Political History and Theory

In his new book, Isolationism: A History of America’s Efforts to Shield Itself From the World, CFR Senior Fellow Charles A. Kupchan explores the nation's past to uncover the ideological and political roots of U.S. grand strategy, understand the recent return of isolationist sentiment, and examine how the nation can bring its foreign commitments back into line with its means and purposes.

This blog post was authored by Anna Shortridge, research associate for U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations.  One hundred years ago today, U.S. Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby certified that the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified as part of the Constitution. More than seventy years after the Seneca Falls Convention, women had finally won the right to vote in all elections. Centennials of pathbreaking constitutional amendments are worth noting, so my colleague Anna Shortridge wrote up a short history of the amendment’s passage and assembled a list of websites for learning about the suffrage movement and the passage of the amendment that ended the disenfranchisement of half the country’s citizens. The Nineteenth Amendment runs just twenty-seven words: “The rights of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” But it took decades of letter writing, protests and marches, and even hunger strikes and physical violence to make those words a constitutional reality. Some states didn’t wait for the federal government. By 1920, twenty-seven states had already granted women partial or full voting rights. Wyoming holds the distinction of being the first state or territory to give women voting rights. Wyoming also holds the distinction of being the first state to send a woman to Congress—it elected Jeannette Rankin to the U.S. House four years before the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified—and the first state to elect a woman as governor—it elected Nellie Ross to the State House in 1924. Congress caught up to the majority of states when it passed the Nineteenth Amendment on June 4, 1919, and sent it to the states for ratification. The Union had forty-eight states at the time, so ratification required the approval of thirty-six states. Wisconsin was the first state to say yes, giving its approval on June 10, just hours before Illinois and Michigan did likewise. By July 1920, another thirty-two states had passed the amendment. Eyes then turned to the Tennessee state legislature. Many southern states opposed giving women the right to vote, and the Volunteer State looked to be no different. Although the Tennessee Senate voted overwhelmingly in favor of ratification, the Tennessee House was deadlocked. Or at least it was up until the moment that twenty-four-year-old state legislator Harry Burn, whose mother sent him a note urging support for the amendment, changed his vote. Eight days later, on August 26, 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment officially became part of the U.S. Constitution with the secretary of state’s certification of the vote. So the 1920 presidential election was the first in which both men and women had the formal right to vote. But for many women of color, and especially those living in the South, the Nineteenth Amendment represented only an abstract victory. It would not be until the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act in 1924 that Native Americans were recognized as U.S. citizens. Immigrants from Asia didn’t fully get the right to become citizens until 1952. And most notoriously, a variety of state laws effectively disenfranchised Black Americans until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Even today obstacles hinder the ability of many women to vote. To learn more about the history of the Nineteenth Amendment, check out these seven terrific online resources: And Nothing Less: The Untold Stories of Women’s Fight for the Vote. Hosted by Rosario Dawson and Retta, this seven-part podcast series discusses “the stories we didn’t learn in our history books” about women’s suffrage and the women behind the movement. Beyond the Vote: 100 Years of Women’s Leadership. The Christian Science Monitor produced a special series of articles commemorating the centennial anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment, exploring the history of the suffrage movement, and telling the stories of women around the world fighting for equality today. Five You Should Know: African American Suffragists. Black women pioneered for the right to vote despite the fact that they, along with other women of color, were barred from participating in the suffrage movement alongside white suffragists and were frequently denied the right to vote even following the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. The National Museum of African American History and Culture tells the stories of five prominent Black suffragists. The National Women’s History Museum’s Online Exhibits. This collection of online exhibits covers a range of topics, including the history of women in STEM, Black women’s involvement in the civil rights movement, and women in Congress. Rightfully Hers: American Women and the Vote. The National Archives is commemorating the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment with an online exhibit featuring primary documents from the suffrage movement and some free online streaming events over the next several days. Suffrage at 100. The New York Times plumbed its archive for articles on how women got the right to vote and what it meant when they did. The stories include those of the women of color who were at the forefront of suffrage movement, the impact of the 1918 flu on the movement, and the descendants of suffragists who followed in their ancestor’s footprints. The Times also created a "Votes for Women" board game to let you have some fun and learn about the road to ratification at the same time. Votes for Women: A Portrait of Persistence. The National Portrait Gallery explores the suffrage movement both chronologically and thematically with photos, paintings, lithographs, banners, embroidery, and much, much more. Finally, if you are interested in learning more about women’s involvement in, and impact on foreign policy, check out the work being done by my colleagues in CFR’s Women and Foreign Policy program. Rachel Vogelstein, the program’s director, recently appeared on The President’s Inbox to discuss the significance of the Nineteenth Amendment and the impact of women gaining political power.

