Imperialism, noninterventionism, and revolution: opponents of the modern American empire.

• Author: Stromberg, Joseph R.

From one angle of vision, nonintervention is the essential American perspective on foreign affairs. Honored in the breach more than in practice, nonintervention may nevertheless be the foreign-policy option most consistent with the broadly libertarian values of the liberal republicanism that characterized the American Revolution (Arieli 1964, Bailyn 1967). It is the application of that libertarian heritage to foreign affairs.

Libertarianism, as a full-wrought ideological system, rests on every individual's self-ownership. On this axiom, no one can own another, and all possess equal liberty by virtue of their self-ownership. Equal liberty entails everyone's right to acquire and exchange property, along with a right to defend person and property. Hence, it follows that no one may initiate the use of force. It is legitimate to use force only in self-defense, and it is possible to establish firm criteria for what constitutes genuine self-defense (Rothbard 1998, esp. 161-97).

It serves ethical consistency, as well as certain practical results, if the standards that apply between individuals are applied as far as possible to the actions of states, armies, and bureaucracies. Nonintervention, sometimes miscalled "isolationism," is thus the application of classical liberal (libertarian) principles to foreign policy. Hence, libertarians typically wish that the U.S. government restrict its use of force to repelling actual attacks on the territory of the United States (Rothbard 2000, 115-32). Unlike liberals, conservatives, and even some radicals, who argue over how much--and what kinds of--aid to send to which oppressive regimes abroad, or exactly where to apply American military might, libertarians reject the imperial path and all arguments for empire: economic, power-political, or "humanitarian."

Of course, not everyone arrives at nonintervention by such an organized, ideological route. There are other paths and differing degrees of theoretical rigor. Nevertheless, nonintervention reflects a number of basic themes in American cultural history. One of these is the Puritan, and later typically American, notion of America as a "City on a Hill," aloof from the Old World's quarrels yet able to influence the world through the good example of a successful, free, and prosperous commonwealth eschewing militarism and imperial expansion. In the original Puritan view, of course, the example involved a particular kind of Calvinist piety, and this theme could slide over into sundry secular, liberal, or republican missions of wielding state power and armed force to right the world's wrongs (see Tuveson 1968, Hatch 1977). A recent writer uses the term "exemplarism" for the City-on-a-Hill ideal and sees a tendency for its adherents to turn toward "vindicationism" (armed intervention) when the American example is not embraced (Monten 2005).

Many statesmen of our revolutionary era espoused the cause of nonintervention. George Washington, in his celebrated Farewell Address to the American people in 1796, urged Americans to avoid taking sides in foreign quarrels. America, he said, should maintain liberal and impartial commercial relations with the rest of the world, but "have with them as little political connection as possible." President John Adams practiced successful nonintervention by maneuvering to avoid war with France in spite of strong pressures from within his own Federalist Party. His successor, Thomas Jefferson, also advocated nonintervention, despite partisan differences with the Federalists on other issues. In his First Inaugural, Jefferson called for "peace, commerce, and honest friendships with all nations, entangling alliances with none" (quotations from Washington and Jefferson from Commager 1963, 174, 188, emphasis in original).

Reinforced by geographical isolation from the rest of the world, the traditions of British insularity, and public preoccupation with expansion into contiguous land areas, (2) nonintervention became the seldom-questioned premise of U.S. relations with established European powers and their empires. Nearer to home, in 1823, the Monroe Doctrine signaled U.S. pretensions to hegemony over the Western Hemisphere, although few interventions came of it until the late nineteenth century. Despite some lapses, nonintervention was still the accepted rhetorical standard of traditional U.S. foreign policy, and the lapses were deviations from it. This is an important point because today's overseas interventions enjoy the blessings of the political-intellectual establishment at the outset.

John Quincy Adams summed up the noninterventionist creed in his justly famous Fourth of July Address in 1821:

America goes not abroad 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. She will recommend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by 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 standards of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. (3) As expressed by Adams and others, nonintervention, or strict noninterference in the internal affairs of other nations as well as strict neutrality in conflicts between nations, remained a key force in U.S. public opinion and actual policy up to 1898 and even to 1917. After the disillusioning experience of World War I, nonintervention enjoyed a strong revival in the 1920s and 1930s, only to be buried by World War II and subsequent events.

Already in the early nineteenth century, despite U.S. adherence to nonintervention in overseas territories, there existed a consensus that saw the gradual absorption of contiguous land areas as desirable, convenient, and even imperative for any number of reasons. As historian William Appleman Williams has written, James Madison, "father of the Constitution," was an especially persuasive and influential theorist of expansion. (4) According to classical republican political theory, territorial expansion necessarily weakens free, representative institutions, but Madison stood this argument on its head, reasoning that larger territory would diminish the evils of "faction" and thereby make constitutional government safer (Williams 1973, 157-65). (5)

The implications of territorial expansion were not lost on several generations of Americans bent on grabbing the land adjoining their own. Territorial expansion as such does not immediately involve a nation in the problems of empire in quite the same way that "saltwater," or overseas, expansion does; and expansion into neighboring lands can in principle be accomplished by peaceful means, such as the (probably unconstitutional) Louisiana Purchase. Nonetheless, the characteristic use of force to take land, as in the Seminole War, other Indian wars, and the Mexican War, began to stretch the republic's institutional balance early on. Thus, although James Polk set a precedent for "presidential war" by maneuvering U.S. troops into an incident with Mexico, historian William Earl Weeks has argued that U.S. diplomacy with regard to Florida and Oregon had already shifted power away from Congress and into the hands of the executive branch two decades earlier (1992, esp. 181-85).

The bitter struggle between North and South over the status of slavery in the western territories led directly to the War for Southern Independence, revealing the downside of Madison's expansionist rationale. Northern victory in turn drastically shifted the institutional balance away from that of the original union. As classical-liberal historian Arthur A. Ekirch describes the process in The Decline of American Liberalism (1969) and Ideas, Ideals, and American Diplomacy (1966), the "agricultural imperialism" of" Manifest Destiny helped to engender "civil war," which in turn strengthened the hand of mercantilism in federal policy--for example, in tariffs, excises, conscription (the supreme violation of individual liberty), paper money, and the like--and weakened localism or "states rights." (6)

Powerful ideas accompanied this practical retreat from American liberal, pacific ideals. One of these ideas was Manifest Destiny, the doctrine of inherent necessity and righteousness in U.S. territorial aggrandizement by whatever means. Another significant idea was a sense of the superiority of U.S. republican institutions; Madison's belief that expansion was a positive good led to the view that U.S. ideals and forms of government could usefully be extended by force of arms. This view ironically is similar to later Soviet rhetoric, which held that the extension of the USSR's influence was the expansion of the area of freedom. (7)

This messianic sense of American mission survived into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Combined with it was a newer strategic formulation of U.S. "interest," supposedly "economic" in character. As historians William Appleman Williams and Walter LaFeber have shown in The Roots of the Modern American Empire (1969) and The New Empire (1963), respectively, some U.S. statesmen and businessmen toward the turn of the century came to believe that American prosperity hinged on access to foreign markets for the "surplus" products of American farms and factories, as well as for "surplus" capital. Economic depressions in the 1870s and 1890s were taken as proof of that analysis (see also Gardner 1966; McCormick 1967). Libertarians, stressing Austrian economic analysis and Say's Law of Markets, would of course dispute this "overproduction" hypothesis, and some would argue that a prior inflation of the money supply by federal policies was at fault. Depressions...