George Washington’s foreign policy: Time to return to it

(This was originally published on Independence Day, July 4, 2007.)

Nowadays “patriotism” often is portrayed as supporting President Bush and his many wars and interventions. Today, the United States is engaged in two hot wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq, and has more than 700 military bases around the world in more than 130 countries. The president, and most Democrats as well, portray this as being in America’s best interests and of advancing “democracy” around the world.

In fact, this is nothing but the establishment of a Napoleonic empire at the expense of the American people, our Constitution, and our way of life. America is a republic, not an empire. An empire is ruled by a Caesar, Napoleon, Tsar, or Kaiser. A republic is ruled by representative bodies chosen by the people. An empire is an expensive military camp which inevitably has a gargantuan, expensive bureaucracy and vast agencies that spy on its own subjects to keep them in line. A republic can waste money, too, but it also has the choice — which the empire does not — of keeping spending low and allowing great freedom to its people.

America’s greatest president, George Washington, set America on the right path as a republic. In his famous Farewell Address in 1796, Washington laid out the only way to keep America’s free republic from sliding into an enslaved empire: non-intervention in other countries’ affairs. The great man said:

The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible. So far as we have already formed engagements, let them be fulfilled with perfect good faith. Here let us stop. Europe has a set of primary interests which to us have none; or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves by artificial ties in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities.

Our detached and distant situation invites and enables us to pursue a different course. If we remain one people under an efficient government. the period is not far off when we may defy material injury from external annoyance; when we may take such an attitude as will cause the neutrality we may at any time resolve upon to be scrupulously respected; when belligerent nations, under the impossibility of making acquisitions upon us, will not lightly hazard the giving us provocation; when we may choose peace or war, as our interest, guided by justice, shall counsel.

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, humor or caprice?

It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world; so far, I mean, as we are now at liberty to do it; for let me not be understood as capable of patronizing infidelity to existing engagements. I hold the maxim no less applicable to public than to private affairs, that honesty is always the best policy. I repeat it, therefore, let those engagements be observed in their genuine sense. But, in my opinion, it is unnecessary and would be unwise to extend them.

Taking care always to keep ourselves by suitable establishments on a respectable defensive posture, we may safely trust to temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies.

Today’s foreign policy is the complete opposite of those noble words. For that matter, Bill Clinton’s foreign policies also opposed those of Washington. And likely the next president’s policies will do the same. The exceptions among the announced candidates are Ron Paul for the Republicans and Mike Gravel and Dennis Kucinich for the Democrats.

Let us look at some specifics.

• Despite the end of the Cold War in 1989, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States continues to maintain vast forces in Europe. America belongs to NATO, which existed only as a bulwark against the aggression of the Soviet Union, which no longer exists. America’s presence in Europe and membership in NATO exist now only to project the American Empire.
• Similar Cold War relics are American forces in South Korea, Japan, and other areas in Asia.
• America’s presence in the Middle East is a prime example of imperial folly. President Bush has said over and over that he wants to advance democracy there. Yet democracy has meant that radical Islamic groups have gained greater power: the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hamas in the Palestinian territories, and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
• The “military-industrial complex” that President Eisenhower warned of in his 1961 Farewell Address has metastasized. Economist Robert Higgs estimates that the amount of U.S. military spending now is $1.028 trillion, more than double the government’s official estimate. Higgs includes such things kept off the official ledger as nuclear weapons research, military retirement pay, and veterans’ hospitals. Let’s put the zeros in: it’s $1,028,000,000,000.00 a year. No wonder our taxes and the federal deficits and debt are so high.
• Typical of any large bureaucracy, the military-industrial complex has only one mission: keeping the funding going. Military strategist William Lind writes this week that the Israelis have been learning from their defeat in Lebanon that a top-heavy military doesn’t work — but the Pentagon is impervious to such learning, despite its defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan.
• The Bush administration’s fixation on Iraq and on setting up a supposedly democratic puppet state it can control in Afghanistan have prevented it from the one military action it should take: hunting down Osama bin Laden in his caves in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Bush actually had a chance to grab or kill Osama and decimate al-Qaeda, but let him go when U.S. forces were diverted from that task to the Iraq folly.
• The last time the U.S. Congress declared war was during World War II, yet the country has almost constantly been a war since then. Presidents have usurped the power to declare war that the founders rightly gave to Congress.

It’s long past time to return to a patriotic foreign policy, following the wise counsel of George Washington. This would entail:

• Ending the Iraq war immediately and bringing the troops home to be with their families.
• Pulling all U.S. troops home from the world: Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
• Cutting defense spending at least by half, with the savings — all of it — refunded to hard-pressed U.S. taxpayers.
• Re-establishing the U.S. military on a Fourth Generation Warfare footing so that it can effectively go after al-Qaeda and other real threats.
• Re-establishing the U.S. Congress as the center of decision-making on war. Only wars declared by Congress should be conducted. (Unconstitutional approval for presidential action, such as that by Congress on the Iraq war in October 2002, is not a declaration of war and should not be used. Only real declarations of war count.) Any president who begins an undeclared war should be impeached and removed from office, beginning with President Bush.

If America does not take these corrective actions, she will continue descending into the violent bankrupt maelstrom of tyranny and imperial dictatorship. That was the path to the destruction of the Roman Republic and its displacement by the Roman Empire. America may not have long to avoid that fate.