The Four Schools of American Foreign PolicySojal Prime

The Four Schools of American Foreign Policy

Tell me these categories aren't accurate.

George W. Bush was a Wilsonian who eventually had to give in to America's Jacksonian core values. Indians hate Andrew Jackson's memory and hope he burns in Hell. He screwed us over- using the Executive Branch's military power to defy the Supreme Court and destroy Indian sovereignty, territory, and taking away their farms, mills, mines, ferries and other businesses - making us starving, cross-continental refugees. Still, most Indians are Jacksonians.

"The Hamiltonians are people who think the United States needs to become the same kind of great power in the world that Britain was at its peak. We need to have a strong economy. The federal government should be working hand-in-glove with large corporations and great business interests to advance their interest in overseas trade. We should try to build a global order of trade and economic relations that keep us so rich that we can afford to do what Britain used to do, which is to keep any one country from getting too strong in Europe and Asia to affect our vital interest, to threaten us. And when a country threatens to take over, either Europe or Asia, then we should build up a coalition against them and bring them down, either by peace or war. That's been a vision that has moved a lot of people. George Washington to some degree had this view of American foreign policy.

Then you've got its opposite, the Jeffersonian view, which says the United States government should not go hand-in-glove with corporations. That will undermine democracy. It'll get us involved with despots abroad. We'll be supporting evil dictators because some American corporation has economic interest that is advanced by this. And, also, this is going to undermine democracy at home. So you look at somebody like Ralph Nader as a Jeffersonian, who sees the Word Trade Organization (WTO) as a corporate, big-government plot against democracy at home and democracy abroad.

But at the same time, this Hamiltonian goal of a grand, global order gets us involved in conflicts with people overseas. We're involved in the Middle East, so people hate us in the Middle East, so they come and attack us as on September 11th. "If we'd never set foot in the Middle East, we wouldn't have these problems," say Jeffersonians. That's the logic of antiwar movements, and we've certainly seen a lot of Jeffersonian [values] over the generations.

Wilsonians -- and I think we all intuitively know what that is -- hold the belief in the United Nations, international law. The United States should be pushing our values around the world and turning other countries into democracies whether they like it or not. And the U.S. should also work multilaterally in institutions. We should be supporting things like the International Criminal Court, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. And we should not be unilateralist in our approach. We should put human rights ahead of trade, and so on.

Then finally, you've got a group called the Jacksonians, for Andrew Jackson. One way I describe them is to talk about an incident in American history that illustrates a lot of that school's values. When Andrew Jackson was a general in 1818, he was fighting a war against the Creek Indians in Georgia. Because Florida at the time was still under Spanish rule and there were two Englishmen in Florida selling arms to the Indians, who were then attacking U.S. forces in Georgia. Jackson took the U.S. Army across the international frontier into Spanish territory without any permissions or any U.N. resolutions. He went in there, arrested the two Brits, brought them back to the United States, tried them before a military tribunal and hanged them. And this did cause outrage in Europe. They said "These people have no respect for international law." But it made Jackson so popular in the U.S. that his election to the presidency was just a matter of time after 1818. [The idea is]: "Don't bother with people abroad, unless they bother you. But if they attack you, then do everything you can."

So in the 1930s, Hitler takes over Paris; we don't move an inch. He starts exterminating the Jews; we don't move an inch. Japan is [carrying out aggression] all over Asia. And on December 6, 1941, any opinion poll in the country would have said that most Americans wanted to stay out of World War II. Then December 7th, Japan attacks Pearl Harbor and suddenly the polls change. Jacksonians: when somebody attacks the hive, you come swarming out of the hive and you sting them to death. And Jacksonians, when it comes to war, don't believe in limited wars. They don't believe, particularly, in the laws of war. War is about fighting, killing, and winning with as few casualties as possible on your side. But you don't worry about casualties on the other side. That's their problem. They shouldn't have started the war if they didn't want casualties.

So, four schools."