-up election year, the race between Donald Trump and all-but-certain Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton is already shaping up to be a debate over America’s global role of the kind we haven’t had for decades, perhaps since the last “America First” movement of the late ‘30s. And it is a debate that some foreign-policy experts suggest is long overdue, even if it tends to distress U.S. allies around the world. ("The unthinkable has come to pass," Germany’s Die Welt wrote after Trump became the presumptive GOP nominee this week.)

It is also a debate that, were they still around to witness it, a majority of past U.S. presidents going back to George Washington would probably welcome—and most of them, believe it or not, might well take Trump’s side.

In his big foreign-policy rollout speech last week, Trump declared it was time “to shake the rust off of America’s foreign policy” and drop American pretensions about remaking the world in our image any longer. Or as he put it, in an obvious reference to the failed invasion of Iraq and intervention in Libya, America should abandon the “dangerous idea that we could make Western democracies out of countries that had no experience or interest in becoming a Western democracy.” Brazenly calling his agenda “America First”—never mind that was the name of the notorious pre-World War II isolationist movement—he also directly challenged the 70 years of bipartisan consensus over the post-World War II global order that America created. He suggested that the world needs America far more than the other way around, and he effectively warned U.S. allies that without a new global deal that demands a kind of tribute paid to Washington for its defense umbrella—he wants them to “prove” they are our friends, he says—he’d walk away from the world’s trade table, so to speak.

“We will no longer surrender this country or its people to the false song of globalism,” Trump said. “The nation-state remains the true foundation for happiness and harmony. I am skeptical of international unions that tie us up and bring America down.”

Predictably, Trump’s views have outraged commentators who lament the allusions to the prewar, anti-Semitism-laced isolationism of Charles Lindbergh and other members of the America First movement. His statements have also invited mockery from allies of Clinton, who as a pro-interventionist former secretary of state sees Trump’s turn away from the world as a naive and dangerous anachronism. Madeleine Albright, a mentor to Hillary on foreign policy and, as a refugee from Nazi Germany, a lifelong and passionate advocate of the idea that America is the “indispensable nation” in overseeing global order, accused Trump of historical illiteracy. “Maybe he never read history or he doesn’t understand it,” former Secretary of State Albright told reporters in a conference call organized by Clinton’s campaign.

Trump does appear to be giving short shrift to—and perhaps does not fully comprehend—a lot of the history that underlies America’s modern approach to the world. He doesn’t always make sense when he talks about foreign policy, calling at once for steadiness and unpredictability, a military buildup and a major war on ISIS but also restraint in the use of U.S. force overseas. In March, he embraced NATO in one interview and then declared it “obsolete” six days later. He speaks of upgrading “NATO’s outdated mission and structure—grown out of the Cold War—to confront our shared challenges, including migration and Islamic terrorism,” without appearing to understand that NATO has been engaged in that very enterprise for at least a decade, especially in Afghanistan. He is cavalierly dismissive of the international alliance-and-trading system that grew up in the ruins of World War II, and which many experts would say helped to win the Cold War and preserve American dominance.

He has also said things so offensive—openly embracing torture and other war crimes, such as killing the wives and children of terrorists, promising to ban all Muslims from entering the U.S. and to round up and deport every one of the 11 million illegals—that even many Republicans are horrified, saying such policies would undercut whatever moral authority America still has on the world stage. Some of his proposals, like imposing 45 percent tariffs on Chinese goods, could seriously disrupt or even destroy the world trading system, causing a global depression.

But Trump is also correct in suggesting that the current global system is an aberration in American history, that it may not be sustainable forever under current conditions, and that America should focus more on fixing our own economic house for a long time to come (a view shared, incidentally, by Barack Obama, who loves to say “it’s time to focus on nation-building at home”). The U.S. share of global defense spending has soared to more than a third of the total, while the American economy has dropped in size to one-quarter of global GDP; America spends more in total than the next seven largest countries combined: China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Britain, India, France and Japan. And to what end exactly? No one can quite say. “Since the end of the Cold War and the breakup of the Soviet Union, we’ve lacked a coherent foreign policy,” Trump said in his speech. This is also arguably true. From Bosnia to Kosovo to Iraq, America has bounced around from idea to idea and intervention to intervention—from the idea of “humanitarian war” to the idea of “preventive war.” There is nothing even close to the ragged consensus that existed over Cold War containment.

