Among these familiar claims about the American identity and mission, Wilson’s phrase haunted me as I thought about today’s panel.  Just what was it that we dreamed of at our birth?  The answer was supposed to be obvious in 1861 and 1919 and 1941 and 1956, but is it obvious now?  Where exactly do these intimations of immortality beckon us?  This question gets to the core of any disagreement over U.S. foreign policy.  Policy is never just about policy.  Were Lincoln, Wilson, FDR, and Dulles wrong to legitimize present action by past precedent?  More to the point, were they correct about the Founders’ natal dreams?  Historical honesty requires that we acknowledge the expansiveness of  the Founders’ dreams and even the hubris of some of their claims about their place in history.  There is indeed at one level an unmistakable continuity between later efforts to remake the world by expanding the dominion of freedom and democracy and the Founders’ own hopeful expectancy.  In some ways it is easy to prove that world renewal is exactly what we dreamed of at our birth.  John Adams connected the settling of America with the eventual “emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.”  In 1776, Thomas Paine announced in Common Sense that “we have it in our power to begin the world over again.  A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now” (p. 65). George Washington wrote Lafayette that one day “the United States will be the legislator of all nations.”  James Madison thought the delegates at Philadelphia were somehow to “decide forever the fate of Republican Government.”  And Benjamin Franklin claimed that “our cause is the cause of all mankind, and that we are fighting for their liberty in defending our own.  It is a glorious task assigned us by Providence.”  These examples could be multiplied tenfold and more. 

But do these words prove that the Founders set in motion a world revolution and that it is up to each succeeding generation to fulfill this promise of universal emancipation?  Is it legitimate and historically responsible to claim or even imply that the Founders would have endorsed the North in the Civil War and American intervention in Europe in World War I and World War II, and would have waged the Cold War in a particular way?  To do so requires radical over-simplification of the past, selective appropriation of the past for present needs, and a bold Whiggish-ness that reverses cause and effect.  The historical record is, of course, more complex.  The Founders’ enthusiasm was tempered by their view of man and history.  As Claes Ryn has recently pointed out, they were anchored in the Classical and Christian tradition of humility and self-restraint.  They also recognized the inevitability of international rivalry among nations motivated by fear, honor, and interests.  If they were dreamers, and some were, they were also practical, experienced men of the world, students of history who knew the dangers of enthusiasm, shunned “utopian speculations” and the designs of the “lovers of humanity,” and soon, along with Burke, feared the “armed doctrine” of ideology.

The emperor Marcus Aurelius, who knew something about the complexities of world power, instructed his Stoic soul to stay away from visionary schemes.  “Don’t hope for Plato’s Utopia,” he wrote in his Meditations, “but be content to make a very small step forward and reflect that the result even of this is no trifle” (IX.29).  In the spirit of this reminder, I recommend, as we anticipate the next forty years of foreign policy, one “very small step forward” – and “this is no trifle.”  This small step is to end the rhetoric and expansive imagination of Messianic nationalism.  On September 11, 2002, President Bush quoted John 1:5 and identified America as the light that shined in darkness and was not overcome.  This appropriation of the gospel, and the related claim that the hand of history is upon America to expand freedom and democracy, ought to be controversial among conservatives.  It is not clear to me what is supposed to be conservative about this aspiration.  Some arguments for the forced expansion of freedom and democracy appeal to America’s security, claiming that a more democratic world will be a safer world, that an expansive foreign policy is not idealistic but sanely self-interested.  But must we remake the world in order to be at peace with it or even to be safe in it?  Must we make the world over in our own image and likeness?  Perhaps we do have the capacity to make the world peaceful, safe, free, and prosperous, but at what costs to ourselves and to our institutions?

Policymakers who advocate a continuing world-redemptive role for the United States need to prove that a Messianic posture best preserves our constitutional republic and most effectively secures the lives, liberty, and property of the American people.  They ought to demonstrate just how and to what degree Messianic nationalism makes America safer.  Many ordinary citizens might well wonder what harm there is in universalizing American values, in claiming that the ideals enshrined in the Declaration and Constitution belong to all peoples in all cultures, as President Bush claimed in a speech at the National Archives last September.[1]  What is the harm in believing that one’s nation has a divine mandate to spread freedom, the rule of law, self-government, prosperity, and peace?  Is this aspiration any different from Imperial Rome’s mission to shut the gates of war, to beat down the proud, and to bring the world under the dominion of law and justice as Virgil described it?  These are good things.  Who in good conscience could speak against universalizing these blessings, especially if a nation has the capacity to do so, and especially if national ability means national responsibility?  

