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The Last Best Hope: A History of American Realism
By Dr. John Hulsman
This book is dedicated to Sara, who is the beginning and the ending of everything for me.
“We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.” Abraham Lincoln, Message to Congress, December 1862
Introduction: Saving the last best hope
It was the worst possible time to begin a social revolution. December 1862 was the zenith of the year of miracles for the southern Confederacy. From June 1862--when following the severe wounding of General Joseph E. Johnston, Robert E. Lee assumed command of the Army of Northern Virginia--until June 1863, on the cusp of the Battle of Gettysburg, the South could do almost no wrong.
Lee outgeneraled George McClellan during the Seven Days Battles of June-July 1862, then demolished John Pope at the Second Battle of Manassas in August 1862. Next, and perhaps most amazingly, even when the North had the great good fortune of knowing every detail of Lee’s planned invasion of Maryland (which was discovered in several unburned cigar wrappers), the South somehow managed a tactical draw against the briefly reinstated McClellan at the Battle of Antietam on September 17, 1862, the bloodiest single day’s fighting of the war.
Before the tide was turned at Gettysburg in early July 1863, the southern year of miracles added dominant victories at Fredericksburg (December 1862) and Lee’s masterpiece, Chancellorsville, in April-May 1863. As a direct result of the North’s failure to quickly put down the rebellion the 1862 mid-term elections had not gone well for Lincoln’s Republican Party, which had sustained losses of 22 seats in the House (despite maintaining a plurality) while the opposition Democrats gained 28.[1] No, in the midst of all this military failure, it was not a propitious time for beleaguered President Abraham Lincoln to embark on a fundamental remodeling of the country’s basic social structure, by beginning to do away with the evil of slavery.
Yet Lincoln persevered nonetheless. While it was dispiriting that the South had somehow managed a tactical draw at Antietam Lee had been forced to retreat to his Virginia stronghold following the carnage, amounting to a strategic victory for the North. The President seized upon this rare piece of good news, amidst a year of disasters, to go ahead with the most daring policy initiative that had been attempted in America since the founding of the nation in the 1780s, the emancipation of the four million slaves held in southern territory.
A month before signing the Emancipation Proclamation, on December 1, 1862, in fulfillment of his Constitutional duties (Article II, Section 3), Lincoln sent his second annual message to Congress,[2]then delivered in written form.[3] While the vast majority of it reads like a mind-numbing laundry list of what the federal government was doing at the time—establishing a Department of Agriculture, managing America’s finances, establishing a continental railway system, dealing with warring Native Americans--at the end Lincoln abruptly and majestically shifted gear, urging Congress to lift up its eyes and to think far ahead, about the future of the Union after the conclusion of the Civil War.
In September 1862, following Antietam, Lincoln had warned his Cabinet that he planned to abolish slavery in the southern-held territories by Executive Order, as a war measure, by January 1, 1863. Washington, then as now, was a perpetual hotbed of gossip, so the coming proclamation was by December the worst-kept secret in the Capital.
The end of his second annual message to the Congress was Lincoln’s paving the way for the coming proclamation. Linking the abolition of slavery to the future of the country itself, Lincoln boldly stated, “In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free.”[4] Crucially, in one of the text’s few mentions of foreign affairs, the president was explicitly clear that the US left “to every nation the exclusive conduct and management of its own affairs.”[5] America was far too busy trying to salvage its own experiment with democratic governance to arrogantly tell other countries what to do.
But the President had saved the best of his oratory for last. Echoing Jefferson’s first inaugural, where he had called America “the world’s best hope,”[6] Lincoln ringingly ended, in reference to the planned emancipation, “We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.”[7]
These words have resonated with the American people down the ages because they so fundamentally track with how Americans feel about themselves, their place in the world, and the country they have forged. America’s sense of itself has always included huge dollops of both fear and hope, that the republic and the experiment in democratic governance are beset by endless peril at the same time the promise of the American Revolution remains the universal hope of man. Ironically, just as Lincoln went back to Jefferson to find a way forward for a post-Civil War America, we must now also go back in time to him, to find a way forward for our country as it enters our new, present Age of Insecurity.
The Jacksonians
The purpose of this work is as beguilingly simple as it is forthrightly ambitious. This book will serve as a clarion call for a new dominant realist foreign policy alliance within conservative circles, fusing the populist Jacksonian base of the GOP with the more libertarian Jeffersonian school of thought.
