NOT JUST A BEACON OF FREEDOM, BUT ITS ARMY:

(via Mike Daley
A Strategy for Republican Empire? (Mackubin T. Owens, October 2003, Ashbrook.org)

In his speech of June 25, 1787 at the federal convention in Philadelphia, Charles Pinckney of South Carolina asserted the predominance of domestic policy in a republic when he said:

We have unwisely considered ourselves as the inhabitants of an old instead of a new country. We have adopted the maxims of a State full of people & manufactures & established in credit. We have deserted our true interest, and instead of applying closely to those improvements in domestic policy which would have ensured the future importance of our commerce, we have rashly & prematurely engaged in schemes as extensive as they are imprudent. Our true situation appears to me to be this - a new extensive Country containing within itself the materials for forming a Government capable of extending to its citizens all the blessings of civil and religious liberty - capable of making them happy at home. This is the great end of Republican Establishments. We mistake the object of our government, if we hope or wish that it is to make us respectable abroad. Conquest or superiority among other powers is not or ought not ever to be the object of republican systems. If they are sufficiently active and energetic to rescue us from contempt & preserve our domestic happiness and security, it is all we can expect from them - it is more than almost any other Government ensures to its citizens.

Several days later, Alexander Hamilton replied to Pinckney:

It had been said that respectability in the eyes of foreign nations was not the object at which we aimed; that the proper object of republican Government was domestic tranquility & happiness. This was an ideal distinction. No Government could give us tranquility & happiness at home, which did not possess sufficient stability and strength to make us respectable abroad.

This exchange between Pinckney and Hamilton is a remarkably concise expression of the alternatives faced by all regimes and recognized since Thucydides. It is the ancient conflict between the city on the one hand and empire on the other; between civic virtue and poverty on the one hand and modern freedom and commerce on the other; between rest and motion; between Sparta and Rome/Athens.

The debate among the Founders was anticipated in the formulation of Machiavelli: "If any one therefore wishes to establish an entirely new republic, he will have to consider whether he wishes to have her expand in power and dominion like Rome, or whether he intends to confine her within narrow limits."

Two things work against Pinckney's vision in the long run. Ironically, the first is that it worked so well for so long that by the late 19th Century (arguably by the end of the Civil War) we'd become the most powerful nation on Earth and therefore, like it or not, a significant factor on the world stage. The second is that the Founding principles are universal and apply not just to Americans but to "all Men". We need not, and will not, intervene everywhere that our fellow men are being denied God given dignity and the right to "life, libertyy, and the pursuit of happiness", but we will never be indifferent as between such folk and their oppressors and when sufficiently provoked we do tend to intervene and bring our revolution to their soil.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 2, 2003 6:47 AM