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Amerika'nın Kuruluşu: Müdahaleciliğin Gölgesinde Bir Bağımsızlık Hikayesi

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Responsible Statecraft, ABD'nin bağımsızlığının 250. yıldönümüne dair bir yazı dizisi kapsamında, ülkenin dış politikasının temellerini sorguluyor. 1821'de John Quincy Adams'ın yaptığı uyarı dolu konuşmayı hatırlatarak, Bağımsızlık Bildirgesi'nin idealleriyle ABD'nin zaman içinde benimsediği müdahaleci tutum arasındaki çelişkiye dikkat çekiliyor. Makale, Amerika'nın doğuşunun 'kılıçla' müdahale geleneğine dayandığını ve bu mirasın modern savaş ve barış politikalarını nasıl şekillendirdiğini inceliyor. Adams'ın 'yurt dışında canavarları yok etmeye gitmez' sözleriyle sembolize edilen erken dönem ihtiyatı, ilerleyen yüzyıllarda yerini askeri angajmanlara bıraktı. Dizi, bu dönüşümün bağımsızlık ruhuyla ne ölçüde bağdaştığını sorguluyor. ABD'nin küresel rolüne dair eleştirel bir perspektif sunan yazı, kuruluş değerlerinin güncel dış politika kararlarında ne kadar yankı bulduğunu tartışmaya açıyor. Tarihsel bir hesaplaşma niteliğindeki bu değerlendirme, özellikle müdahale kültürünün sürekliliğine vurgu yaparak okuyucuyu düşünmeye sevk ediyor.

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Started 30 Jun, 04:05 5 events Updated 2d ago
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  1. Diplomatic30 Jun, 04:05