Rather than reinventing the wheel, we will draw on the never-bettered US foreign policy typologies put forward by Walter Russell Mead in his masterpiece, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy And How It Changed The World.[8] Mead’s particular genius, beyond shrewdly detailing the major American foreign-policy schools of thought belief systems, is to organically imprint each with an American historical figure who most epitomizes what each school of thought is actually about.
For the purposes of our book (though I strongly advise you to read the whole of Mead’s groundbreaking work), we will ignore the left-leaning, Democratic Party-based Hamiltonians and Wilsonians. Now that Donald Trump has usefully exiled the shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later neoconservatives to their proper home in a Democratic Party that is all about social engineering, we will instead be focusing on the two major foreign-policy strands currently dominating the Republican Party.
These two conservative foreign policy schools of thought are surely not the same. Jeffersonians like Johnny Cash; Jacksonians are Johnny Cash. Jeffersonians adore the first amendment; Jacksonians are passionate about the second. Jeffersonians support the FIRE; Jacksonians the NRA.[9] Jeffersonians support populism, but much like their namesake, from an elitist perch; Jacksonians are truly of the people. Beyond these social and cultural differences, over policy the two tend to divide over free trade, with Jeffersonians being enthusiastic supporters while Jacksonians are inherently more protectionist.
But for all these differences, there is more that unites these two schools of thought than divides them. Above all, they are fused together by a common (if unacknowledged) adherence to realism, which can and must serve as the cement for the new, dominant foreign policy orientation of the Republican Party. With neoconservatives fleeing conservative circles with the advent of Donald Trump and with neoconservatism increasingly discredited in general, the GOP can at last shake off the stigma of failed promiscuous interventions in wars of choice such as the debacle in Iraq, and futile nation-building exercises, such as America’s two-decade disaster in Afghanistan. There has never been a better time for the re-ascendance of realist principles in conservative circles.
Specifically, Jacksonians share with Jeffersonians a suspicion of unfettered federal government power, preferring such government as is necessary to reside closest to the people; that is, with the states and localities. Their common ancestors doubtless carried the famous serpent flag of the Revolutionary War, ‘Don’t Tread on Me,’ as both schools are fearsome defenders of individual liberty. Originally, in line with their formidable namesake, Andrew Jackson, Jacksonians were pre-Revolutionary Scots-Irish settlers, who quickly moved as far away as possible from coastal control, inhabiting the Old West of West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, Illinois, Indiana, and parts of the South.
In terms of social policy, Jacksonians believe self-reliance is a core value, that every individual has equal rights, but differing life outcomes are to be expected. They believe in both the dignity of the country and the dignity of the individual. Jacksonians, like their dueling namesake, believe America is an honor culture, whose prerogatives must be fought for, if necessary.
Jacksonians absolutely hate today’s leftist woke movement both because they despise its self-loathing and deprecation of an America they love and also because they believe that absolutely no one has the right to tell a self-reliant Jacksonian what to say, what to think, or what to do. The same holds true for the United States in general, as in this honor culture the US must not submit itself to lectures from unelected foreign technocrats of any kind. The American government’s role is to provide for the well-being of this folk community. The American people do not need to be educated (let alone socially engineered) by the country’s coastal elites, let alone by arrogant foreigners.
As such, both Jacksonians and Jeffersonians fear rule from far away, particularly being suspicious of both globalist do-gooding by unelected foreigner-run international institutions, such as the United Nations (UN) and International Criminal Court (ICC), as well as international agreements which bind Americans, such as the green Kyoto protocol. Jacksonians are realists on this key plank, wanting no international institution or treaty to constrain America’s freedom of maneuver.
Part of the reason for this reluctance for America to be bound stems from the fact that the Jacksonian honor culture means that the US has a sworn obligation to protect those it has actually given its word to. As such, interventions and conventions should not be entered into lightly. For example, over Vietnam, Jacksonians were the last school of thought to get excited about the war, given that primary American interests did not seem to be at stake. However, once the US was committed, Jacksonians were also the last foreign policy group to want to leave, given that America had given South Vietnam its word to fight shoulder-to-shoulder with Saigon.
