BORN A CRUSADER STATE:

To break its addiction to war and overseas adventures, the argument goes, the nation needs only to rediscover its inner John Quincy Adams.

It is a curious argument, given the man's record. The Independence Day speech was not a blanket warning against American ambition and expansion. It was an argument against a specific policy proposal -- supporting a Greek rebellion against Ottoman rule -- that Adams worried would needlessly antagonize European powers at a sensitive time and divert the U.S. from more pressing matters.

It was also a provocative address that exhorted people everywhere to follow America's example in throwing off the chains of monarchy and absolutism: "Go thou and do likewise!" Most important, it was but one part of a broader diplomatic legacy characterized by vaulting ambition, audacious aggrandizement and the promotion of a distinctively American and deeply ideological form of realism.

Adams was a committed expansionist from the earliest days of his diplomatic career. He believed that the fate of U.S. security and democracy was tied to the creation of a strong, united country that would dominate the vast lands to the west. Attaining primacy within North America, Adams argued, was essential to avoiding the unhappy fate of Europe, where small, vulnerable states were constantly arming themselves and fighting one another.

The choice was between having "a nation coextensive with the North American continent, destined by God and nature to be the most populous and most powerful people ever combined under one social compact," and having "an endless multitude of insignificant clans and tribes at eternal war." Liberty and expansion went hand in hand.

As secretary of state, Adams focused on securing this continental empire. His most important diplomatic achievement was the Transcontinental Treaty with Spain of 1819. That pact was the product of wise tactical restraint -- namely, holding back from supporting South American rebellions against Spanish imperial rule. But it also resulted from not-so-subtle coercion, in the form of implicit threats to seize Spanish Florida and support for Andrew Jackson's military forays into Spanish territory.

The result was a treaty that ceded key Spanish territories in North America to the U.S. More critically, it secured recognition of America's claim to a western boundary on the Pacific Ocean, thereby paving the way for expansion across the continent and beyond. (It also paved the way for the spread of slavery into the American West, something Adams would come to regret.) There was nothing modest about Adams' statecraft.

That went doubly for Adams's other key diplomatic achievement. The Monroe Doctrine, issued in 1823, offered an assurance that America would not meddle politically in Europe's affairs. But it also advanced the radical idea that the U.S. would not tolerate European efforts to establish new colonies in the Western Hemisphere, or to re-subjugate the nations that had just overthrown Spanish rule.

This was an astonishing assertion of American primacy. It was all the more audacious because Adams insisted on making the statement unilaterally, rather than in concert with the British, who also had an interest in the independence of the new South American nations.

America, Adams argued, would do better "to aver our principles explicitly ... than to come in as a cock-boat in the wake of the British man-of-war." And here Adams also testified to the deep connection between American values and American interests, by arguing that the U.S. had a vital interest in keeping autocratic regimes (monarchies, in this case) as far away as possible from its shores. It was impossible, he wrote, that European monarchies "should extend their political system to any portion" of the Western Hemisphere "without endangering our peace and happiness."

This was indeed a form of what today is called "realism." But it was a quintessentially American realism: An assertion that government type matters profoundly in global affairs, that powerful autocracies are inherently threatening to a democratic republic, and that the U.S. will be more secure and influential to the extent that it is surrounded by relatively liberal states.

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