America’s Founders and the Principles of Foreign Policy: Sovereign Independence, National Interests, and the Cause of Liberty in the World

Bottom Line: The American Founders created an independent, self-sufficient commercial republic founded on principles of justice that would guide our national interests both home and abroad. The people’s safety and happiness would be secured in foreign affairs through prudential policies that would promote their interests, encourage liberty and free government, respect the rights of other nations, and promote peace and justice around the world.

The Declaration of Independence was the cornerstone of the American Founders’ general views on foreign policy. Based upon those universal moral principles, the Founders worked to promote the United States’ independence of action. Rejecting modern competing schools of realism, internationalism, isolationism, and neoconservatism, Spalding makes the case that the Founders’ prudential policies were aimed at securing “national sovereignty in the world” and “popular sovereignty at home.” As the Founders argued in the Declaration of Independence, the nation was to do the “Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do” based on the principles that should guide the statecraft of all nations.

“Rather than a permanent condition of detachment from the world,” Spalding argues, “the Founders advocated a flexible policy aimed at achieving and thereafter permanently maintaining the sovereign independence for Americans to determine their own fate.”

Securing Americans’ safety, a necessary prerequisite to securing the conditions for their happiness, meant fending off external threats and always being prepared for war – preparation that included organizing state militias, building a sufficient naval force, and promoting domestic manufacturing. For the Founders, American foreign policy should be guided by the national interest, which didn’t mean establishing an empire but instead treating all nations justly. The U.S. must respect other nations’ sovereignty, allowing them to manage their own affairs, and not intervene unless a threat is real and imminent. Overall, Spalding argues that U.S. foreign policy should promote liberty and free government and maintain peace with all nations.

As John Quincy Adams once stated, America’s “glory is not dominion, but liberty. Her march is the march of the mind. She has a spear and a shield: but the motto upon her shield is Freedom, Independence, Peace. This has been her declaration: this has been, as far as her necessary intercourse with the rest of mankind would permit, her practice.”

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