    By the sword: America was born intervening

    Washington, United States

    This article is part of an RS series reflecting on the 250th anniversary of American Independence and its impact and meaning for modern U.S. foreign policy, war, and peace. On the Fourth of July, 1821, the 45th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams stood before his fellow citizens in the House of Representatives. Rather than flatter them, Adams warned them. America, he said, “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.” Were she ever to do so, the fundamental maxims of her policy “would insensibly change from liberty to force… and she might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.” He chose the anniversary deliberately, treating the country's birthday as a day not only to celebrate America but to warn it. As we mark 250 years of American independence, that habit of self-examination is worth recovering, because Adams described the country we have become. We usually tell the story as a fall from grace. In the beginning, the founders kept us out of foreign quarrels. Washington's Farewell Address counseled against permanent alliances. Then, somewhere along the way, we went off the path, traded a republic for an empire, and became the restless armed power the world knows today. It is a comforting story. It is not true. The United States did not drift into intervention. It was born intervening. The Declaration of Independence was itself an indictment, a list of a king’s abuses grave enough to justify war. Among the charges that its principal author, Thomas Jefferson, laid against King George III was that he “kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.” Jefferson would become the nation’s first secretary of state, the founding head of the department we have since hollowed out. Now consider what the founding generation did, as opposed to what it said. Between 1776 and 1864, the young republic undertook 64 military interventions. Almost none were in Europe, which is where the founders counseled staying out. They were close to home. Nearly half fell on Latin America and the Caribbean. Many more were waged across the continent itself, against sovereign Native nations, in the long campaigns we politely call the Frontier Wars. We do not usually count those as foreign policy. They happened on land that is now American, so we file them under settlement, or expansion, or national growth. But that land was foreign when the fighting began, and became domestic only because we won. To classify those wars by today's map is to let the conquest define the crime. The treaties settle the question. Between 1778 and 1868, the United States signed 366 treaties with Native nations, and by the same constitutional act used for treaties with France or Britain. A treaty is the most formal instrument of foreign relations a state possesses; you do not sign one with a people you consider your own. These were sovereign nations, recognized as such, before they were fought, removed, and dispossessed. The Declaration named Native peoples exactly once, as the “merciless Indian Savages” the king had supposedly loosed upon the frontier. They appear as a threat to be feared, never as nations to be honored, and the republic spent a century making and breaking treaties with them as nations. When Congress ended the practice in 1871, it passed a law declaring that no tribe would any longer be recognized as a power “with whom the United States may contract by treaty,” ending by statute the formal recognition of Native sovereignty that had structured relations for nearly a century. So the founders both warned and did. Adams himself, who cautioned against hunting “monsters,” helped author the Monroe Doctrine and pressed expansion into Florida. This is the founding pattern. Early America was not isolationist. It was selectively so. It stayed out of Europe, where war was costly and offered little, and was relentlessly forceful in its own neighborhood, where force was cheap and the rewards were land and standing. The warnings against entanglement were never a doctrine of restraint. They were a doctrine of focus. Seen this way, the rest of our history is not a fall but a pattern that scales, across the continent to the Caribbean and Pacific to Europe and Asia and, eventually, nearly everywhere else. The geography widened. The reflex held. What changed in our own time is not the reflex but the rate. From the founding through the Second World War, the United States intervened abroad roughly once a year. During the Cold War, the rate climbed. Then, at the moment we expected the country to rest, it accelerated. After the Cold