A Republic, Not an Empire: Reclaiming America's Destiny

by Patrick J. Buchanan

We Americans have been behaving like the Roman Empire. Between 1989 and 1999, we invaded Panama, smashed Iraq, intervened in Somalia, invaded Haiti, launched air strikes on Bosnia, fired missiles at Baghdad, Sudan, and Afghanistan, and destroyed Serbia. We imposed embargoes and blockades on Libya, Iran, Iraq, and dozens of other states.

And though it has received $100 billion in U.S. arms and aid over the past thirty years, Israel has contemptuously dismissed U.S. demands to stop building settlements on Arab land. And, despite our generosity, Israel suborned the traitor Jonathan Pollard to loot our vital secrets, lied about it, and then sold the technology for our Patriot and Python missiles, and the AWACS and F-16, to Communist China. Israel looks out for Israel first, and Americans must start looking out for America first.

The great criminals of modernity have been the tyrants who treated human beings not as ends in themselves with intrinsic value, but as means to their ends. This was the crime of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Castro, and Pol Pot. And it is a sin against patriotism to treat a country not as an end in herself, a land to be loved and cherished, but as the means to an end, be it global democracy or “benevolent hegemony” or world government or Pax Americana or some New World Order. This is the sin of the Wilsonians and neoconservatives alike.

Washington had welcomed the 1778 Treaty of Alliance with France. It must, he said, “chalk out a plain and easy road to independence.” That alliance had brought Rochambeau’s army and Admiral DeGrasse’s fleet to Yorktown. But with victory Americans began to look for ways to sever the alliance. John Jay, the peace negotiator in Paris in 1782, though instructed to take no decision without the “knowledge and concurrence” of France, opened a back channel to the British in violation of the alliance’s proscription against a separate peace. Jay confided to Benjamin Franklin, “Let us be grateful to the French for what they have done for us, but let us think for ourselves. And, if need be, let us act for ourselves!”3 The French foreign minister felt betrayed by the United States’ separate peace, and so told Dr. Franklin. To George Washington, alliances were to be temporary, entered into when a crisis commanded, dissolved when the crisis passed.

Washington was in his first year as president when the French Revolution erupted. By the end of Washington’s first term, Louis XVI had gone to the guillotine. When France declared war on England in early 1793, Washington declared “impartial neutrality,” a wildly unpopular decision. He now came face-to-face with a difficulty that has bedeviled many of his successors: a passionate attachment to foreign causes. The neutrality decree sundered the cabinet. Jefferson’s partisans, denounced as “Gallic jackals,” mocked the Federalists as “British boot-lickers.”9 Alexander Hamilton, who accused Jefferson of a “womanish attachment to France and a womanish resentment against Great Britain,” was himself accused of leaking Jefferson’s strategies to the British.10 In part because of Hamilton’s interference in his department, Jefferson resigned as secretary of state and was replaced by Edmund Randolph, who was dismissed when the British leaked letters to support a charge he had solicited bribes from the French for acts of treason during the Whiskey Rebellion.

In 1793 Edmond Genet arrived in America and began to outfit privateers to raid British commerce, and to raise armies to attack British interests. Many Americans enthusiastically supported Genet’s activities. Washington did not; he desperately wanted to keep America out of the war. Hamilton penned his famous “Pacificus” letters to support Washington’s declaration of neutrality, contending France had supported America’s revolution for its own motives, that we had given France the revenge it had sought against England and owed it nothing more, that intervention in the European war carried immense risks for virtually no reward.

It was in his recalling these painful episodes that Washington warned against “inveterate antipathies” and “passionate attachments” to any nation other than our own. He wrote: The Nation, which indulges towards another an habitual hatred, or an habitual fondness, is in some degree a slave... to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest.... [Such a] passionate attachment... produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favourite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest . . . where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and Wars of the latter, without adequate inducement or justification.

By the end of his term, Washington had persuaded his countrymen of the wisdom of neutrality. When the French minister sought to interfere in the election of 1796 on behalf of Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans, his intrusion backfired. Indeed, it had been in part to help defeat Jefferson and assist Adams that Washington had released his Farewell Address two months before the election.

Pointing to our country’s great and safe distance from Europe, he implored: Why forego the advantages of so peculiar a situation? 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, Humour, or Caprice? ’Tis our true policy to steer clear of permanent Alliances, with any portion of the foreign world. So far... as we are now at liberty to do it.16 The “great rule” was the wisest counsel left his countrymen by the greatest American. It was counsel bred of half a century as a soldier, a planter dependent on British trade, a commander of American forces, and a president who had seen his countrymen at each other’s throats over a war in Europe. Washington knew his nation had the potential to be the greatest on earth, but he also knew America needed generations of peace to grow to its natural size and power before it could take its place in the world.