The draft report of the U.S. Commission on Unalienable Rights provides a gift to despotic regimes and reveals the Trump administration’s hypocritical human rights policy.

The global environmental crisis has exposed the limitations of traditional political realism. It is time to embrace ecological realism. 

The question of how the United States should respond to the rise of China has dominated the foreign policy debate in recent years. Democrats and Republicans alike agree that the days of cooperative engagement have passed and that Washington should take tougher steps in dealing with Beijing, even as they disagree between and among themselves on where the dividing line lies between “tough” and “reckless.” As that debate proceeds—and it could heat up as Election Day approaches—it’s worth remembering that this is hardly the first time a president has had to decide on how to respond to a rising Asian power. Indeed, one hundred and fifteen years ago today, President Theodore Roosevelt, facing the emergence of a different power in Asia, signed off on a document known as the Taft-Katsura Memorandum that opted not for confrontation but for accommodation. To understand the Taft-Katsura Memorandum, some context is necessary. By the start of the twentieth century, U.S. foreign policy had begun to turn outward, and especially toward Asia. During the Spanish-American War—the “splendid little war” as Secretary of State John Hay called it—the United States took the opportunity to annex Hawaii and seized control of the Philippines from Spain. Instead of giving Filipinos their independence, Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt saw the archipelago as a foothold from which to project and protect U.S. interests in the Western Pacific. To ensure U.S. control, they pursued a bloody counterinsurgency campaign that lasted three years, killing 4,000 Americans and more than 220,000 Filipinos. Nor did U.S. interests in Asia stop at the Philippines. In 1900, McKinley dispatched several thousand U.S. troops to China as part of an international effort to put down the so-called Boxer Rebellion. As the U.S. presence in the Western Pacific was surging, so too was Japan’s. In May 1905, the Japanese Navy sank thirty Russian ships at the Battle of Tsushima Strait, giving Tokyo the upper hand in the Russo-Japanese War. Roosevelt had initially applauded the Japanese surprise attack on the Russian fleet at Port Arthur in February 1904 that began the war. By the time of the Japanese victory at the Tsushima Strait, Roosevelt’s thinking had changed. Japan’s naval prowess and reach now threatened not just Russia but potentially also the United States. Looking to head off the threat, Roosevelt dispatched his secretary of war, William Howard Taft, to Tokyo. Taft happened to be sailing to East Asia that summer to lead a congressional delegation on a goodwill tour. (Ironically, by this time, the Japanese, worried about their ability to sustain their war against the Russians, had asked Roosevelt to mediate the conflict. The parties met in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in August 1905. For his efforts in negotiating what became the Treaty of Portsmouth, Roosevelt was awarded the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize.) Taft’s charge was to sound out the Japanese on their attentions in the Western Pacific and to do what he could to dissuade them from casting a covetous glance toward the Philippines. Taft’s delegation arrived in Japan on July 25. Two days later, Taft met with the Japanese prime minister, Count Taro Katsura. According to the memorandum summarizing the discussion, their conversation had three parts. The first dealt with Japan’s interest in the Philippines. Taft asked for assurance that Japan’s sole interest in the islands would be “to have these islands governed by a strong and friendly nation like the United States.” Katsura “confirmed in the strongest terms” that was in fact the case, adding that “Japan does not harbor any aggressive designs whatever on the Philippines.” The conversation then shifted to conditions in East Asia. Katsura said the only way to maintain peace in the region was to “form good understanding between the three governments of Japan, the United States, and Great Britain.” Taft responded that President Roosevelt could not enter into such an agreement without the consent of the U.S. Senate. That said, the secretary of war noted: without any agreement at all the people of the United States were so fully in accord with the policy of Japan and Great Britain in the maintenance of peace in the far East that whatever occasion arose appropriate action of the Government of the United States, in conjunction with Japan and Great