So Trump may be an “id with hair,” as Hillary Clinton calls him, but at least when it comes to his foreign policy views, he’s an all-American id. His “America First” campaign theme has far deeper roots in the history of this country than most pundits are acknowledging. Indeed, Trump shouldn’t be dismissed as a mere apostate in his view of America’s role in the world; against the backdrop of all 239 years of America’s existence, he represents more a reversion to the American norm. Trump, in condemning one of the worst instances of American overreach in U.S. history, the Iraq invasion, declared in his speech: “The world must know we do not go abroad in search of enemies.” The line was an allusion to the famous injunction of John Quincy Adams in 1821 that America "does not go in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.” Adams went on to warn, somewhat presciently, America should know that “once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself, beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force.”

Read today: Iraq. Trump is consciously invoking this tradition— hence his line about the futility of trying to forcibly transform nations, like Iraq—and the Adams allusion was quite intentional, a senior Trump campaign official told me. “Several sections of the speech were intended as a return to several foreign policy directives from our founding generation,” he said. Among them were a “Hamiltonian emphasis on having financial independence through manufacturing,” and “seeking to avoid complex foreign entanglements.”

Most modern internationalists, both Democratic and Republican, have long since relegated John Quincy’s injunction to history, that of a 19th century America that was still a developing country and wanted only to be left alone. The internationalists have been, until now, so dominant and sure of themselves and the postwar system that in recent years no one has questioned it (though the unilateralist George W. Bush administration did an effective job of largely ignoring its institutions—especially NATO—in its first term). Unwinding this system today is almost unthinkable: American power overlays every region of the planet, and it supplies the control rods that restrain belligerents and arms races from East Asia to Latin America (if not always successfully, as we’ve seen in the Mideast and Afghanistan). Nor does Trump appear to be going so far as to say he wants to withdraw from the global system—“To all our friends and allies, I say America is going to be strong again. America is going to be a reliable friend and ally again,” he said in his speech—but he does seem willing to renegotiate the terms and conditions for it, as well as America’s role in it.

When Adams gave his “monsters abroad” speech, he was only channeling the fundamental beliefs of the Founders, starting with his father, John Adams, and his mentor, Thomas Jefferson, who warned against “entangling alliances” abroad. And of course George Washington, who wrote in his farewell address on Sept. 17, 1796 (though the actual words were probably drafted by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison): “Our detached and distant situation invites and enables us to pursue a different course. … Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground? Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor or caprice? It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world ... ”

Think about that: the Father of Our Country —with the imprimatur of Madison and Hamilton (he of the expansive view of federal power)—declared America’s “true policy” to be avoiding “permanent alliances” abroad. And yet that’s exactly what we’ve got 220 years after Washington’s declaration, tons of them—not to mention permanent membership in global organizations such as the United Nations and the World Trade Organization that we Americans had the largest hand in creating. Princeton scholar John Ikenberry, author of Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order, says that starting in 1946, the United States added a new ally—a nation with which it had some kind of security relationship—every five years or so. Today, it has a total of 62 permanent allies, including many from the former Soviet bloc. (Washington also has a fairly recent strategic partnership with India, another world power.)

Most historians and experts see this Western alliance system as a great triumph of American foreign policy (not least because it helped bankrupt the Soviet Union as Moscow tried to keep up with the more open Western economies), one that keeps delivering rewards. Thanks in part to this system, a quarter century after the Cold War, the U.S. still has no real challenger as the lone superpower of earth, and U.S.-created global institutions like the U.N., International Monetary Fund and WTO provide layers of multilateral cover that serve to take the raw edge off American hegemony, making it acceptable to much of the world. That is highly unusual in the history of great powers, which in the past have always provoked new rivalries and alliance-building against them. The overall prosperity created by this worldwide system, despite the inequities of globalization, has provided a powerful and enduring motivation for nations to remain part of it. In order to gain power and influence, countries must prosper; in order to prosper, they must join the international economy. Everyone inside this international system gets richer and stronger, while everyone outside it grows relatively weaker and poorer. Even Russia and China appear to realize this, which is one reason why Vladimir Putin’s fitful efforts to form a permanent “balancing” alliance with Beijing never amount to much, another boon to Washington.

For all the lamentation about the level of rhetoric in this Trumped-up election year, the race between Donald Trump and all-but-certain Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton is already shaping up to be a debate over America’s global role of the kind we haven’t had for decades, perhaps since the last “America First” movement of the late ‘30s. And it is a debate that some foreign-policy experts suggest is long overdue, even if it tends to distress U.S. allies around the world. ("The unthinkable has come to pass," Germany’s Die Welt wrote after Trump became the presumptive GOP nominee this week.)

