Putting America First always meant defending that way of life. But for most Americans, the overriding objective of American foreign policy has ever been, first of all, protecting a decent, autonomous way of life for our citizens. The Puritan strain has played a considerable role in America’s foreign as well as domestic affairs. They had left the Old Country to escape its troubles, as well as to run their own affairs, and had become happily accustomed to running their own lives with a minimum of trouble from without. Although the Puritans were unusually concerned with spiritual perfection, most early arrivals were ordinary but adventuresome Brits and Germans, old-fashioned about their Christianity and morals. The Europeans who had come to America had not been great men – actual or would-be contenders in Europe’s partisan or national struggles. It meant putting a better, describably different way of life first. Putting America First meant more than natural self-interest. And that is why Americans’ relations with foreigners were always premised on appreciation for what made America different. They came because they expected America to be different, a nearly empty land where they would have peace, freedom, and the bread that their hands earned. They left old quarrels and did not come to start new ones. They had not come on the way to anywhere else. From the earliest settlements, Americans have thought themselves fortunate that they or their ancestors had distanced themselves from the rest of European civilization – and not just geographically. In America, as everywhere else, a people’s choices and priorities reflect who they are. What were America’s founders and their followers trying to foster and preserve by their conduct among nations? What were they trying to put first? Why did the Progressives turn away from these concerns? What did they put first? How dismissive were they of reality? What have been Progressivism’s effects on how America has fared among nations? How have changes in the world and in America itself made it impossible to continue on the Progressive course? How would John Quincy and those following his principles manage America’s present international situation?īy what principles might today’s statesmen put America First? They chart a clear path to escape America’s previous eleven disastrous decades of so-called “progressive” international relations. The author explains why the many fruitless American wars-large and small-which followed Wilson’s conduct of World War I always resulted in a failed peace and often more conflicts abroad and the loss of the domestic peace each failure caused among Americans.įinally, America’s Rise and Fall among Nations examines how John Quincy Adams’s insights are applicable to our current domestic and international environments and exemplify what “America First” can mean in our time. This policy also remains the commonsense philosophy of most Americans today.Īmerica’s Rise and Fall among Nations contrasts this original “America First” foreign policy with the principles and results of the following hundred years of “progressive” foreign policy which suddenly arrived with the election of Woodrow Wilson as president in 1912. Best described in the works of John Quincy Adams and carried out by his successors throughout the nineteenth century, this is the foreign policy by which America grew prosperous and in peace. Minding our own business, while leaving other peoples to mind theirs, was the basis of the United States’ successful foreign policy from 1815 to 1910.
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