For Jacksonians, there should be no such thing as a limited war. Either America is fully committed or it simply should not be militarily involved. Either the stakes are important enough for the US to fight for—in which case you should commit to total war—or they are not and you should stay home. As such, Jacksonians resent any effort to stop short of victory. For all these reasons, Jacksonians are staunchly opposed to recent Humanitarian Interventions in places like Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo or Libya, where there are no significant American interests at play. For Jacksonians, countries, like families, should first and primarily take care of their own.[10]
In line with realist thinking, Jacksonians believe that the international system is anarchic and violent and will remain so forever. America must be ever vigilant and have a strong military always at the ready to defend the country itself. For all this, Jacksonians are not ‘isolationist’ as so many of their simplistic detractors allege. Aggressive when they perceive primary American interests to be at stake, Jacksonians are simply far less so when they perceive they are not, as in the multiple interventions in the 1990s in then-collapsing Yugoslavia.
It was the Jacksonians who formed the crucial core of the Trump revolution which swept aside the old, decrepit GOP establishment. The old elite’s cardinal sins were that they did not really care about illegal immigration, spent trillions of dollars on wars not in the primary national interests of the country, focused more on their business friends than on US workers over trade deals, and never took on woke politics. All of these things made the Bush-era Republicans increasingly suspect in Jacksonian eyes.
To the contrary, Trump assiduously tended to his Jacksonian base, starting no new wars of choice, focusing on law and order, attacking wokeness in society, promoting government deregulation and tax cuts, and establishing a proactive energy policy, based on fracking and increased drilling. Rarely has a politician so kept faith with his core supporters, which explains their fervent loyalty to Trump, come hell or high water, in return. The new political reality, which will last after he eventually leaves the stage, is that the base of the Republican Party will remain solidly Jacksonian and Trumpist well into the future.
The Jeffersonians
The Jeffersonians also make up an important piece of the conservative coalition, one more lodged in elite and decision-making circles than the Jacksonians, if smaller in size overall.[11] They, like the Jacksonians, lack the Wilsonian left’s missionary zeal regarding the rest of the world. Both conservative schools of thought would not mind the world becoming more like America, though they think this unlikely to happen. What they are both sure of is that they don’t want America becoming more like the rest of the world. Instead, both schools of thought are united in a fervent belief in American exceptionalism, that the specific cultural, social, and political heritage of the United States is a precious gift bequeathed to us by the Founders, and not one to be squandered.
For them, unlike liberal hawks or neoconservatives, the basic object of US foreign policy is to defend American values at home rather than to extend them overseas. For Jeffersonians in particular, building a successful republic in one country is more than enough to keep America busy. Jeffersonians believe that democracy is a fragile plant, difficult to grow and still more difficult to propagate. As such, America’s mission in the world is to serve as an example for the virtues of democracy, rather than ignorantly and ruinously attempting to impose it at the point of a gun upon societies of which we know little.
For Jeffersonians, democracy can never be taken for granted; it must be forthrightly defended. Even more than their Jacksonian allies, Jeffersonians believe fervently in the basic fact that the United States is exceptional and different from the rest of the world and that this uniqueness must be defended at all costs. Jeffersonianism is inherently a defensive creed, with the preservation of the individual liberty made manifest in the American Revolution amounting to the highest aim of statecraft. Liberty may be infinitely precious but Jeffersonians also believe it is infinitely fragile.
These basic views lead Jeffersonians to be concerned with the dangers to the domestic tranquility of the country given excessive entanglements in foreign quarrels. Involvement in overseas wars requires a centralized, high-tax gathering, bureaucracy-heavy state with an overweening military-industrial complex, all conditions Jeffersonians rightly fear limit liberty and encourage tyranny and are fundamentally corrupting of American democracy. As such, Jeffersonians tend to see foreign affairs more through the lens of mitigating threats rather than exploiting opportunities. While isolation cannot be an answer, a restrained foreign policy that limits these domestic dangers to American institutions at the least possible risk and cost is the way ahead.
For Jeffersonians, then, war is to be avoided at almost all costs, being the last resort of foreign policy--rather than the first resort as neoconservatives’ advocate--primarily because wars carry with them the seeds to undermine American liberty at home. Today’s imperial presidency is the result of the permanent foreign policy crisis that was the Cold War of 1945-1991, characterized by the rise and rise of the national security state, excessive secrecy, vast debt, and extraconstitutional, unfettered power for the chief executive.