It is also a debate that, were they still around to witness it, a majority of past U.S. presidents going back to George Washington would probably welcome—and most of them, believe it or not, might well take Trump’s side.

In his big foreign-policy rollout speech last week, Trump declared it was time “to shake the rust off of America’s foreign policy” and drop American pretensions about remaking the world in our image any longer. Or as he put it, in an obvious reference to the failed invasion of Iraq and intervention in Libya, America should abandon the “dangerous idea that we could make Western democracies out of countries that had no experience or interest in becoming a Western democracy.” Brazenly calling his agenda “America First”—never mind that was the name of the notorious pre-World War II isolationist movement—he also directly challenged the 70 years of bipartisan consensus over the post-World War II global order that America created. He suggested that the world needs America far more than the other way around, and he effectively warned U.S. allies that without a new global deal that demands a kind of tribute paid to Washington for its defense umbrella—he wants them to “prove” they are our friends, he says—he’d walk away from the world’s trade table, so to speak.

“We will no longer surrender this country or its people to the false song of globalism,” Trump said. “The nation-state remains the true foundation for happiness and harmony. I am skeptical of international unions that tie us up and bring America down.”

Predictably, Trump’s views have outraged commentators who lament the allusions to the prewar, anti-Semitism-laced isolationism of Charles Lindbergh and other members of the America First movement. His statements have also invited mockery from allies of Clinton, who as a pro-interventionist former secretary of state sees Trump’s turn away from the world as a naive and dangerous anachronism. Madeleine Albright, a mentor to Hillary on foreign policy and, as a refugee from Nazi Germany, a lifelong and passionate advocate of the idea that America is the “indispensable nation” in overseeing global order, accused Trump of historical illiteracy. “Maybe he never read history or he doesn’t understand it,” former Secretary of State Albright told reporters in a conference call organized by Clinton’s campaign.

Trump does appear to be giving short shrift to—and perhaps does not fully comprehend—a lot of the history that underlies America’s modern approach to the world. He doesn’t always make sense when he talks about foreign policy, calling at once for steadiness and unpredictability, a military buildup and a major war on ISIS but also restraint in the use of U.S. force overseas. In March, he embraced NATO in one interview and then declared it “obsolete” six days later. He speaks of upgrading “NATO’s outdated mission and structure—grown out of the Cold War—to confront our shared challenges, including migration and Islamic terrorism,” without appearing to understand that NATO has been engaged in that very enterprise for at least a decade, especially in Afghanistan. He is cavalierly dismissive of the international alliance-and-trading system that grew up in the ruins of World War II, and which many experts would say helped to win the Cold War and preserve American dominance.

He has also said things so offensive—openly embracing torture and other war crimes, such as killing the wives and children of terrorists, promising to ban all Muslims from entering the U.S. and to round up and deport every one of the 11 million illegals—that even many Republicans are horrified, saying such policies would undercut whatever moral authority America still has on the world stage. Some of his proposals, like imposing 45 percent tariffs on Chinese goods, could seriously disrupt or even destroy the world trading system, causing a global depression.

But Trump is also correct in suggesting that the current global system is an aberration in American history, that it may not be sustainable forever under current conditions, and that America should focus more on fixing our own economic house for a long time to come (a view shared, incidentally, by Barack Obama, who loves to say “it’s time to focus on nation-building at home”). The U.S. share of global defense spending has soared to more than a third of the total, while the American economy has dropped in size to one-quarter of global GDP; America spends more in total than the next seven largest countries combined: China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Britain, India, France and Japan. And to what end exactly? No one can quite say. “Since the end of the Cold War and the breakup of the Soviet Union, we’ve lacked a coherent foreign policy,” Trump said in his speech. This is also arguably true. From Bosnia to Kosovo to Iraq, America has bounced around from idea to idea and intervention to intervention—from the idea of “humanitarian war” to the idea of “preventive war.” There is nothing even close to the ragged consensus that existed over Cold War containment.

So Trump may be an “id with hair,” as Hillary Clinton calls him, but at least when it comes to his foreign policy views, he’s an all-American id. His “America First” campaign theme has far deeper roots in the history of this country than most pundits are acknowledging. Indeed, Trump shouldn’t be dismissed as a mere apostate in his view of America’s role in the world; against the backdrop of all 239 years of America’s existence, he represents more a reversion to the American norm. Trump, in condemning one of the worst instances of American overreach in U.S. history, the Iraq invasion, declared in his speech: “The world must know we do not go abroad in search of enemies.” The line was an allusion to the famous injunction of John Quincy Adams in 1821 that America "does not go in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.” Adams went on to warn, somewhat presciently, America should know that “once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself, beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force.”