War ended, America doubled its Cold War rate, to about 4.6 interventions a year. Dying by the Sword, a project I led alongside international relations scholar Sidita Kushi, documents and confirms every case from 1776 through 2019, and across that whole span the country has not passed a single year without a military intervention since 1974. The total approaches 400. U.S. foreign policy since only extends the line. The surprise is in the timing. We assume war tracks danger: more threat, more force. But the busiest stretch of American intervention came after the Soviet Union fell, when no rival of comparable strength remained and no enemy threatened our survival. The threat went down. The intervening went up. US National Interest and Intervention Patterns, 1776–2019 Source: Dying by the Sword: The Militarization of US Foreign Policy, Monica Duffy Toft and Sidita Kushi (Oxford, 2023), p. 25 The evidence cuts deeper. As America escalated after the Cold War, other states did the opposite. They lowered their hostility toward us, and after 2001 they initiated fewer disputes than in any earlier era. We were also intervening over interests that mattered less. By our own measures, the unipolar decades combine the lowest stakes in our history with the highest rate of force. Our adversaries were backing down. We reached for the gun anyway. A rival disciplines a great power. Every use of force during the Cold War had to be weighed against the risk of confrontation with Moscow, and that weighing imposed a restraint that had nothing to do with virtue. Remove the rival and you remove the discipline. The threshold drops, and a country that once balanced force against diplomacy and trade begins to treat force as the answer to everything. This is the turn from statecraft to what I have called kinetic diplomacy: diplomacy conducted by armed force, with the secretary of state's old department starved while the Pentagon swells. It is how a superpower slides into the posture of a bully, reaching by reflex for the hammer because it has let its other tools rust. Here is the hardest part to write. The hammer mostly does not work today. Ivan Arreguín-Toft documented why strong states lose to weak ones, and his finding is plain: when a great power brings overwhelming force against an adversary who refuses to fight on its terms, it tends to bog down, alienate the population it claims to help, and lose over a time span that favors the weak. Force succeeds only when it is limited and tied to a concrete objective it can actually achieve. Unbounded, it fails. And then there is the water. Since last September, in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific, American forces have destroyed scores of small boats allegedly carrying drugs, killing more than 200. Most victims of these strikes were never charged, never tried, never named. What began as a campaign against traffickers became a blockade, and then a war: in January we seized the president of Venezuela and flew him out of his own country. It is the oldest American habit: use force in the neighborhood, where it is cheap and the victims have no standing to object. And it is the easy victories close to home that breed the confidence to reach farther, to believe the same hammer will land on Iran. Jefferson indicted his king for “depriving us, in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury.” We now deal death at sea with no trial at all, and call the dead unlawful combatants in a war we declared upon them. We are watching the hammer fail in real time. Last summer the United States struck Iran's nuclear facilities and declared the program “obliterated.” American intelligence later assessed that the strikes had delayed, not destroyed, Tehran's capabilities. Months later, American aircraft were returning to hit Iran again. Military force had achieved what it often does: a temporary setback mistaken for a permanent solution. This is what Adams foresaw on America’s 45th anniversary: the maxims changing, insensibly, from liberty to force. Not a single betrayal but a slow drift, each step reasonable, the country at the end of it no longer the ruler of its own spirit. It need not end there. The founders were not pacifists, and they were not innocent; they built the very pattern this essay traces. But they also left a warning against it, and the warning was right even when they were not. They knew force was finite, that it traded against every other national good — that a republic that spent it carelessly would find it gone when the stakes were real. They said so, and then often did the opposite. The task now is to honor the warning they failed to honor themselves.

