Foreign Policy Restraint Is an American Promise
The national character is to work to bring our words and deeds in line.
Hours before Iran’s national soccer team took the pitch in Seattle for its group-stage match against Egypt, the U.S. Central Command announced further strikes against the Islamic Republic. This sequence was without obvious precedent. A World Cup host nation had never bombed a participating country during the tournament. Fortunately, FIFA had already provided the punchline by awarding President Donald Trump the FIFA Peace Prize just over six months before the tournament’s opening kickoff.
The scene is absurd, but the paradox is typically American. As we reflect on the anniversary of our independence, we may confront the fact that America has always struggled to reconcile words and deeds. We are an ambitious country littered with contradictions between the tales we tell ourselves and the actions that we take.
An interesting array of questions points beyond war in Iran, the semiquincentennial, and who lifts the World Cup Trophy. What does it mean for a republic to celebrate its independence while its government drifts in and out of a war without popular support, congressional consent, or any plausible theory of victory? The Founders repeatedly and emphatically warned against ensnaring the young republic in conflicts overseas. Furthermore, having heard less, of late, regarding “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none,” what might we make of restraint’s standing as a foundational principle?
Looking back from the quarter-millennium mark, it is evident that we won our independence by revolting against an empire before assembling one of our own. Madison designed a constitutional system suspicious of executive war-making before leading the country into a bitterly fractious and uncertain conflict in 1812. Monroe inveighed against European interference, a doctrine that soon morphed into the proposition that our anti-imperial republic should manage the Western Hemisphere. Polk maneuvered troops and Congress into a war of territorial acquisition. We later acquired colonies, built a global navy, fought world wars, and collected allies and bases around the globe.
It would be impossible to conclude from this record that America is naturally restrained.
Yet the United States is a country of grand philosophical ambition. This nation was founded on the promise of liberty, self-government, consent of the governed, constitutional boundaries, and opposition to arbitrary power. At times, we have failed to live up to those claims or fundamentally violated them. But our failure to reach our loftiest goals is not dispositive of our aspirations. The existence of slavery does not render equality un-American. The emergence of Jim Crow did not consign civil rights to the dustbin.
To that extent, restraint is one of the promises we made to ourselves at the Founding, and one we have regularly broken.
There is a corrective thread running through the suspicion of standing armies, the constitutional power of Congress to declare war, and Washington’s warning against permanent alliances. It animates John Quincy Adams’s insistence that America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy,” the anti-imperialists, and Wilson’s reelection on the strength of “he kept us out of war.” It moved the men and women who marched against war in Vietnam and Iraq and informs the present vexation with our latest war of choice. Note the company we’ve kept: Founders and Progressives, Cold War Republicans, and legions of the New Left. This is not a partisan inheritance.
This tradition of restraint is embedded in our civic rituals. It echoes with every recitation of Washington’s Farewell in the Senate, in Eisenhower’s warning against the military-industrial complex, and in the repeated success of candidates who promised to keep war from consuming the republic.
This is partly due to the material reality of our geography. We escaped the Old World and its rivalrous monarchs to establish a new country the size of a continent and bordered by two oceans. This gave us the unusual opportunity to engage the world without being governed by its conflicts. For much of our history, the question posed to Americans was not whether we should trade, travel, evangelize, or project our cultural influence abroad. To the contrary, we demurred from foreign quarrels lest they warp the shape and character of our republic.
But the distance between people and policy is not simply a matter of maps and globes. After the Second World War, the United States routinized key aspects of wartime mobilization. Signed into law by President Truman in 1947, the National Security Act created the modern bureaucratic structure of a national security state. War, once conceived of by the Founders as a state of exception that required public deliberation and congressional consent, became the province of the executive branch and its array of classified bureaucracies. The result is a republic that often uses force while rarely choosing war.
We gather this July Fourth to celebrate more than the memory of our founding. Our present moment demands an understanding and appreciation of the obligations our ambitions impose. Can a nation founded on the principle of self-government constrain its own power with prudence, courage, and wisdom?
Restraint has rarely been America’s habit. But it has always been part of America’s promise. Let us recall that our highest aspirations still have claims on us.
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