Read today: Iraq. Trump is consciously invoking this tradition— hence his line about the futility of trying to forcibly transform nations, like Iraq—and the Adams allusion was quite intentional, a senior Trump campaign official told me. “Several sections of the speech were intended as a return to several foreign policy directives from our founding generation,” he said. Among them were a “Hamiltonian emphasis on having financial independence through manufacturing,” and “seeking to avoid complex foreign entanglements.”

Most modern internationalists, both Democratic and Republican, have long since relegated John Quincy’s injunction to history, that of a 19th century America that was still a developing country and wanted only to be left alone. The internationalists have been, until now, so dominant and sure of themselves and the postwar system that in recent years no one has questioned it (though the unilateralist George W. Bush administration did an effective job of largely ignoring its institutions—especially NATO—in its first term). Unwinding this system today is almost unthinkable: American power overlays every region of the planet, and it supplies the control rods that restrain belligerents and arms races from East Asia to Latin America (if not always successfully, as we’ve seen in the Mideast and Afghanistan). Nor does Trump appear to be going so far as to say he wants to withdraw from the global system—“To all our friends and allies, I say America is going to be strong again. America is going to be a reliable friend and ally again,” he said in his speech—but he does seem willing to renegotiate the terms and conditions for it, as well as America’s role in it.

When Adams gave his “monsters abroad” speech, he was only channeling the fundamental beliefs of the Founders, starting with his father, John Adams, and his mentor, Thomas Jefferson, who warned against “entangling alliances” abroad. And of course George Washington, who wrote in his farewell address on Sept. 17, 1796 (though the actual words were probably drafted by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison): “Our detached and distant situation invites and enables us to pursue a different course. … Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground? Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor or caprice? It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world ... ”

Think about that: the Father of Our Country —with the imprimatur of Madison and Hamilton (he of the expansive view of federal power)—declared America’s “true policy” to be avoiding “permanent alliances” abroad. And yet that’s exactly what we’ve got 220 years after Washington’s declaration, tons of them—not to mention permanent membership in global organizations such as the United Nations and the World Trade Organization that we Americans had the largest hand in creating. Princeton scholar John Ikenberry, author of Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order, says that starting in 1946, the United States added a new ally—a nation with which it had some kind of security relationship—every five years or so. Today, it has a total of 62 permanent allies, including many from the former Soviet bloc. (Washington also has a fairly recent strategic partnership with India, another world power.)

Most historians and experts see this Western alliance system as a great triumph of American foreign policy (not least because it helped bankrupt the Soviet Union as Moscow tried to keep up with the more open Western economies), one that keeps delivering rewards. Thanks in part to this system, a quarter century after the Cold War, the U.S. still has no real challenger as the lone superpower of earth, and U.S.-created global institutions like the U.N., International Monetary Fund and WTO provide layers of multilateral cover that serve to take the raw edge off American hegemony, making it acceptable to much of the world. That is highly unusual in the history of great powers, which in the past have always provoked new rivalries and alliance-building against them. The overall prosperity created by this worldwide system, despite the inequities of globalization, has provided a powerful and enduring motivation for nations to remain part of it. In order to gain power and influence, countries must prosper; in order to prosper, they must join the international economy. Everyone inside this international system gets richer and stronger, while everyone outside it grows relatively weaker and poorer. Even Russia and China appear to realize this, which is one reason why Vladimir Putin’s fitful efforts to form a permanent “balancing” alliance with Beijing never amount to much, another boon to Washington.

But the magic formula never appeared. Thus the global system we have today is truly a kind of accidental American empire. The question now is there really anything we can do about it, and should we really want to? Do we really want to alienate critical allies by driving a harder bargain with them at a time when China and Saudi Arabia are flush with capital to spend on their own alternative regional systems? “Nations have no permanent friends or allies, they only have permanent interests,” Lord Palmerston famously said. If America’s friendships and alliances have come to look permanent, perhaps that’s only because the United States has done a good job of convincing other nations that their interests are aligned with ours long term. The argument that Hillary Clinton will no doubt make is that especially in a post 9/11 world, a world in which both opportunities and threats have become globalized, the task of securing freedom, prosperity and safety—and American dominance—means securing the international system. She will insist there is no other choice.

But at a time when many Americans are angry and feel dispossessed, and when they blame the rest of the world for their ills—egged on by Trump’s rhetoric about getting “raped,” for example by China—it may be that voters do want another choice. Trump appears to be offering one, and a lot of people are listening.