    Responsible Statecraft
  2. Diplomatic02 Jul, 04:05

    America does not know its own mind

    Washington, United States

    This article is part of an RS series reflecting on the 250th anniversary of American Independence and its impact and meaning for modern U.S. foreign policy, war, and peace. In a 1941 speech to the America First Committee, which sought to keep the nation out of World War II, Charles Lindbergh insisted that the United States was “better situated from a military standpoint than any other nation in the world.” “If we concentrate on our own defenses and build the strength that this nation should maintain, no foreign army will ever attempt to land on American shores,” Lindbergh thundered. “If we enter fighting for democracy abroad, we may end by losing it at home." President Franklin D. Roosevelt attacked these isolationist arguments head-on as he made the case for sending arms to the victims of aggression, warning that the fall of Great Britain to the Axis powers would imperil U.S. interests. “It is no exaggeration to say that all of us, in all the Americas, would be living at the point of a gun,” Roosevelt said. “We well know that we cannot escape danger, or the fear of danger, by crawling into bed and pulling the covers over our heads.” Japan settled this debate by attacking Pearl Harbor, prompting the America First Committee to disband as the nation entered World War II. But these bitter divisions over statecraft continued to haunt many American elites. In 1943, journalist Walter Lippmann worried that ideological cleavages endangered the republic. “The spectacle of this great nation which does not know its own mind,” he warned, “is as humiliating as it is dangerous.” This warning would prove premature; a consensus behind liberal internationalism would form during the 1940s, consolidate in the early 1950s, and last through the rest of the century. Yet the past is prologue. Today, Lippmann’s apprehensions could not be more apt. As it celebrates its 250th birthday, America does not know its own mind. Internationalists are again doing battle with America Firsters, cleaving the body politic between two incompatible approaches to the nation’s role in the world. Amid deepening disarray across much of the world, the United States urgently needs to reclaim a wise and steady course. Mining the nation’s history can point to the middle ground between globalist excess and nationalist retreat — a new grand strategy that can gain support across the political spectrum while also anchoring a changing world. *** The founding era bequeathed to the United States a grand strategy that was isolationist, unilateralist, protectionist, and anti-immigrant. In his Farewell Address of 1796, President George Washington warned against “permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.” The United States banked on the natural security provided by flanking oceans, generally avoided taking on enduring strategic commitments beyond North America, and studiously shunned entanglement in great-power rivalry. The United States chose to go it alone and chart its own foreign policy path rather than entering pacts and alliances that could tie its hands. In 1793, President George Washington reneged on the alliance with France concluded in 1778 to help secure U.S. independence. The United States did not enter another military alliance until after World War II. American positions on trade and immigration also sought to keep the outside world at bay. From its earliest days, the United States relied heavily on commerce with other nations, but it sought fair trade rather than free trade and looked to tariffs to raise revenue and bolster industrialization. The protectionist impulse intensified after the Great Depression with the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, which triggered the collapse of international trade. And, even as America welcomed with open arms immigrants that were white and Protestant, Jews, Catholics, Asians, Mexicans, and various “non-white” peoples were often the target of anti-immigrant measures. Racism and anti-immigrant sentiment reinforced isolationism by intensifying the nation’s urge to limit its entanglement with the outside world. To be sure, the United States hardly sat on its hands until World War II. As it sought dominance in the Western hemisphere, the young nation steadily expanded westward, shunting aside Native Americans and launching a war in 1846 that led to the annexation of roughly half of Mexico’s territory. But when American policymakers strayed further afield, they faced sharp backlash at home. Victory in the Spanish-American War of 1898 saddled the United States with Spain’s former possessions in the Caribbean and Pacific. Especially after thousands of U.S. soldiers died fighting insurgents in the Philippines, this bout of imperialism did not go over well with the electorate. “We assert that no nation can long endure half republic and half empire,” charged Democratic presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan in 1900. Americans similarly soured on President Woodrow Wilson’s decision to enter World War I to “make the world safe for democracy.” The 1920 election was effectively a referendum on Wilsonian internationalism. The Republican nominee, Warren Harding, campaigned “against the internationalism” of Wilson and “for the policies of [George] Washington.” Harding won in a landslide, sparking America’s sharp strategic retreat during the interwar years. This isolationist impulse held strong even as Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan embarked down a path of aggression and territorial expansion. *** This first era of U.S. grand strategy came to a decisive end on December 7, 1941, when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. “That day ended isolationism for any realist,” wrote Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, who had until then been a leading proponent of isolation and non-intervention. President Roosevelt began what would result in a sea-change in U.S. grand strategy, forging a new bipartisan compact behind liberal internationalism. Helping drive this foreign policy revolution were tectonic shifts in geopolitics. Advances in aviation and other military technologies led American policymakers to conclude that two great oceans no longer provided strategic shields. “The world has grown so small and weapons of attack so swift,” Roosevelt explained, “that no nation can be safe in its will to peace.” A new strategic principle would come to guide U.S. statecraft: “never again,” as described by historian Melvyn Leffler, “could the United States permit an adversary or coalition of adversaries to gain control of the preponderant resources of Europe and Asia.” To ensure safety at home, the United States had to venture abroad, defeat autocratic aggressors, and spread republican ideals. Amid the onset of the Cold War, the United States left behind hemispheric isolation and became a crusader state. In the service of defending its worldwide interests and spreading democracy, the United States deployed its armed forces abroad