Britain, for such a purpose could be counted on by them quite as confidently as if the United States were under treaty obligations to take [it]. The conversation concluded with a discussion of Korea. Katsura said it had been the “direct cause” of the Russo-Japanese War and that he saw Japan’s oversight of Korea as the “logical consequence” of Japan’s military success in the war. He continued: If left to herself after the war Korea will certainly draw back to her habit of improvidently resuscitating the same international complications as existed before the war. In view of the foregoing circumstances Japan feels absolutely constrained to take some definite step with a view to precluding the possibility of Korea falling back into her former condition and of placing us [Japan] again under the necessity of entering upon another foreign war. Taft “fully admitted the justness of the Count's observations,” and said that “in his personal opinion the establishment by Japanese troops of a suzerainty over Korea” was justified, but cautioned that “his judgment was that President Roosevelt would concur in his [Taft's] views in this regard …he [Taft] had no authority to give assurance of this.” After the conversation concluded, the “agreed memorandum” on what had been discussed was drafted, most likely by Katsura. On July 29, Taft wired the memorandum to Secretary of State Elihu Root. The memorandum was then forwarded to Roosevelt, who was at his home in Oyster Bay, New York. On July 31, Roosevelt responded: “Your conversation with Count Katsura absolutely correct in every respect. Wish you could state to Katsura that I confirm every word you have said.” The upshot of the discussion was that Roosevelt had signaled that he would not oppose Japanese designs on Korea. That fact would be codified in the Treaty of Portsmouth, which recognized the legitimacy of Japanese claims in Korea and South Manchuria. When Korea in November 1905 cited its 1882 treaty of amity and friendship with the United States in asking for diplomatic help in fending off Japanese pressure, Roosevelt declined. By mid-November, Japan had taken control of Korea’s foreign policy. Two weeks later, the United States closed its legation in Korea and placed “Korea” under the heading of “Japan” in the State Department’s Record of Foreign Relations.  Although Taft acknowledged to Katsura that no agreement could be binding on the United States without the Senate’s consent, Roosevelt never informed the Senate, or Congress more broadly, of what Taft and Katsura had discussed. (Roosevelt’s attitude toward the Senate on such matters was best summarized by his response three years later when he was asked if the Senate should be informed of another secret agreement he negotiated with Japan: “Why invite the expression of views with which we may not agree?”) The Taft-Katsura Memorandum also wasn’t covered in the press. For nearly two decades it remained unknown and forgotten. Then in August 1924, Tyler Dennett, a professor of history at Johns Hopkins, revealed its existence. He had stumbled upon it while going through Roosevelt’s papers at the Library of Congress. He asked Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes if he could make the document public. The document had never been classified as secret, so Hughes said yes. The memorandum was subsequently published in Current History with the title “President Roosevelt’s Secret Pact with Japan.” Dennett argued that the memorandum amounted to a binding agreement between Japan and the United States wherein Japan would leave the Philippines alone if the United States let Japan oversee Korea. Historians have been debating that claim ever since. Some argue that Taft-Katsura was not an agreement at all, let alone one with a quid pro quo. In this view, the memorandum merely constituted an exchange of views that the two sides had previously shared. Others argue that it was a quid pro quo agreement precisely because Taft “expressed United States approval of Japanese control over Korea in return for Japanese respect for United States presence in the Philippines.” Some go further and argue that the Taft-Katsura Memorandum served as a precedent to the division of Korea nearly a half-century later. And these arguments generate their own counter, namely, given the isolationist sentiment of most Americans at the start of the twentieth century, would any American president have done anything to oppose Japan’s colonization of Korea beyond issuing a stiff, and ultimately inconsequential, diplomatic note? Regardless of which side of the historical debate you fall on, the geographic settlement outlined in the Taft-Katsura Memorandum lasted for thirty-six years, until December 7, 1941.

