Given the heated back-and-forth over the Trump Administration’s strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities and continued support for Ukraine, it is clear that matters of foreign policy will be a major factor in defining the character of American conservatism moving forward.
There is bound to be disagreement over the relative geopolitical merits of supporting Ukraine or Israel, as well as the appropriate level of support. However, one principle is undeniable: an advocate of a given course of action must demonstrate its connection to the interests of the people of the United States alone. That doesn’t mean it can’t be mutually beneficial for an international partner. But the very purpose of statesmanship is to navigate events and relationships in a manner that maximizes the advantage accruing to one’s own nation. Absent a clear definition of the specific interests served by an existing alliance, there will always be a danger of the tail wagging the dog.
The first order of business is therefore to establish such a definition. What do we gain by a given course of action in service of a foreign nation? This is as much a question of theory as of practice: What are we fighting for, and what are the best means to obtain it? As so often tends to be the case, the best place to look for an illustration of the principles that can help guide our thinking is the American Founding—although perhaps not in the way it is normally considered.
A recent republication of the diplomatic historian Samuel Flagg Bemis’s The Diplomacy of the American Revolution by Encounter Books provides an excellent case study in both the appropriate form and substantive matter of a productive foreign partnership.
At the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, it became apparent that American victory required significant foreign aid, both in terms of material support and perhaps even eventual military partnership. Silas Deane (eventually replaced by John Adams), Arthur Lee, and Benjamin Franklin constituted a newly formed body called the “American Commission to France,” which was tasked with securing aid for the revolutionary cause. The French would have to be convinced not only to aid the colonists’ war for independence, but also believe that the existence of the U.S. as a sovereign nation would benefit their own geopolitical position.
This seems quite different than our present situation, where foreign beneficiaries claim the U.S. has a moral responsibility to provide them the military means to secure their maximalist political objectives. Ukrainian lawmaker Oleksandr Merezhko reflected this sentiment at the recent NATO summit in the Netherlands: “[Trump’s] decisive in reacting against the authoritarian regime in Iran, but he doesn’t do anything like that with regard to Putin. To me, it’s not consistent.” According to this logic, any nation facing an ostensible authoritarian regime is owed open-ended American support, no matter how authoritarian they themselves may be. Such “consistency” would ensure the U.S. is perpetually at war—the seeming intention of many who have manned the levers of power in our own foreign policy establishment in the modern era.
Needless to say, the American Commission had no such pretensions. The very first chapter of Bemis’s work outlines how American statesmen went about proving a confluence of interests with France. Their effort was greatly aided by the receptive ear of French Foreign Minister Charles de Vergennes, an early supporter of the American cause who helped articulate how support for the United States could benefit Paris.
Vergennes’s first consideration was that military aid would initially need to be delivered through a policy of secret assistance. That fact established the pretext for support: the prospective aid promised to harm Great Britain while maintaining the conditions for plausible deniability. The guise of French neutrality was paramount. Military force is always employed pursuant to a political objective. A nation’s control of the timing and degree of its engagement with an opponent, real or potential, therefore defines strategic advantage. France would need to ensure that the risk of having war forced upon it by Great Britain on account of its military support to the colonists did not outweigh the potential benefit of that covert support.
Prudence would dictate the correct calculus (that is, establishing proper means) in light of the end of French foreign policy. There would be no appeal to abstract principle or vague allusions to a national interest absent specific and identifiable objectives. Instead, Vergennes clearly articulated how this policy of secret assistance would serve to increase France’s relative geopolitical position while weakening Great Britain’s.
French support had to be accompanied by Paris’s simultaneous military preparations “against all contingencies with Great Britain.” This included a royal command “ordering the rebuilding of the navy and the supplying of new equipment for the army” in order to “organize French military resources for [this] aim.” All the while, the French government would provide “studied friendly assurances to the British Government, calculated to deceive it as to France’s relations with the Colonies.” The final consideration would be that any assistance in the form of munitions supplied to the colonies must not include “any [official] convention with [the U.S.] until their independence be established and notorious.”