in war and peace and constructed a web of defense alliances and a vast network of overseas bases. Between 1948 and the end of the Cold War, U.S. forces engaged in more than 40 military interventions. Unilateralism gave way to multilateralism. The Senate approved membership in the United Nations by a vote of 89-2, and the Bretton Woods institutions were set up to oversee the international economy. Fervor for free trade displaced protectionism, and Washington took the lead in negotiating the liberalization of international commerce. The country also embraced a new sense of multiculturalism, bolstered by looser immigration laws and the victories of the civil rights movement. The bipartisan compact behind liberal internationalism served as the political foundation for Pax Americana well into the twenty-first century. Western hegemony, underpinned by U.S. power, acquired a taken-for-granted quality. *** Yet history is moving forward. America’s internationalist consensus has shattered. Decades of war in the Middle East have soured the electorate on military interventions and undermined trust in the political establishment. Automation, globalization, and deindustrialization have hollowed out the middle class and turned free trade into a dirty word on both sides of the aisle. The failure of international institutions to deliver has sapped enthusiasm for multilateralism, while a dysfunctional immigration system has eaten away at the fabric of multiculturalism. On foreign as well as domestic policy, Americans are deeply divided along ideological and partisan lines. Trump is a symptom, not the cause, of the country’s political fracture and its turn against the establishment. And at least in theory, Trump’s pivot to America First represents an overdue course correction. Trump vowed to pull the nation back from decades of strategic overreach, ease off democracy promotion and multilateralism, and erect protectionist barriers that would revive the nation’s manufacturing sector. He also vowed to fix an immigration system that many Americans recognized as badly broken. But Trump has overcorrected and underperformed. Rather than pulling off a needed strategic retrenchment, he attacked Iran, launching yet another failed war of choice in the Middle East and straining the nation’s alliances. Trump is right to back off promoting democracy abroad, but he corroded American democracy by disregarding the rule of law at home. In the meantime, his protectionism has worsened the nation’s affordability crisis and his harsh deportations have turned a majority of the U.S. public against his immigration policy. Trump is doing an excellent job of bringing down the old order. But he shows no sign of putting in place a viable alternative. *** Today, America is adrift; neither liberal internationalism nor Trump’s America First strategy is able to sustain domestic support. Wide swings in U.S. strategy are contributing to global instability and undermining U.S. leverage. With American history as our guide, it is time to create a new consensus — one that builds on the wisdom of both George Washington and Franklin Roosevelt and sets the country on a stable path forward. The last major shift in U.S. foreign policy was forged in response to the catastrophe of World War II. This time, Washington must not wait for another great-power war to help birth an ordering moment. The clock is ticking. As China reaches great-power status and middle powers continue to rise, global power is diffusing from west to east and north to south; geopolitical rivalries are mounting in step. Yet with America’s purposes abroad no longer in equilibrium with its domestic means, the United States is not currently up to the task of providing steady leadership. To get back on course and help anchor a changing world, America should now embrace what one might call “multilateralism-lite.” International cooperation remains necessary for solving global problems like trade, global warming, and AI regulation, but the United States cannot rely on bureaucratic and slow-moving institutions like the U.N. to address these problems. Instead, it should focus on coalitions of the willing and bespoke groupings targeting specific tasks. Alongside such ad hoc coalitions, the United States should also encourage states to lean first and foremost on regional organizations, such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and the African Union, which should shoulder more responsibility and deliver more public goods in their neighborhoods. As global power diffuses, the United States must for now set aside efforts to spread republican ideals and instead work with other nations — democracies and autocracies alike — to fashion a pluralistic and ideologically diverse global order. Democracies will need to compete respectfully in the marketplace of ideas with countries that adhere to alternative forms of governance. Autocracies will likewise need to live comfortably alongside liberal democracies. International cooperation will require respect for sovereignty and toleration of differences over values and governance. In this respect, the United States and China should do more to build a pragmatic and constructive relationship. Teamwork between the world’s two leading powers will help facilitate global governance and reduce the chances of a dangerous rupture. The crusading ethos that has defined U.S. foreign policy for the last 80 years must be tamed; America’s role as global policeman has run its course. At the same time, hemispheric isolation is not an option in an interdependent world. The United States still needs to help prevent the domination of Eurasia by a hostile power, even as it retrenches from and avoids wars of choice in other parts of the world. Keeping alliances in Europe and Asia alive and well is a cheap investment in maintaining a stable balance of power. As Washington presses allies to shoulder more burdens, it should still maintain a robust U.S. force presence in both theaters. This is the pathway toward a stable equilibrium between chronic overreach and dangerous detachment. Such a refashioning of U.S. foreign policy will not be easy. In order to make it stick, U.S. democracy will have to get back up on its feet. Domestic investments will be needed to promote growth, bring down inequality, and educate Americans for the jobs of the future. A tamed brand of globalization – one that entails a more level playing field with trade partners but avoids protectionist overkill – can help ensure that the benefits of international trade are more widely shared. Only if it gets its own house once more in order will the United States have the power and purpose to provide effective leadership abroad. America’s founders imparted enduring wisdom when they cautioned against unwise entanglement abroad. But the world of the 21st century is not the world of the founding era; like it or not, Americans are entangled in an interdependent globe. The United States must now step back without stepping away; it must do less, but still do enough. Arriving at that middle ground will be the challenge of the post-Trump era.