It was under our second president that America fought an undeclared naval war with France. The cause was the treaty John Jay brought home from England, which allowed the British to seize U.S. ships carrying goods bought by its enemy, France. Paris saw this as ingratitude, treachery, and a dishonoring of the Alliance of 1778, and retaliated by ordering warships to follow the British example and seize merchant ships flying the American flag. Between July 1796 and June 1797, French cruisers seized more than three hundred. To head off a war, Adams sent three delegates to Paris to negotiate. There they were met with an offer of women and demands for a large bribe and for a U.S. apology for Adams’s allegedly anti-French statements to Congress. Only then might negotiations begin. When word of the insult reached the United States, a national outcry went up—“Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute!” Congress authorized the seizure of armed French ships, and the president recalled Washington to lead the defense of his country. Washington wanted to put Hamilton, a hero of Yorktown, in active command. Hamilton envisioned a campaign to seize Florida, New Orleans, and Texas from France’s ally, Spain. With the Federalists elated to be aligned with Britain, the robust little U.S. Navy began attacking and seizing armed French cruisers.2 But Adams wanted no full-dress war. He sent a delegation to negotiate with the French first consul, who did not want America aligned with the Br...

Obedient to Washington’s admonition, Adams had ended his career on an act of statesmanship. He had redeemed America’s honor and exacted proportionate retribution on France’s navy, but refused to engage his country in a war in which the costs would never have been justified by any conceivable gain. And by severing the Alliance of 1778, Adams kept the United States out of a decade of Europe’s bloodiest wars.

But when Monroe arrived, he found a sensational development. Talleyrand had offered to sell not only New Orleans but all Louisiana for $25 million. What had changed? Napoleon’s dream of a New World empire had been drenched in blood when a French army of 50,000, sent to subdue Santo Domingo, had succumbed to yellow fever and massacre by the rebels of Toussaint L’Ouverture. Louisiana no longer appeared to Paris as a granary to sustain an American empire; rather, it seemed an issue that might force the United States into alliance with Britain, and an unprotected province likely to be ripped away in the event of a war, which was exactly what Napoleon was planning. Setting aside personal jealousies, Monroe and Livingston negotiated the purchase for $15 million. “We have lived long,” said Livingston, “but this is the noblest work of our whole lives.”9 The pair had acted just in time. The formal agreements were dated April 30, 1803. Two weeks later, Britain and France were at war, and America learned that British war plans had included the immediate capture of New Orleans. Jefferson embraced the purchase. While Bonaparte had no right to transfer Louisiana, which he had pledged “not to sell or alienate,” and Jefferson had no authority to buy it, that seemed not to matter to either of them. America was taking possession of stolen goods being fenced by the greatest thief in Europe, but there was no denying the bargain. “This accession of territory affirms forever the power of the Un...

Despite the splendid showing of America’s navy in the undeclared war with France in 1797–1798, “pure Republicans” of Jefferson’s party, like John Randolph, believed a navy was a natural enemy of liberty. Jefferson himself believed in a policy not far distant from unilateral disarmament. On his taking office, the army was reduced by a “chaste reformation,” as Jefferson called it, from 3,500 to 2,500 men, while his navy was being scuttled. “I believe that gunboats are the only water defense which can be useful to us, and protect us from the ruinous folly of a navy,” Jefferson had written.11, 12 Federalists hooted at Jefferson’s naiveté and his Lilliputian fleet. In a world at war, the brilliant intellectual who was president had chosen to defend America’s peace and honor by leaving it naked to attack by land and sea, while trading vigorously with both sides. With much of the navy rotting in dry dock, American merchants began shipping with abandon to both England and Napoleon’s Europe. British merchants whose markets we were pirating were incensed; even more so were British patriots. In England, Americans were looked upon as avaricious collaborators of a criminal regime. Desperate for seamen to replace crews lost in battle or to desertion, the Royal Navy began boarding U.S. ships and removing “British subjects” for impressment into service. Eight thousand to ten thousand Americans were eventually taken, many kidnapped.

Reluctant to go to war against the world’s greatest sea power, Jefferson resorted to economic sanctions and persuaded Congress to pass the Embargo Act of 1807. No U.S. ship could carry cargo to Europe. To punish Britain, and France, which had also harassed American shipping, the United States had imposed a blockade on itself.