But universalization is exactly the problem.  Good things are not good in every context, or carried to any degree, or arranged in any priority.  Love of neighbor and even love of one’s enemy are enjoined by the gospel, but expanded into principles of foreign policy these standards of behavior lose all meaning.  Universalizing the Golden Rule as if it were the only rule of right conduct and applicable in every circumstance shows little understanding of the rule itself and its proper and proportionate relationship to other ethical rules.  Despite what progressives have been saying for more than a century, the nation is not the individual writ large; the world is not the community writ large.  The American system of justice and form of government may not be right for the world.  Universalism makes sense only in an indefinitely malleable world populated by abstractions and uncomplicated by stubborn complexity and fixity.  Sound judgment and sound leadership always require due recognition of context, degree, and hierarchy. 

Regardless of real or imagined benefits, Messianic nationalism’s costs are evident and affect more than political rhetoric (which is rarely “mere” as it expands the realm of the possible – or the impossible – in the public imagination).  Messianic nationalism imposes serious costs on America’s institutions.  It confuses the things of God and the things of Caesar, misleading the Church about the proper identity, boundaries, and mission of the State.  This blasphemous confusion by itself is reason enough to correct the problem, but consequences also reach beyond the Church to the state and society.  Messianic nationalism carries with it what William Graham Sumner on the eve of the Spanish-American War called the penalty of greatness[2] – burdens of increased taxes, increased likelihood of war brought by constant intervention overseas, greater jeopardy to American soldiers, the vulgarization of political discourse, the corruption of politics, and the fanning of national vanity.  An imperial policy may destabilize regions and put the safety of foreign peoples at greater risk by imposing unsustainable systems of government based not on efficacy but on ideology.  It denies legitimacy to any regime that does not embrace democracy.  It seeks to overthrow other governments not primarily because of the likely or overt threat they pose but because of their heretical political ideologies. 

There are costs as well to a vulnerable Constitution that was not designed to govern an empire in the first place.  The Constitution, by definition a system of limitations, was, again in Sumner’s words, designed to be incompatible with “conquest, extension, domination, and imperialism.”[3]  The “armed doctrine” of global democracy, however, becomes restless under these inconvenient constitutional limitations.  Ideology becomes impatient with institutional constraints on ambition.  Ideology simplifies international conflicts, either shrinking or magnifying them into unrecognizable contests of ideas.  It hinders sound judgment by distorting reality through its own prism.  It mistakes part of reality for the whole.  It misjudges proportion, the proper scale of values, and the limits of the possible.  It favors slogans over careful judgment, precipitous action over slow deliberation.  It promises permanent, universal solutions to intractable, perennial problems.  An ideologically-driven foreign policy is more likely to misperceive and misconstrue national interests, to overlook good options in its myopic pursuit of the best, to choose Quixotic goals, to become intolerant and aggressive, and to earn ill-will in a world crowded with would-be Messiahs. 

U. S. foreign policy needs to be kept within a constitutional framework, even at a time of grave threats to national security and to American lives and property.  The Founders’ framework always recognized that the executive powers would require flexibility, latitude, and responsiveness.  These criteria are compatible with constitutional boundaries.  No one would deny that twenty-first century America has grown into something unrecognizable to the eighteenth century.  But we ought not to make more of this truism than the passage of time and the evolution of context and circumstances requires.  There is nothing about the condition of the modern world that prevents the United States from pursuing a foreign policy characterized by what Claes Ryn calls “responsible nationhood.”[4] 

Americans were told throughout the twentieth century that we must be willing to “pay any price and bear any burden,” but is this the language of statesmanship?  Don’t statesmen do exactly that – count costs?  The Wilsonian language of “all,” “every,” “anywhere” persists with renewed vigor in the current administration.  For its first hundred years, America served as an example of successful self-government, liberty, prosperity, and the rule of law, but in its second century it promised to extend freedom, democracy, peace, and opportunity.  The universal promises of “all,” “everywhere,” “anyone” have no grounding in human experience and no place in a responsible, Constitutionally-constrained foreign policy.  How can we promise so much to ourselves and others?  In its place, we need to recover the lost language of a foreign policy grounded in the U. S. Constitution and in the constitution of man and things.  In this fallen, finite, transitory world, there are no permanent solutions, no universal remedies, no self-evident outcomes toward which the hand of history is leading us.

When I see pictures of our troops in Baghdad, I cannot help asking, is this what we dreamed of at our birth?  In honor of my pledge to give all of us the last word, I ask you, the members and friends of the Philadelphia Society, is this what we dreamed of at our birth?  This one question must be answered as we together contemplate the direction of U. S. foreign policy for the next forty years.

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