Former Vice President and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden says he will announce his choice for his vice presidential nominee next week. That has spurred one last burst in the quadrennial exercise of speculating about who could be picked and why. I don’t have any particular insights to add to that handicapping conversation.  I do know that the position is heavily coveted. One might wonder why, though, given what the men who have held the job—and so far all forty-eight of them have been men—have said about it. (Yes, more men have been vice president than president, four more to be exact.)  John Adams, the first vice president in U.S. history, set the tone from the start. He wrote in 1793 to his wife Abigail that “my Country has in its Wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant Office that ever the Invention of Man contrived or his Imagination conceived."  Doubts about the benefit of being vice president persisted in the years that followed. Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster turned down the offer to be William Henry Harrison’s running mate in 1840, saying “I do not propose to be buried until I am really dead and in my coffin.” It was not a good career move. Harrison died just a month after taking office. But his death didn’t change Webster’s conviction that the job of vice president was beneath him. He reportedly declined the opportunity to be Zachary Taylor’s running mate in 1848. Like Harrison, Taylor died in office. Theodore Roosevelt didn’t give into his pride as Webster did. He agreed to be William McKinley’s running mate. But his enthusiasm for the job was limited. He offered that “I would a great deal rather be anything, say professor of history, than Vice-President.” Thomas Marshall, who served under Woodrow Wilson, compared being vice president to being “a man in a cataleptic fit; he cannot speak; he cannot move; he suffers no pain; he is perfectly conscious of all that goes on, but has no part in it.” Marshall also told the story of “two brothers. One ran away to sea; the other was elected vice president of the United States. And nothing was heard of either of them again.” As much as Marshall complained, he couldn’t have disliked the job that much. He served two terms. John Nance Garner, who served two terms as vice president under Franklin Delano Roosevelt—this after serving as speaker of the House—called his decision to accept the job “the worst damn fool mistake I ever made.” Cactus Jack, as he was known, didn’t stop there. He provided the world with perhaps the best known summary of what it means to be number two in the American political system: It’s “not worth a bucket of warm piss.” Publications worried about the sensitivities of their readers changed that to “a bucket of warm spit.” Garner also called the vice presidency “the spare tire on the automobile of government."  FDR went through three vice presidents. His last pick, Harry Truman, wasn’t any more enthusiastic about the job than Garner was. Surveying the history of the position, Truman said “Look at all the Vice Presidents in history. Where are they? They were about as useful as a cow's fifth teat." Vice President Spiro Agnew understood Truman’s point. The understudy to Richard Nixon put it this way: "It is a damned peculiar situation to be in, to have authority and a title and responsibility with no real power to do anything.” That gap between title and responsibility grated on Agnew’s successor, former New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller. He described his duties as: “I go to funerals. I go to earthquakes.” The inherent limits of the job are why Daniel Webster is not the only person to have respectfully (or otherwise) declined to be vice president. None described his reasons more colorfully than John McCain. He dismissed questions about his interest in serving as George W. Bush’s running mate—not that the then-nominee intended to offer McCain the spot—by saying: “The vice president has two duties. One is to inquire daily as to the health of the president, and the other is to attend the funerals of Third World dictators. And neither of those do I find an enjoyable exercise.” Of course, some vice presidents have been consequential. Dick Cheney may be the best example. He even got his own movie. And Biden himself goes to great pains to make the case that he was integral to the Obama administration’s decision-making, a point that President Barack Obama continually corroborates. And when Biden announces his pick, he likely will say that she—he has a pledged to pick a woman as running mate, something that is long overdue—will be an essential part of his governing team. Whether that is how things work out should a Biden administration come to pass remains to be seen.  The vice presidency comes with no substantive responsibilities besides breaking ties in the Senate, something that seldom happens. Any other tasks a vice president takes on risk upstaging the president or treading on someone else’s turf. That is perhaps why Hubert Humphrey, who found himself ostracized for a time by President Lyndon Johnson for providing unwanted advice, lamented: “You are trapped, vulnerable and alone, and it does not matter who happens to be President.” Or as Dan Quayle put it: “The job is just awkward, an awkward job.”  But for all that the job of vice president retains tremendous appeal, and not just because of the great residence that comes with it. Its appeal lies in the possibility it represents. As America’s first vice president recognized: “I am Vice President. In this I am nothing, but I may be everything.” And that potential to be everything is why Biden’s choice deserves the scrutiny it will inevitably get. Anna Shortridge assisted in the preparation of this post. 

