Adams’s son, John Quincy Adams, the most prominent and influential foreign policy thinker of the antebellum era, also agreed that the United States could serve as a role model for republican institutions but must never attempt to become a messianic missionary or, even worse, an imperious intruder in the British mode. As he put it in a Fourth of July speech (1821) that George Kennan loved to quote, “America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.”