The effect of French policy would therefore be to increase its own relative military strength vis-à-vis Great Britain, while its de jure neutrality would assuage London’s suspicions as long as possible. This would not only maximize the balance of forces in Paris’s favor when war did come, but also maintain the French initiative in deciding the time and place for commencing hostilities. The last point regarding conventions would additionally ensure the strategic flexibility to prioritize Paris’s own political objectives throughout—not those of the colonists—regardless of any unforeseen circumstances that might arise.
Vergennes subsequently presented an official memorandum entitled “Réflexions sur la conduite à tenir par la France” (Reflections on the Conduct to be Held by France) to Louis XVI and his council. This served as a direct point of reference, listing the exact ways in which covert aid to the Americans would be to the strategic benefit of France.
Until only recently, the United States has had a long track record of doing the exact opposite. Our conspicuity in conflicts around the world has bordered on the boastful. Instead of maintaining flexible and open-ended partnerships that allow us the space and leverage to put our own interests first, our support of foreign nations has often ossified into de facto, if not de jure, conventions that are bound to unrealizable ideals. This state of affairs threatens our national defense capabilities, as our limited stocks of critical advanced weapons systems, including expensive and difficult-to-produce aerial defense capabilities, have been depleted to worrying levels.
President Trump instinctually knows that these trends are a major problem. His administration has been working accordingly in order to help reverse them, especially in regard to ensuring U.S. force readiness. The problem, now as ever, is translating those instincts into an organized and effective policy course against systemic obstruction and coordinated subversion that comes mostly from Washington itself.
It remains to be seen whether Trump will be able to thread the needle on all the complicated foreign policy issues America currently faces. Still, the ambiguity of a given policy course in any theater of operations is often part of Trump’s general approach. That isn’t sycophantic apologetics: it is certainly fair, and often useful, to raise concerns and point out risks with the administration’s policies, as well as to disagree with a given policy when one believes the merits of an alternative course outweigh what was chosen.
But there are very powerful entrenched forces with much to lose should Trump’s instincts be successfully translated into policy. The purpose of criticism should always be to help effectuate the latter. Those who want to criticize the president, whether it be over his Middle East or Russia policy, must therefore also acknowledge that he is battling an extremely well-organized amalgam of forces bent on sustaining the status quo.
In light of these pressures, it is important to consider the principles that should guide our approach to the complicated matter of foreign partnerships. The first diplomatic experience of the United States served to instantiate the danger of entangling alliances in the collective mind of the young nation. The lessons learned were reflected in George Washington’s famous Farewell Address, in which the first president decried those convoluted foreign webs that served to inflame domestic tensions and create mutual antipathies that detracted from the actual interests of the country. Lest anyone think that Washington is not an authoritative enough voice on this subject, it should also be recalled that Alexander Hamilton helped write the Farewell Address.
The wisdom of avoiding permanent connections with any country was thus borne of direct experience. France supported the colonists because Paris perceived it to be in its own interest—not because there was a claimed moral obligation. Those first American statesmen likewise understood the value of such flexibility. Indeed, French leadership was fearful of a rapprochement between the colonies and Great Britain throughout the war, and consistently sought to reduce any potential for the two to establish a separate peace.
Writing on the crisis of modern natural right, Leo Strauss said that “history is liable to turn man’s understanding from ‘the business before him’ to misleading analogies, and men are naturally inclined to succumb to that temptation.” Those words certainly ring true today, especially when every geopolitical development is equated to Munich 1938 in order to justify U.S. engagement. But there are nonetheless important lessons to be gleaned through the study of a given statesman’s theoretical considerations and the circumstances in which he acted.
Bemis’s entire work should be read in full to understand the context in which the nation’s Founding diplomatic mindset was formed. By attempting to study such interactions from an individual statesman’s vantage point, we might catch a glimpse of the transcendent principles that derive from the very nature of man. We can learn to recognize greatness and, through familiarizing ourselves with it, more accurately assess the actions of the statesmen of our own time.