A basic way to avoid foreign entanglements for Jeffersonians is for the US to recognize that its primary national interests are narrow. They see the risks and costs of intervention as so high that only basic threats to the nation’s existence—such as World War II—justify military involvement.
Another reason for this foreign policy restraint is the Jeffersonian’s frugality. A dollar not frittered away on social engineering in faraway countries of only peripheral importance to the US means a dollar not taken from American citizens. I have often said at meetings with deadbeat European governments that they don’t get to tell me what to do with my army, as I am the only one in the room paying for it, whether I want to or not.
Without a crusading, overly expansive foreign policy, determined to right all the wrongs of the world, there is far less corresponding need for an overweening military-industrial complex. Without such powerful vested interests getting in the way, in terms of lobbying for a vast, unaccountable centralizing government, addicted to war and gobbling up and misspending the patrimony of the country, the riches of America can be returned to where they belong: its enterprising people.
Realism as the glue
As we can see, Jacksonians and Jeffersonians are surely not the same. Yet they are more than similar enough--and together unquestionably have both the intellectual and political heft to dominate the Republican Party far into the future—to form an alliance as the new preeminent foreign policy impulse on the conservative right in the United States. And the glue that unites them, despite their real differences, is realism.
It has often been said, most recently by Emma Ashford in Foreign Affairs, that realism is not really a coherent man-made philosophy. More accurately, it is a set of enduring precepts and impulses, grounded in history, that have made sense of the world since the dawn of time.[12]
As Ashford rightly sets out, first, most realists think states are primarily guided by questions of security and survival. Second, states act primarily on the basis of their national interest rather than utopian, universalist principles. Third, the international system, never having had a world government, is defined by anarchy. Fourth, realist foreign policy initiatives are defined by pragmatism, the art of the possible, rather than grand and doomed otherworldly ideological crusades. Fifth, whereas the Wilsonians who dominate the Democratic Party believe that (somehow) states can rise above conflict and power politics--whether through the magic of trade, international institutions, or international law—all realists categorically reject that such a transcendence is possible. Sixth, and finally, because of this basic state of the world, most realists emphasise prudence as a policy-making virtue beyond all others.
This general depiction of realism takes us a long way down the road towards a fundamental Jacksonian-Jeffersonian intellectual and political alliance, as both major US foreign policy schools of thought can effortlessly (unlike their Wilsonian and Hamiltonian rivals) get behind these basic realist precepts. But if this is generally what realism is about, there needs to be another layer of specificity to the grand Jacksonian-Jeffersonian bargain: how have realist impulses played out in America’s specific history as it has actually been lived?
For using applied history--looking at the specific history of American realism to find the basic organic building blocks for the future of this grand conservative alliance—is what this book is all about. As Lincoln did with Jefferson so we must now also do with our common American past, mining it to see who we are, what this means, and how this common realist past can animate the Jacksonian-Jeffersonian future.
A history of American realism
This book will consist of nine vignettes drawn from US history, mining basic realist precepts gleaned from the American story that serve as the foreign-policy basis for the coming Jacksonian-Jeffersonian accord. The conclusion of this book will take the nine precepts of this applied history and convert them into a practical American realist foreign policy for today, using them as compass points to navigate the new geostrategic world we actually find ourselves in. Politically, these nine precepts and conclusion must rally today’s Jacksonians and Jeffersonians around a common positive vision of conservative realism, fit for purpose in our new age.
Employing story-telling from the American saga, we will create a positive vision for conservative realism that will fuse the Jacksonians and Jeffersonians together. Through this intellectual marriage, it is to be hoped that this book will have a profound impact on the intellectual direction of foreign-policy decision-making in the GOP for years to come. There has never been a greater opportunity to reclaim the primacy of realism and restraint in terms of conservative thought. This book hopes to grasp it.
The nine precepts of American realism
1. Alliances should only be entered into when they advance specific and primary American interests. We will look at the fraught circumstances surrounding the Jay Treaty and Washington’s Farewell Address as the template for the country’s astounding foreign policy success of its first one hundred years.