The global environmental crisis has exposed the limitations of traditional political realism. It is time to embrace ecological realism. 

Original intent. The term pops up frequently in debates over how to interpret the U.S. Constitution. At its core, the concept of original intent holds that constitutional interpretation should be guided (or bound) by what the framers envisioned when they wrote the document back in 1787. But what happens to original intent when the framers themselves disagreed on how to interpret their handiwork? It’s not an academic question. Just look at the so-called Pacificus-Helvidius debate, which began 227 years ago today. The debate pitted Alexander Hamilton (writing under the pen name “Pacificus”) and James Madison (writing under the pen name “Helvidius.”) Even though the two men had had more influence than anyone else on the writing and ratification of the Constitution, they painted decidedly different views of the relative powers of Congress and the president in foreign policy. Their disagreement has echoes to this day. The debate originated in President George Washington’s issuance of the Proclamation of Neutrality on April 22, 1793, declaring that the United States would not take sides in the war that that had just erupted between France and a range of European powers, including Britain. The proclamation excited passions at home, all the more so when by happenstance a representative of the revolutionary French government, Edmond-Charles Genêt, traveled from Charleston, South Carolina, to Philadelphia whipping up pro-French sentiment. Then Vice President John Adams would remember it later, perhaps with a touch of hyperbole, as a time “when ten thousand people in the streets of Philadelphia, day after day, threatened to drag Washington out of his house and effect a revolution in the government or compel it to declare war in favor of the French Revolution and against England.” As Adams’s recollection suggests, much of the opposition to Washington’s decision was on the substance. Many Americans favored siding with France. The two countries had a treaty of alliance, French support had been critical to winning the War of Independence, and neutrality would help the hated British. Indeed, in an effort to forestall these criticisms and in keeping with the recommendation of Washington’s Francophile secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson, the proclamation did not use the word “neutrality” but instead declared America’s “friendly and impartial” attitude toward all the belligerents. But for many critics the Proclamation of Neutrality also raised an important constitutional question: under what authority did Washington act? The Constitution said nothing about neutrality. It did, however, lodge the power to declare war with Congress. By opting for neutrality even if he hadn’t used the term, hadn’t Washington infringed on Congress’s constitutional authority? Doubts about the propriety of Washington’s action extended to members of his own cabinet, with Jefferson writing that “my objections to the competence of the Executive to declare neutrality (that being understood to respect the future) were supposed to be got over by avoiding the use of that term.”  The first of Hamilton’s seven essays defending Washington appeared in a Philadelphia newspaper, The Gazette of the United States, on June 29, 1793. The seventh and final one appeared on July 27. The essays clearly rankled Jefferson. He wrote to Madison several times urging him to respond to Hamilton’s “heresies”: Nobody answers him, & his doctrines will therefore be taken for confessed. For God’s sake, my dear Sir, take up your pen, select the most striking heresies, and cut him to pieces in the face of the public. There is nobody else who can & will enter the lists with him. Madison initially tried dodging his friend’s request. He ultimately relented, though he told Jefferson that “I have forced myself into the task of a reply. I can truly say I find it the most grating one I ever experienced.” Madison’s five essays were published in The Gazette of the United States between August 24 and September 18. Both sets of essays addressed the substantive criticisms of the Proclamation of Neutrality. But the enduring legacy of the exchange was the differing constitutional visions the two framers sketched. Hamilton argued for a broad reading of presidential power, insisting that “the general doctrine of our Constitution…is… that the executive power of the nation is vested in the President; subject only to the exceptions and qualifications, which are expressed in the instrument.” In contrast, the role of the Senate in treaty-making and Congress in declaring war were “exceptions out of the general ‘executive power’ vested in the President, they are