Oct 14 2008
Quotations on Foreign Policy: John McCain versus the American Founders
These quotations are meant to accompany Mr. Stolyarov’s presentation, “A Critique of John McCain’s Ideas on Foreign Policy.”
The American Founders advocated a non-interventionist foreign policy.
“It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.”
~George Washington, Farewell Address, 1797.
“Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political; peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.”
~Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, 1801.
This foreign policy was remarkably successful, as Andrew Jackson acknowledged:
“The foreign policy adopted by our Government soon after the formation of our present Constitution, and very generally pursued by successive Administrations, has been crowned with almost complete success, and has elevated our character among the nations of the earth. To do justice to all and to submit to wrong from none has been during my Administration its governing maxim, and so happy have been its results that we are not only at peace with all the world, but have few causes of controversy, and those of minor importance, remaining unadjusted.” ~ Andrew Jackson, Second Inaugural Address, 1833.
Grover Cleveland affirmed the ideas of Washington, Jefferson, and Jackson:
“The genius of our institutions, the needs of our people in their home life, and the attention which is demanded for the settlement and development of the resources of our vast territory dictate the scrupulous avoidance of any departure from that foreign policy commended by the history, the traditions, and the prosperity of our Republic. It is the policy of independence, favored by our position and defended by our known love of justice and by our power. It is the policy of peace, suitable to our interests. It is the policy of neutrality, rejecting any share in foreign broils and ambitions upon other continents and repelling their intrusion here. It is the policy of Monroe and of Washington and Jefferson—‘Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliance with none.’”
~ Grover Cleveland, First Inaugural Address, 1885.
One of the most eloquent critiques of military conscription was offered by Ronald Reagan in 1979:
“[Conscription] rests on the assumption that your kids belong to the state. If we buy that assumption then it is for the state – not for parents, the community, the religious institutions or teachers – to decide who shall have what values and who shall do what work, when, where and how in our society. That assumption isn’t a new one. The Nazis thought it was a great idea.” ~ Ronald Reagan, 1979
John McCain disagrees with these ideas and agrees instead with Theodore Roosevelt’s militaristic, jingoistic expansionism.
“My hero is a guy named Teddy Roosevelt.” ~ John McCain, Second Presidential Debate, 2008.
“Theodore Roosevelt is one of my greatest political heroes. The ’strenuous life’ was T.R.’s definition of Americanism, a celebration of America’s pioneer ethos, the virtues that had won the West and inspired our belief in ourselves as the New Jerusalem, bound by sacred duty to suffer hardship and risk danger to protect the values of our civilization and impart them to humanity. ‘We cannot sit huddled within our borders,’ he warned, ‘and avow ourselves merely an assemblage of well-to-do hucksters who care nothing for what happens beyond.’” ~ John McCain, Speech at the University of Southern California, 2002.
“[I]f we are to hold our own in the struggle for naval and commercial supremacy, we must build up our power without our own borders.”
~ Theodore Roosevelt, Speech Before the Hamilton Club in Chicago, 1899
Teddy Roosevelt disdained peace and “commercialism” and advocated war, hardship, sacrifice, and militarism:
“We cannot, if we would, play the part of China, and be content to rot by inches in ignoble ease within our borders, taking no interest in what goes on beyond them, sunk in a scrambling commercialism; heedless of the higher life, the life of aspiration, of toil and risk, busying ourselves only with the wants of our bodies for the day…” ~ Theodore Roosevelt, Speech Before the Hamilton Club in Chicago, 1899
“A life of slothful ease, a life of that peace which springs merely from lack either of desire or of power to strive after great things, is as little worthy of a nation as of an individual. I ask only that what every self-respecting American demands from himself and from his sons shall be demanded of the American nation as a whole.” ~ Theodore Roosevelt, Speech Before the Hamilton Club in Chicago, 1899
“We do not admire the man of timid peace. We admire the man who embodies victorious effort; the man who never wrongs his neighbor, who is prompt to help a friend, but who has those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life.” ~ Theodore Roosevelt, Speech Before the Hamilton Club in Chicago, 1899
“When men fear work or fear righteous war… well it is that they should vanish from the earth, where they are fit subjects for the scorn of all men and women who are themselves strong and brave and high-minded.” ~ Theodore Roosevelt, Speech Before the Hamilton Club in Chicago, 1899
“If in 1861 the men who loved the Union had believed that peace was the end of all things, and war and strife the worst of all things, and had acted up to their belief, we would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives, we would have saved hundreds of millions of dollars… We could have avoided all this suffering simply by shrinking from strife. And if we had thus avoided it, we would have shown that we were weaklings, and that we were unfit to stand among the great nations of the earth.”
