‘Monsters to Destroy’

But that generally wise counsel from the then-secretary of state was offered at a different time, for a different America, confronting a different world. The United States in the early 19th Century was still a fledgling country, not the global superpower it is today. Even if it had wanted to police the world, it lacked the capabilities to undertake such a task.

Conversely, the power of aggressive states and even non-state actors to wreak massive harm to people and nations has expanded exponentially since President Thomas Jefferson established the wooden-ship U.S. Navy to chase the Barbary Pirates away from American commercial vessels.

As the traumatic experiences of two world wars demonstrated, modern weapons and advances in transportation and communications technology present far greater dangers to humanity than those Adams and his countrymen faced two centuries ago.

The international community, led by the United States, has responded to the global threat by creating doctrines and institutions to prevent a repetition of the horrors visited on the world during the bloody Twentieth Century.

“Never again” became the moral byword and the world’s organizing principle, leading to creation of the United Nations, adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and most recently, implementation of a U.N. doctrine of Responsibility to Protect. Hallowed Westphalian dogmas of national sovereignty and territorial integrity have partially given way to interventionist principles.

Under this implied new global social contract, a nation’s sovereignty is sacrosanct only so long as it does not violate other nations’ sovereignty or act toward its own or other populations in ways that “shock the conscience of mankind.” Genocide and crimes against humanity within or outside a country’s borders can now justify an international response.

Ironically for those who tout his hands-off posture, it was Adams himself who stated the moral underpinning of today’s international institutions and principles. In the same address where he warned against excessive U.S. meddling overseas, he stated what most of today’s leaders see as the reason we cannot always walk away from the world’s atrocities: “America, with the same voice which spoke herself into existence as a nation, proclaimed to mankind the inextinguishable rights of human nature, and the only lawful foundations of government.”

In other words, regimes which flout human rights, particularly in egregious ways, are unlawful and illegitimate and forfeit their right to rule. While Adams did not recommend regime change as the remedy at that time, that possible outcome has become increasingly accepted, at least in principle, in the modern era.

There is one other important respect in which those who cite Adams as the authority for non-intervention might wish to take pause. It is true that he said America could take pride that in its first half-century “she has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings.”

As a U.S. Senator, Adams’ apparent acquiescence to Jefferson’s war on the Barbary pirates is not inconsistent with that posture. It was the brigands who came searching for American ships and seamen, not the reverse; it was pure self-defense, well recognized under international law.

But that is precisely the point at which Adams today might easily be on the side of those advocating stronger, even preemptive measures abroad against today’s threat from global terrorism. Jefferson and John Quincy’s father, John Adams, met with Tripoli’s ambassador to London in March 1785 and questioned the right of the Barbary States to attack American shipping and enslave crews and passengers.

They were told: “It was written in the Koran, that all Nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon whoever they could find and to make Slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mussulman (Muslim) who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.”

John Quincy no doubt absorbed from his father what some today might describe as a trace of Islamophobia. He wrote in 1830, after he had been president:

“Mahomet declared undistinguishing and exterminating war as a part of his religion, against all the rest of mankind, [and] a war of twelve hundred years has already raged. That war is yet flagrant; nor can it cease but by the extinction of that imposture.”

Who knows what Adams might conclude today about pursuing overseas “monsters” who have already arrived at our doorstep (al Qaeda, ISIS) or have sent war refugees flooding to the West’s shores (Syria’s Bashar al-Assad)?

Joseph A. Bosco worked in the office of the secretary of defense, 2002-2010.