    Responsible Statecraft
  3. Diplomatic03 Jul, 04:05

    Seeing in real time why founders kicked monarchy to the curb

    Washington, United States

    This article is part of an RS series reflecting on the 250th anniversary of American Independence and its impact and meaning for modern U.S. foreign policy, war, and peace. The spring of 1794 strained the nerves of even the most principled adherents to official neutrality and free commerce. The British Royal Navy had seized 250 American merchant vessels en route to the French West Indies. Neither the Federalists nor the Republicans were clamoring for war, but they disagreed bitterly over how to resolve the crisis without being swept up in a European maelstrom. Most agreed the young country was too weak to take on a major power. In an April 25 letter to Vice President John Adams, Thomas Jefferson — the Republican leader and famous French sympathizer — lamented, “my countrymen are groaning under the insults of Gr. Britain. I hope some means will turn up of reconciling our faith & honour with peace: for I confess to you I have seen enough of one war never to wish to see another.” Jefferson would receive his wish this time, although he and the Republicans were outraged by President George Washington’s decision to avert war through an unpopular, one-sided treaty. But such was the price of peace. The British, then embroiled in an existential struggle against revolutionary France, eventually stopped seizing American ships, creating an opening for negotiations. In the more than two centuries since the vexations of Washington’s second term, however, war has too often been the norm — unnecessary, undeclared, ruinous, even genocidal. This bloody history can obscure the founding generation’s genuine fear that war’s deleterious consequences would undermine republican government and weaken the country’s independence at an irrecoverable cost in blood and treasure. America’s semiquincentennial should compel us to revisit these ideas without resorting to presentism, because the American Revolution remains the most important event in our history, and the Constitution these former revolutionaries crafted in 1787 is still our Constitution today. This does not mean resorting to hagiography. While many founders dreaded foreign wars, railed against permanent alliances, or even proposed utopian visions for enduring international comity, they were not saints. They made plenty of mistakes in the cause of peace, such as Jefferson’s economically disastrous embargo to avoid another war with Great Britain in 1807. They were not pacifists, either. Jefferson, who “retained the instruments and followed the basic thrust of his predecessors’ foreign policy,” according to historian George Herring, deployed the new navy to fight a limited war against the Barbary pirates from 1801 to 1805. The operation included a failed attempt to overthrow Tripoli’s government. When the fighting ended indecisively, it had cost the treasury “far more than the price of tribute” typically paid to the Barbary States, says Herring. Meanwhile, on the North American continent, both the U.S. government and a racist citizenry pursued violent expansionism in Indian lands, unleashing campaigns of indiscriminate murder and dispossession. As historian David Silverman writes in “The Chosen and the Damned,” “the conquest of Indians was the central activity of the federal government and several states and territories throughout the era of the early republic… killing Indians for their land was the doctrine of the entire nation.” Yet in light of our current troubles, America’s first leaders still have something to teach us. Though they inhabited a vastly different world, one of their problems broadly resembles one of ours: determining the difference between vital and peripheral national interests — and how best to safeguard the former. In our age of the imperial presidency and permanent war, it may seem quaint that Presidents Washington, Adams, and Jefferson treated war against rival European powers as a true last resort to be avoided if at all possible. We might start with the debates at the Constitutional Convention in August 1787 concerning war powers. Massachusetts delegate Elbridge Gerry “never expected to hear in a republic a motion to empower the Executive alone to declare war.” By vesting this power in Congress, the framers rejected British notions of prerogative power. An “elective King” the new republic did not need. As John Jay warned in the oft-quoted Federalist No. 4, “... absolute monarchs will often make war when their nations