Conservative Internationalism

Since world war ii international relations specialists have debated two main traditions or schools of American foreign policy, realism and liberal internationalism.

This essay rejects all of these conclusions. It argues instead that Ronald Reagan tapped into a new and different American foreign policy tradition that has been overlooked by scholars and pundits. That tradition is “conservative internationalism.”

Jefferson is claimed by isolationists and liberal internationalists, but he was neither. He doubled the size of American territory, and although this expansion took place on the North American continent when America was militarily weak, Jefferson’s policies can hardly be called isolationist or pacifist. In fact, he used all the military, especially naval, power that the United States had at the time and combined threats and diplomacy deftly to seize the opportunity to grab Louisiana. The Louisiana Purchase may have fallen into his lap, as some historians later argued, but he had to place his lap in the right position to catch it.

In this as in so much else, there were several Jeffersons. He's only a liberal internationalist because of a certain unrealistic idealism in his thinking. I don't think he ever committed himself to UN-type projects. And he wasn't going to use the US to remake the world. So I'd say he wasn't really a liberal internationalist at all.

There was an idealistic isolationist in Jefferson. That's the guy who embargoed our shipping rather than go to war with Britain. That's the guy who, Nau notwithstanding, didn't do much to develop our military capacities, a failing that left us unprepared for war when it did come in 1812.

But there was also a realistic Jefferson, who used US power when he thought it necessary. That's the guy who took on the Barbary Pirates. I'd say he was like other 19th century Presidents. They didn't want us meddling in Europe's quarrels, and in general were far less interventionist than the country's later leaders, but they didn't entirely rule out actions elsewhere in the world.

Maybe there is a common tradition to Truman and Reagan, but Polk really doesn't fit into the same paradigm either. It's hard to think of him as someone who spread freedom in the world. That may have been what he professed. It may even have been the result of his actions. But national acquisitiveness and aggrandizement was so much a part of his motivation that one wonders if he deserves as much credit as Nau gives him.

This is do-it-yourself tradition making. Nau's model isn't necessarily untrue, but he tries to apply it too widely.

"Jefferson laid down the conservative internationalist precept that the first and best government is self-government and that national and international governments should only do what local and national governments cannot do."

The only problem I have here is that I do not believe that international governments should even exist in the sense of being a fixed political institution with its own sovereignty. Ad-hoc coalitions of governments with common interests can function temporarily as long as there exist a common interest.

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