Texas Rep. Ron Paul is expected to finish among the top three in tonight’s Iowa Republican presidential caucuses. He may even win the thing, thanks to years of organizing his troops on the ground, mounting a well-funded campaign, and articulating an anti-centralized government that many Americans find appealing. He has also challenged the idea that America has any business interfering in the affairs of any other country. It’s not necessary to agree with his thinking to recognize why others find it compelling. But Paul and his enthusiasts err when they claim he is advocating the same isolationist foreign policy that was advanced by George Washington and the other members of the Founders.
Paul has been running a television commercial during the Iowa campaign that prominently features quotes from Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. The former said “Congress alone is constitutionally vested with the power of changing our condition from peace to war, [so] I have thought it my duty to await their authority for using force to any degree.” The Madison quote is this: “The Constitution supposes what the history of all governments demonstrates that the executive is the branch of power most interested in war and most prone to it. It has accordingly, with studied care, vested the question of war in the legislature.” Hence, Paul’s opposition to the war in Iraq, the intervention in Libya, and to U.S. intervention to stop Iran from developing a nuclear bomb.
But understood in their context, neither quote cited by Paul backers actually justifies applying the isolationist label to the Founders. Jefferson was president when he led the nation, with congressional approval, into its first foreign war, against the Barbary Pirates in the Mediterranean. What is less often recalled is that Jefferson had previously, as secretary of state under George Washington, secured congressional approval to build the U.S. Navy specifically for the purpose of attacking the pirates. Jefferson clearly was no isolationist, and the fact that he abided by the Constitution in initiating hostilities does not mean he would agree with Paul’s views today.
As for Madison, during and after his tenure in the White House as America’s fourth president, revolutions — often led by Simon Bolivar– erupted across South America. The revolutionaries frequently appealed to America for aid, much as the Libyan rebels did last year. Viewing these political upheavals as part of “the great struggle of the Epoch between liberty and despotism,” Madison endorsed providing American aid to “sustain the former in this hemisphere at least,” and he joined Jefferson and John Quincy Adams in backing the Monroe Doctrine.
Often portrayed as an isolationist act, the Monroe Doctrine was anything but. As the Heritage Foundation’s Marion Smith noted in a recent study, “with the Monroe Doctrine, the U.S. attempted to ban imperial ambition from one-third of the globe’s surface, thereby delegitimizing the accepted system of imperialism and attempting to fundamentally alter the international order — hardly an isolationist policy.”
Don’t be surprised if the words “new isolationism” are uttered often by analysts seeking to make sense of tonight’s Iowa results should Paul win or place in the top three. Just remember: Applying the label to the Texas libertarian is fine, but it is not a term that fits Washington, Madison, Jefferson and their illustrious colleagues.