to be construed strictly, and ought to be extended no further than is essential to their execution.” Hamilton further argued that while the “legislature have the right to declare war, it is on the other, the duty of the executive to preserve peace, till the declaration is made; and in fulfilling this duty, it must necessarily possess a right of judging what is the nature of the obligations which the treaties of the country impose on the government.” This vision of a powerful president armed with implied constitutional powers differed markedly from the vision of presidential authority Hamilton had laid out in the Federalist Papers. There he had painted a presidency with circumscribed powers. The president’s position as commander in chief “would amount to nothing more than the supreme command and direction of the military and naval forces,” and his authority to receive foreign ambassadors would be “more a matter of dignity than of authority.” And perhaps most notably, he argued that “the history of human conduct does not warrant that exalted opinion of human virtue which would make it wise in a nation to commit interests of so delicate and momentous a kind, as those which concern its intercourse with the rest of the world, to the sole disposal of a magistrate created and circumstanced as would be a President of the United States.” Madison responded that Hamilton had it backward—the balance of power between the executive and the legislature tilted toward Congress. The president’s foreign policy powers were restricted to those specifically mentioned in the Constitution and even those did not amount to much. For instance, Madison dismissed Hamilton’s contention that the power to receive foreign ambassadors imbued the president with broader authorities by observing “that little, if anything, more was intended by that clause, than to provide for a particular mode of communication.” For Madison, the president was essentially an agent who acted on behalf of Congress and who should not act in ways that would circumscribe its freedom of action. This vision of the presidency was more pinched than the one Madison had sketched five years earlier at the Virginia ratifying convention, showing that Hamilton was not the only framer whose constitutional views shifted with time and circumstance. (Madison’s flexibility on constitutional interpretation showed up again a few years later during the debate over the Jay Treaty.) Madison probably had the better of the argument in terms of the system the framers who met in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 thought they were creating. But Hamilton had the better of the argument of how the system would actually unfold. Over the next two centuries, power—both constitutional and practical—shifted toward the president. It did so in good part because of a dynamic that Hamilton had recognized in the Federalist Papers, namely, that “decision, activity, secrecy, and dispatch will generally characterise the proceedings of one man, in a much more eminent degree, than the proceedings of any greater number; and in proportion as the number is increased, these qualities will be diminished.” The shift would be helped along by the frequent willingness of members of Congress to put aside qualms about the president’s authority to act when he delivered policy outcomes they wanted. In their jousting, Hamilton and Madison both pointed to constitutional provisions that supported their position. In doing so, they highlighted how the framers, perhaps unwittingly, had created a constitutional structure of separated institutions with overlapping powers. These overlapping, or concurrent, authorities, in turn have meant, as the legal scholar Edwin Corwin famously put it, that the Constitution extends “an invitation to struggle for the privilege of directing American foreign policy.” That struggle generate a productive tension, with the two branches checking each other’s worst tendencies—or bring out each other’s best qualities. But it also raised the possibility that one branch trump the other. As the historian Arthur Schlesinger wrote nearly a half-century ago in The Imperial Presidency, “if the President were to claim all the implications of his control of diplomacy, he could, by creating an antecedent state of things, swallow up the congressional power to authorize hostilities. If Congress were to claim all the implications of its power to authorize hostilities, it could swallow up much of the presidential power to conduct diplomacy.” I will leave it to you to decide which is the greater risk today. Noah Mulligan and Anna Shortridge assisted in the preparation of this post.

Singapore, one of the world’s wealthiest and most trade-dependent countries, punches above its weight in regional and global affairs.

