Dennis Ross
On tariffs and Iran nuclear negotiations, the Trump administration isn’t communicating what it actually wants.
Donald Trump may not be a conventional president, but there is one tradition in American foreign policy that he fits. “America First” may be his slogan—and clearly represented a movement in the 1930s to keep us out of war—but, in reality, it reflects a tradition that guided the United States in foreign policy from the time of our independence through most of the nineteenth century. We have never been isolationist. Rather, we were unilateralist. Alliances would limit our freedom of action. America’s founding fathers did not want to be bound to others, especially European powers, that would draw us into endless conflicts.
Commerce guided us, and it meant not just that we would engage with the rest of the world but that we often intervened militarily around the globe to protect our shipping, pry open possible markets, or ensure that we could not be excluded from them. Whether it was fighting the Barbary pirates off the “shores of Tripoli,” forcibly opening Japan to our trade, or sending marines to China at its end to save missionaries and also ensure that the United States received all the same commercial access that others had, America in the nineteenth century did not shy away from the use of force to protect our interests. It was global alliances that we resisted.
Moreover, while Thomas Jefferson believed our values were universal, he did not believe in imposing them. Like Jefferson, John Quincy Adams believed in our “exceptionalism” but also feared we would lose our character and our values if we sought to impose them internationally; as he put it in 1821:
But she 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…She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.
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