are to get nothing by it, but for the purposes and objects merely personal, such as thirst for military glory, revenge for personal affronts, ambition, or private compacts to aggrandize or support their particular families or partisans.” The framers’ fear of arbitrary, prerogative power resonates for reasons that are all too obvious. In waging war against Iran without so much as a nod to Congress or trace of public consent, President Donald Trump defiled the Constitution, unwittingly confirming the 18th-century wisdom about corrupt, self-dealing despots. Trump is scarcely the first president to leap headlong into an ill-advised war of choice, and some of his predecessors notably obtained congressional authorization and public backing before sinking into the abyss. Yet Trump’s folly stands out as we mark the 250th anniversary of the revolutionaries’ rejection of monarchy. In an interview with Responsible Statecraft, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Joseph Ellis said Trump’s Middle East misadventures are a stark reminder that “the worst thing any president can do is commit the United States to an unnecessary and unwinnable war.” The Constitution’s framers got it right, Ellis said: “The decision to go to war should not be made by one person.” Moreover, the Iran war fiasco was undertaken at the urging of a foreign country — Israel — whose interests do not align with those of the United States and whose malign influence over U.S. foreign policy might churn George Washington’s stomach. Unlike modern Israel, eighteenth-century France did have a treaty with the United States, the 1778 pact negotiated by Benjamin Franklin during the reign of King Louis XVI. Washington consulted with his cabinet to discuss the country’s obligations to the newly republican France, whose leaders were pressing for the U.S. to intervene. “President Washington had already concluded that the U.S. was too weak and unprepared to fight in a European war and would suffer economic disaster if trade was cut off with Great Britain. He therefore prioritized neutrality, but stopped short of a formal renunciation of the French alliance,” according to a forthcoming book by Mike Yaffe of the George Washington Leadership Institute at Mount Vernon. “Washington articulated a vision for a foreign policy designed to give the United States maximum flexibility to chart its own course in pursuit of the national interest: lasting peace with all nations.” In the cabinet, Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton set aside their reservations and pushed Washington to issue a proclamation of neutrality on April 22, 1793, and the following year Congress passed a neutrality act. “No other president has been able to exercise such enduring influence over U.S. foreign policy,” says Ellis. At the time, however, some early American leaders balked at this approach, arguing that war was necessary to defend American commerce. Others, namely James Madison, believed Washington had usurped Congress’ power over matters of war and peace. Writing under the name Helvidius, Madison said, “War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement… In war the honors and emoluments of office are to be multiplied; and it is the executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed. It is in war, finally, that laurels are to be gathered, and it is the executive brow they are to encircle.” John Adams inherited Washington’s neutralist stance as war hysteria gripped the country in the late 1790s. He ultimately averted an all-out clash with the French who, like the British before them, were preying on American shipping. The second president sought a negotiated settlement against the wishes of many fellow Federalists, not least Hamilton, who sought to exploit the crisis to expand the army and strengthen the central government. “Adams built the navy to combat these erstwhile allies and in so doing defended neutrality without a major war. The Quasi-War involved real combat at sea but ultimately restored US-French relations to one of benign neutrality,” Christopher Mott, a scholar at the U.S. Institute for Peace & Diplomacy, told Responsible Statecraft. Adams considered his decision to negotiate with France “the most disinterested, prudent, and successful conduct in my whole life,” as cited by the late Gordon Wood in his monumental “Empire of Liberty.” Peace arrived too late to save Adams’ political career. But if we are truly interested in saving our republic from the enervating miseries of endless war, we might take some inspiration from his stubborn pursuit of peace.