2. “No more stupid wars.” Fighting wars of choice, from Humanitarian Interventions on the Wilsonian left (recently Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Somalia and Libya) to nation-building exercises on the neoconservative right (recently Iraq and Afghanistan), are ruinous to America’s overall position in the world. American military power must be husbanded for use only when primary American national interests are at stake. To make this case, we will look at the long and distinguished career of John Quincy Adams, who led the charge in opposing just such interventions.
3. To act, or not to act, depends on the national interest. Compared with today’s foreign policy blob, which tends to do far too much far too badly, the US must be more discerning, being aggressive (diplomatically, economically, and even militarily) when its primary national interests are at stake and far less so when they are not. We will look at how Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of State, William H. Seward, adroitly avoided an unnecessary war with Victorian England while prosecuting an absolutely vital war with the Confederacy.
4. Sovereignty is real and everything. Be the issue managing America’s borders, energy independence or not outsourcing US decision-making to unaccountable international institutions, America must preserve its freedom to act on its own as it chooses to in the world. We will examine the underrated Senator William Borah’s successful opposition to Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations.
5. America must never shirk using force to fight wars when its primary interests are at stake, but it must also never go abroad looking for a fight over lesser interests. There is a difference between a Hitler and a Milosevic. We will follow the story of how over time FDR masterfully prepared the US for World War II.
6. Furthering the immediate and specific interests of the American people must be the never-forgotten touchstone of any successful US foreign policy. We will look in detail at Eisenhower’s warning about a military-industrial complex, a permanent war party, seeing in today’s foreign-policy blob an establishment which often cares more about the sufferings of others than the real calamities befalling our own people.
7. Above all, American national interests (designed to secure the American nation) should always drive US foreign policy. We will dissect JFK’s handling of the Cuban missile crisis, where he threaded the needle, forcing the Soviets to back down (securing primary US interests) while at the same time avoiding the apocalypse of nuclear war.
8. The US must be ruthlessly prepared to cut deals with the devil, coming to terms with less than savory countries if doing so furthers US interests. We will look at Nixon’s masterstroke in going to China, mightily contributing to overall victory in the Cold War.
9. The US must be a “Shining city on a Hill” and not be in the foolhardy business of trying to impose democracy upon the rest of the world. We will end our history of American realism by examining the wildly successful career of Ronald Reagan, who understood better than anyone that America as example is a great source of its power.
In conclusion, we will put all these organic precepts gleaned from applied history to work, using the new Jacksonian-Jeffersonian fusion around American realism to look at the world of today, devising a coherent, overall foreign policy that flows from this new, yet old, way of looking at the world. The compelling imperative of this book is as ambitious as it is necessary. For if we can change the Republican Party, we can change America; and if we can change America, we can change the world. It is as simple, and as important, as this.
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[1] “Party Divisions of the House of Representatives, 1789 to Present | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives.” History, Art & Archives: United States House of Representatives, 2013, history.house.gov/Institution/Party-Divisions/Party-Divisions/.
[2] Abraham Lincoln, “Second Annual Message,” December 1, 1862; www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/second-annual-message-9.
[3] While Washington had delivered the message as a speech, Jefferson had discontinued the practice, considering the format too monarchical. Between his time and the modern era, the message was delivered in written form, as Lincoln dutifully complied with in December 1862. It was only in the early Twentieth Century that Woodrow Wilson went back to the original practice of delivering the State of the Union as a speech in front of both houses of Congress.
[4] See Lincoln, “Second Annual Message.”
[5] Ibid.
[6] Thomas Jefferson, “First Inaugural Address,” March 4, 1801; https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/jefinau1.asp
[7] Lincoln, “Second Annual Message.”
[8] For an Olympian view of all the major US foreign policy schools of thought, see Walter Russell Mead, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy And How It Changed The World, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001).
[9] Respectively, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and the National Rifle Association.
[10] For Mead’s complete view of Jacksonianism, see, Mead, pp. 218-263.
[11] For Mead’s complete view of Jeffersonianism see, Ibid., pp.174-217.
[12] For three different but useful takes on what realism amounts to see, Emma Ashford, “In Praise of Lesser Evils: Can Realism Repair Foreign Policy?” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 101 Number 5, (September/October 2022); Hans Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967); Anatol Lieven and John Hulsman, Ethical Realism: A Vision For America’s Role In The World (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006).
I can’t wait to write my review 1/10/24. After following you for quite some time, I feel prepared to read this book. I understand so much more about American foreign policy. Thank you John!