A new book, “A World Safe for Commerce,” sees that global image as America’s underlying and enduring foreign policy pursuit, per the Wall Street Journal review.
The question arises – just what is America’s ongoing goal? Is there a single one? Who can say what it might be? Is it indelible to our nature? Is there evidence on which people – Americans or others – can draw definitive conclusions about America’s nature?
Popular discourse and academic studies suggest various American motivations. The view that we have always pursued economic advantage has a long history. Another sees us as conquest-driven, epitomized in one book’s title “A Nation Made By War.” Radicals and realists both see a drive for power underlying any aims we’ve expressed to spread or protect freedom. George Washington sought to shield American virtues from power politics, underpinning the isolationism that held sway into the 20th Century. George Kennan invoked America’s “best traditions” in calling for containment of the Soviet Union.
There are nuanced views: Prof. Walter McDougal discerns a shift from a national drive for internal progress to one for external dominance. Walter Russell Mead lays out a long running dance between four policy traditions, Hamiltonian, Jeffersonian, Jacksonian and Wilsonian.
Any nation’s foreign policy history evinces diverse motives, playing off each other, rising and receding, evolving into new forms, succeeding and failing. America’s is no exception, and motives good and bad have at some time shaped U.S. conduct.
America differs from other countries, though, in the nature of our basic national interest. For most of history, national interests were material, territorial, and tangible security concerns of countries defined by blood, soil, tongue, lord, and church. Interests, of those people or their lords, pertained largely to war, wealth, and other tangible matters.
America as a “People” was conceived only as holders of certain “self evident” truths, that all humans are equally and inherently endowed with personal rights, and that governments exist to secure those rights. Without palpable markers like blood and soil, we define ourselves as we exercise our rights – by the conduct we choose. We have no received traits to channel those choices to serve a pre-ordained character. If for four generations we allow persons of certain traits to be enslaved, next generations can abolish that practice, altering the nation’s character the better to carry our creed. If a burgeoning industrial sector drives political leaders to open new markets abroad, another sector of religious progressives might then demand government comportment with liberal missionary goals. If Realpolitik requires defeat of a global aggressor, economic interest may dovetail with that campaign – and create a rules-based global order for trade and investment. And we can keep steering into new directions as we discover them.
The constant, though, is that at bottom, our identity rests on a principle of rights, not a collection of received traits. There is nothing inherently American about a bent for trade, a crusade for rights or Christian morals, a campaign for vaccinations, or a shunning of long term alliances. No one can define any innate American motivation, except perhaps an insistence on preserving my right to my discretion. Any pattern of conduct – whether a pattern of waging war, an emphasis on trade, a missionary impulse, another to isolation – is the happenstance of our choices, however long some of those happenstances might endure.
This self defining nature means, first, that nothing from the past is permanent save our commitment to rights. America, then, is always becoming something new. Our definition does not come out of the past, as with traditional identities, but only unfolds in the future. Second, then, it puts a burden on us, as we make ourselves, to validate rights as a viable basis for a nation. If we value these rights, and this self-creative power, we need to preserve those rights, and show in some way that this society can both survive (or “endure” …) and exhibit some sort of value or meaning. This particularly American burden follows our unique renunciation of tangible markers for national identity. Its novelty makes us an experiment and its oddity makes us exceptional. Our creed’s open-endedness puts our fate in our own hands, free person by free person. America’s ongoing goals, national character, and success are not for anyone to name, but for us to make.
Common Conviction 