    Responsible Statecraft
  4. Diplomatic03 Jul, 04:05

    Forget the Vietnam war 'gap' we have a real credibility chasm today

    Washington, United States

    This article is part of an RS series reflecting on the 250th anniversary of American Independence and its impact and meaning for modern U.S. foreign policy, war, and peace. When it comes to war, the Trump administration faces a credibility problem. According to CNN, between late March and early June, the president claimed he was on the verge of reaching a peace deal with Iran at least 38 times. Such fabrications came nearly a full year after Trump declared that Iran’s nuclear facilities had been “obliterated” and suffered “monumental damage.” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has been equally sanguine these past months, bragging at one April Pentagon press conference that Operation Epic Fury, the campaign against Iran launched on February 28, had been “a historic and overwhelming victory on the battlefield, a capital-V military victory.” And yet the war continued on. Now, a tenuous “memorandum of understanding” to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and lift Iranian sanctions, while raising alarm among some members of Congress, has been painted by Trump as a major win thanks to a “record high” stock market and “tumbling” oil prices. Such optimistic yet fallacious progress reports elicit memories of another American war in which credibility became contested ground, both at home and abroad. The lies of Vietnam created a “credibility gap” between the White House and American public — one that has now turned into a credibility chasm undermining the trust necessary for political leaders to deliver on their national security promises. It is with good reason that the American war in Vietnam has come to be seen as one of the most contentious conflicts in our nation’s 250-year history. The political-military struggle set a historical benchmark for how we talk about — and lie about — war. Distortion and deception seemed indivisible from the very conduct of American military interventionism. The duplicity started early. Gen. Paul D. Harkins, the first chief of the U.S. military assistance command in Vietnam, openly boasted that “I am an optimist, and I am not going to allow my staff to be pessimistic.” Not surprisingly, rosy reports flowed into Washington. The communist insurgents were diminishing in strength and influence. The Saigon government was attracting loyalty among the rural population. The war was being won. In August 1964, months after Harkins’ tour ended, Washington Post reporter Arnold Beichman shared a popular refrain Americans were still singing outside of Saigon. “We are winning, this we know / General Harkins tells us so.” When Beichman asked a group of U.S. advisors if they thought the South Vietnamese indeed were winning, they unanimously declared “no.” Less than a year later, there seemed little doubt about the U.S. advisory mission’s inability to stanch the communist tide. In the spring of 1965, President Lyndon Johnson dispatched ground combat troops to South Vietnam at the behest of senior military commanders. At Johns Hopkins University that April, the president suggested he had little choice but to escalate. “We do this in order to slow down aggression,” he shared. But the falsehoods only multiplied. Johnson spoke of the “deepening shadow of Communist China,” masking the reality that this conflict was, at its core, a Vietnamese civil conflict. He spoke of strengthening the world order by defeating North Vietnam, avoiding questions of how such a small Southeast Asian country could pack such a huge international wallop. And he spoke of increasing “the confidence of the brave people of South Vietnam,” overlooking the damage being done by American firepower on an already dispossessed rural population. As American troops poured into South Vietnam, journalists took note of the disconnects between official White House narratives and their own observations. David Wise of the New York Herald Tribune first used the term “credibility gap” in May 1965, followed by Murrey Marder of the Washington Post that December. Marder found “creeping signs of doubt and cynicism about Administration pronouncements” and a “perceptibly growing distrust…about the candor or validity of official declarations.” White House untrustworthiness was undermining U.S. foreign policy. Worse was yet to come. By the summer of 1967, two years after U.S. Marines first landed at Da Nang, the war had devolved into a blood-stained impasse. The military command in Vietnam dutifully reported progress at daily press briefings, disparagingly called the “Five O’clock Follies” by skeptical journalists. Back home, the media increasingly spoke of a “stalemate” that only “moved to a higher level of combat, casualties, and destruction.” Concerned about growing domestic discord, the president summoned home his war managers to help “sell” the war. In November, General William Westmoreland, Harkins’ successor, and U.S. Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker presented an optimistic report on Meet the Press. The general highlighted “significant evidence” of “real progress being made,” while Bunker intimated that media reports were misrepresenting the allied war effort. Days later, the president castigated the disparities between “constructive dissent and storm-trooper bullying.” Then the walls crumbled. In early 1968, Vietnamese communists launched a general offensive across South Vietnam during the Tet holiday, hoping to spur a general uprising among the southern population. The American public relations campaign came crashing down as television viewers back home watched military police fighting across shattered U.S. embassy grounds. When word of the attacks reached respected news broadcaster Walter Cronkite, his reaction mirrored many of his fellow Americans. “What the hell is going on,” he reportedly asked. “I thought we were winning the war.” And still, the war dragged on. By the time of Richard Nixon’s presidency, in historian Christian Appy’s words, “the credibility gap took on Grand Canyon-like proportions.” The New York Times’ June 1972 decision to publish the “Pentagon Papers,” a classified record of duplicitous decisions leading the nation to war, surely aided in this massive breakdown of trust. When asked to justify leaking the secret report, whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg turned the tables, asking what made officials “feel like they had a right to keep silent about the lies that had been told…the crimes that had been committed, the illegalities, the deception of the American public?” The lies of which Ellsberg spoke matter because they endure, having been replicated, if not intensified, by a Trump administration indifferent to being truthful about the causes, conduct, and consequences of war. Indeed, the administration seemingly has gone out of its way to hide any inconvenient truth from the American public. Earlier this month, Secretary Hegseth declared the Pentagon press office a “classified space,” curtailing journalists’ ability to report on national security issues. The Five O’clock Follies look comparatively transparent. Of course, Vietnam was not the only case of political leaders using deception to justify military adventurism. The Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003, for instance, was far less an “intelligence failure” than a comprehensive case of intelligence manipulation. Yet the war in Vietnam, perhaps better than any conflict over the nation’s 250-year history, lays bare how dishonesty perpetuates conflict and how the responsibility, if not burden, of citizens in a democracy is to demand a more truthful accounting of wartime decision-making and to question overzealous “progress” reports. Historian Barbara Tuchman thought the solution for opposing senior officials who peddle falsehoods lay outside the halls of government. Writing less than a decade after Saigon’s fall, she believed that avoiding similar “betrayals” like the one in Vietnam depended upon “educating the electorate to recognize and reward integrity of character and to reject the ersatz.” If Americans haven’t necessarily rewarded integrity at the ballot box lately, we shouldn’t lose hope that credibility and character still matter when it comes to wartime leadership. There is no better time than our 250th anniversary to demand that our leaders shrink the credibility chasm that we are peering across today.

    Responsible Statecraft
  5. Economic04 Jul, 04:00

    The massacre America forgot

    United States

    The events of 1919 had largely been erased in the town of Elaine, Arkansas. Now a new generation is documenting the legacy of racial conflict for itself

    Financial Times – World

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