“Peaceable coercion” was a colossal bust. Jefferson was the first president to learn that economic sanctions are an overrated tool of foreign policy. The British and French continued kidnapping American seamen, and the Embargo Act ravaged U.S. exports. Tariff revenue fell by more than half.16 Infuriated New England merchants faced bankruptcy, and a huge market was created for smuggling from U.S. ports and through Canada. So rampant was the defiance of Jefferson’s embargo that when Napoleon invaded Spain in 1808 and put his brother on the throne, the French discovered 250 American ships in Spanish ports and seized their cargoes. When the U.S. minister to Paris protested, Napoleon calmly informed the envoy he was only helping to enforce the Embargo Act.17 Before leaving office, Jefferson saw the act repealed and replaced by a Nonintercourse Act which prohibited U.S. ships from trade only with Britain and France. Jefferson retired to Monticello believing himself to have been a failed president. He wrote to a friend: “Within a few days I retire to my family, my books, and my farms [at Monticello]. . . . Never did a prisoner, released from his chains, feel such relief as I shall on shaking off the shackles of power.”

Having seen how his neighbor and patron had written a glorious page in history with Louisiana, Madison was determined to write one of his own. “The acquisition of the Floridas,” the insightful French minister in Washington noted, “is the object of all of Mr. Madison’s prayers.”20 While Louisiana had given America control of the west bank of the Mississippi, on the east bank there extended a sliver of coastal land which ran like the barrel of a pistol along the Gulf of Mexico from Baton Rouge to Pensacola. This was West Florida, and it belonged to Spain. Some Americans insisted it had been part of Louisiana, but the U.S. claim was weak. Others had an idea how the claim might be strengthened. With Spain occupied with the Napoleonic Wars, American settlers in West Florida were encouraged to revolt. Seizing the Spanish fort at Baton Rouge, a mob tore down the Bourbon banner, dragged it through the dirt, and replaced it with a new flag—the flag of the Republic of West Florida. The “republic” immediately petitioned to join the Union. On October 27, 1810, Madison acceded. West Florida from the Mississippi to the Perdido River was declared U.S. territory, though Americans had cautiously occupied only the land from Baton Rouge to the Pearl River. John Quincy Adams, minister to Russia, undertook to explain it all to the tsar. Acquainted with Bonaparte, Alexander I replied pleasantly, “Everyone always grows a little in this world.”

Spain was helpless, as was its British ally. Jefferson’s prediction of 1790 had come true. By allowing Americans to emigrate, the Spanish had almost guaranteed they would have West Florida wrested from them by the very settlers they had invited in.

Similar situations today immediately come to mind, no doubt as Buchanan intended.

The British despised “Little Jemmy,” as they called Madison, who was five feet two inches tall, and they held in equal contempt his coastal fleet of little boats. But soon Americans had reasons of their own to be enraged. From over the mountains came reports that British Canada had begun arming the Indians, who were scalping Americans in the Northwest. On November 7, 1811, in a bloody battle on Tippecanoe Creek, a tributary of the Wabash, warriors of Tecumseh killed two hundred Americans out of a force of one thousand under the command of William Henry Harrison, the governor of the Indiana Territory. Among the weapons left behind by the retreating Indians, Harrison found that some had been made in Britain.

When Congress reconvened in November, half its members were new, and they chose as speaker the thirty-four-year-old firebrand Henry Clay of Kentucky, who dispensed all the positions of House power to “coonskin congressmen” from the South and West who began agitating for war. “War Hawks,” John Randolph christened them, “buckskin statesmen.” The brilliant, acidulous Virginian mocked the idea of going to war with Great Britain: “What! . . . [S]hall this great mammoth of the American forest leave his native element and plunge into the water in a mad contest with the shark?”24 But the War Hawks did not have in mind engaging the British navy. They envisioned a land battle—for Canada. Americans had begun looking to war to end our British problem once and for all, and Canada with its vast territory and tiny population appeared easy pickings. Clay boasted to colleagues: “The conquest of Canada is in your power. I trust that I shall not be deemed presumptuous when I state that I verily believe that the militia of Kentucky are alone competent to place Montreal and Upper Canada at your feet.”25 Even the Sage of Monticello was caught up in the war enthusiasm, trumpeting to his White House successor: The acquisition of Canada this year [1812] as far as the neighborhood of Quebec, will be a mere matter of marching, and will give us experience for the attack on Halifax the next, and the final expulsion of England from the American continent. Halifax, once taken, every cockboat of hers mus...

Disaster followed disaster. General William Hull, dispatched to seize Canada, surrendered Detroit, hardly firing a shot. New England, which looked on Napoleon as the anti-Christ, and war with Britain as immoral, refused to call its militia into service. In Maine, oaths of loyalty were taken to George III. American warships won dramatic victories, but the British would emerge in 1815 with eight hundred vessels in the Royal Navy, while the United States ended the war with its first-line warships reduced to three.