An article on the origins of the names of African countries was recently published in Quartz. It includes a map of the continent in 1885, at the time of the Berlin Conference. Portuguese and Arabic traders and explorers are the origins of some names, European mispronunciation of tribal names are the origins of others. For example, Cameroon owes its name to a Portuguese traveler that came across a river full of shrimp, which he named Rio dos Camaroes, which means “river of shrimp.” Kenya has its origin in the British mispronunciation of the Kikuyu word for what would become known as Mount Kenya, “Kirinyaga,” which means “where God dwells.” Lagos, one of the largest cities in the world, means “lakes” in Portuguese, a reference to the islands in lagoon upon which it is built. And Nigeria was named by Flora Shaw—a Times of London journalist and later the wife of Nigeria's colonial Governor-General Lord Frederick Lugard—for the river Niger. How African countries received their names is intrinsically interesting, but that Europeans named so many is also a salutary reminder of the origins of these countries. The boundaries of current African states usually have their origins in the Scramble for Africa, when the major European powers divided up the continent among themselves. Precolonial Africa was not organized into the nation-states we see today, with fixed boundaries and a nominal national identity. Rather there were kingdoms and empires with rulers and subjects, and numerous smaller political entities.  These defined blocks of territory, many of which emerged from the Berlin Conference, became the independent nation-states of Africa today. But, for some African thinkers, the nation-state is not a political entity that fits African realities. Hence, some of them prefer to identify with their ethnic or religious groups or as pan-Africans, rather than the nationals of a particular state of European creation. 

Today marks the 223rd anniversary of George Washington’s Farewell Address. It is sometimes mistakenly referred to a speech, but it was actually a six-thousand-word letter to the American people. It first appeared on September 19, 1796, in a Philadelphia newspaper known as the American Daily Advertiser. Why a newspaper in Philadelphia? Because the City of Brotherly Love was the nation’s capital at the time. Washington’s explicit purpose with the address was stated in the title the Advertiser gave it—“The Address of Gen. Washington to the People of America on His Declining the Presidency of the United States.” But Washington wanted to do more than announce that he was not seeking a third term as president. He also wanted to offer his fellow citizens “some sentiments which are the result of much reflection, of no inconsiderable observation, and which appear to me all-important to the permanency of your felicity as a people.” In short, the nation’s first president wanted to offer some parting advice.Washington worried about three threats to the fledging country: factions (or what today we would call partisanship); regionalism; and “the mischiefs of foreign intrigue.” Washington’s warning about the evils of faction, which are still worth reading, were quickly ignored as Federalists (think John Adams and Alexander Hamilton) squared off against Democratic-Republicans (think Thomas Jefferson and James Madison) for political power. And Washington’s warnings about regionalism didn’t stop the deepening rift between North and South that would culminate six decades later in the Civil War. What Washington had to say about the world beyond America’s borders, however, did stick. Indeed, his words would guide U.S. foreign policy for nearly one hundred and fifty years. He wanted the country to “observe good faith and justice towards all nations.” To that end: The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible. So far as we have already formed engagements, let them be fulfilled with perfect good faith. Here let us stop. Europe has a set of primary interests which to us have none; or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves by artificial ties in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities. Today we know that strategy as isolationism, the name its critics gave it in the 1930’s. That label was always misleading. As Washington’s words make clear, he wasn’t looking to cut the United States off from the world. He favored trade, and the United States for decades welcomed immigrants. Isolationism instead sought to minimize America’s political entanglements with the rest of the world, and Europe in particular. Just as important, it set no limits on the U.S. appetite for an often brutal continental expansion. Isolationism was a strategy rooted in America’s weakness and geography—as a small country embracing a new form of government it was far more likely to lose than gain by involving itself in the affairs of Europe, and its location gave it the option to sit on the sidelines. But this hard-nosed geopolitical calculation was buttressed by a sense of ideological exceptionalism—by standing apart from the world, Americans thought that they could set an example for others to follow. The isolationist era in U.S. foreign policy closed on December 7, 1941. Standing apart had worked well for more than a century in sparing the United States from great power conflict, but at Pearl Harbor, it became clear that things had changed. The United States suddenly embraced its role as a global power and charted a fundamentally different foreign policy that brought its own set of accomplishments and challenges.