Jul 21, 2018 3 min read

In the foreign policy section of his Farewell Address to the American people in 1796, President George Washington warned of “permanent alliances” with other nations because such alliances could drag America into actions, such as wars, that serve no American interest. Therefore, Washington said, a decision to go to war, or any other kind of foreign involvement, was only warranted based on our own “interest, guided by justice.” One of his successors, John Quincy Adams, echoed Washington’s sentiment, saying America “is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”

In other words, America should involve itself only in wars that justly serve American interests. To do otherwise in a constitutional republic in which the people are the ultimate judge of public policy – war being public policy in extremis – is to risk losing the support of the people once they inevitably determine the war is not serving the public interest.

This doesn’t mean we should fight only defensive wars, but it does mean, as Adams also put it, we should not go “abroad in search of monsters to destroy” unless those monsters are a threat to us. Fighting in Europe against Nazi Germany, which the American people overwhelmingly supported, was clearly in our self-interest because had the monstrous Adolf Hitler won that war, he would have eventually attacked the last nation standing, America.

Two modern-day examples involving presidents who made very different decisions regarding war are instructive. In 1952, America was involved in the Korean War, in which America supported South Korea against North Korea, the latter being a client state of both the Soviet Union and Communist China, and receiving military and financial support from them. Thus, President Truman thought American troops were necessary to contain Communist aggression. His successor, President Eisenhower, disagreed, and once in office he immediately began peace negotiations, which culminated this week (July 27) in 1953 with the signing of an armistice ending the war and America’s combat presence.

Eisenhower’s thinking went like this: How long would it be before the American people decided they see no self-interested reason to remain involved in a civil war between two third-world nations in a faraway part of the globe, Southeast Asia, that most Americans couldn’t find on a map?

Many criticized his decision, but two decades later history bore Eisenhower out as America found itself fighting in another civil war between two third-world nations in Southeast Asia – a war that ended ignominiously with the surrender of American-backed South Vietnam to North Vietnam after the American people inevitably concluded that they saw no self-interested reason to keep supporting that war and demanded America withdraw from it.

Bruce G. Kauffmann’s email address is bruce@historylessons.net.