~ Theodore Roosevelt, Speech Before the Hamilton Club in Chicago, 1899
“The timid man, the lazy man, the man who distrusts his country, the over-civilized man, who has lost the great fighting, masterful virtues, the ignorant man, and the man of dull mind, whose soul is incapable of feeling the mighty lift that thrills ’stern men with empires in their brains’ – These are the men who fear the strenuous life.” ~ Theodore Roosevelt, Speech Before the Hamilton Club in Chicago, 1899
Theodore Roosevelt glorified war as an opportunity rather than an occasion of great devastation:
“If there is not the war, you don’t get the great general; if there is not a great occasion, you don’t get a great statesman; if Lincoln had lived in a time of peace, no one would have known his name.”
~ Theodore Roosevelt
Woodrow Wilson, who got the United States into World War I after being elected under the slogan, “He Kept Us Out of War,” agreed with McCain and Teddy Roosevelt on foreign policy.
“[A]rmed neutrality, it now appears, is impracticable.” ~Woodrow Wilson, War Message, April 2, 1917
“We are at the beginning of an age in which it will be insisted that the same standards of conduct and responsibility for wrong done shall be observed among nations and their governments that are observed among the individual citizens of civilized states.” ~Woodrow Wilson, War Message, April 2, 1917
“A steadfast concert for peace can never be maintained except by a partnership of democratic nations.”
~Woodrow Wilson, War Message, April 2, 1917
(Whatever happened to “no entangling alliances”?)
Franklin Roosevelt, who instituted the first peacetime military draft in 1940 and eagerly entered the United States into World War II, agreed with McCain, Theodore Roosevelt, and Wilson:
“The American people must march forward as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline.” ~ Franklin Delano Roosevelt
“The price for civilization must be paid in hard work and sorrow and blood. The price is not too high.“ ~ Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “A Call to Sacrifice,” 1942
“This great war effort must be carried through to its victorious conclusion by the indomitable will and determination of the people as one great whole.
“It must not be impeded by the faint of heart.
“It must not be impeded by those who put their own selfish interests above the interests of the nation.
“It must not be impeded by those who pervert honest criticism into falsification of fact.
“It must not be impeded by self-styled experts either in economics or military problems who know neither true figures nor geography itself.
“It must not be impeded by a few bogus patriots who use the sacred freedom of the press to echo the sentiments of the propagandists in Tokyo and Berlin. [!!!!]
“And, above all, it shall not be imperiled by the handful of noisy traitors - betrayers of America, betrayers of Christianity itself - would-be dictators who in their hearts and souls have yielded to Hitlerism and would have this republic do likewise.”
~ Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “A Call to Sacrifice,” 1942
McCain’s view of foreign policy and its antecedents are grievously, devastatingly wrong. What is the alternative? Richard Cobden, a 19th century British classical political economist and free-trade activist, offers eloquent words on the proper foreign policy and its effects:
“The progress of freedom depends more upon the maintenance of peace, the spread of trade, and the diffusion of education, than upon the labors of cabinets and foreign offices.” ~ Richard Cobden
“England, by calmly directing her undivided energies to the purifying of her own internal institutions, to the emancipation of her commerce…would, by thus serving as it were for the beacon for other nations, aid more effectually the cause of political progression all over the continent, than she could possibly do by plunging herself into the strife of European wars…” ~ Richard Cobden
“Peace will come to earth when the people have more to do with each other and governments less.”
~ Richard Cobden
“I have been accused of looking too much to material interests…I believe that the physical gain will be the smallest gain to humanity from the success of this principle. I look farther; I see in the Free-Trade principle that which shall act on the moral world as the principle of gravitation in the universe, drawing men together, thrusting aside the antagonism of race, and creed, and language, and uniting us in the bonds of eternal peace…I believe that the effect will be to change the face of the world, so as to introduce a system of government entirely distinct from that which now prevails. I believe that the desire and the motive for large and mighty empires; for gigantic armies and great navies…will die away; I believe that such things will cease to be necessary, or to be used when man becomes one family, and freely exchanges the fruits of one’s labor with his brother man. I believe that…the speculative philosopher of a thousand years hence will date the greatest revolution that ever happened in the world’s history from the triumph of the principle which we have met here to advocate.”
~ Richard Cobden
The solution to virtually all of the United States’ foreign policy problems is precisely the commercialism that McCain and Theodore Roosevelt decry!
See other parts of “A Critique of John McCain’s Ideas on Foreign Policy.”
