I am realizing that generating content everyday is tough… So many of these ideas will be half-baked things I literally just thought of. Please read generously:
Walter Russell Mead helpfully divides thinkers about US foreign policy into four schools. First, the Hamiltonians think American involvement in the world should primarily be geared towards promoting free trade. By keeping sea lanes open and promoting international compacts, we can create a more stable and liberal world. To paraphrase Kipling, take up the British Empire’s burden! Second, the Wilsonians see the world primarily through the lens of promoting democracy and human rights. They have the most expansive vision of Americas role in the world: trying to replace the government in Venezuela and sending girls to school in Afghanistan. Robespieres on behalf of Fukyamism. Because of its sweeping implications, no president could ever be consistently Wilsonian without radically breaking from the status quo. (Saudi Arabia comes to mind here.) However, much of political commentary and parts of the State Department are plausibly modeled by Wilsonianism.
Then, the Jacksonians are probably the least articulate but most electorally significant faction. At the same time, they want to “bomb the shit out of ISIS” but not to “build fire stations in Baghdad instead of Boston” (to sloppily quote Trump and then John Kerry). The simple fact is that most people are (nor will ever be) not cosmopolitans. In a democracy that matters, so our foreign policy must often legitimate itself with the clear benefits to America from our engagements abroad. Furthermore, it is always a plausible idea that the immediate costs and benefits of a plan will more greatly impact our interest than the hypothetical changes to the world system that Wilsonians/Hamiltonians try to enact.
Finally, the Jeffersonians are the ones ideologically skeptical of American involvement in the world. We have to great ocean sized moats to insulate us from the world, and we should use them. We have a high standard of living for our workers, and we should not let foreign workers undercut us. In fact, when the rest of world does interfere with in unobtrusive universe, it’s often because of some mistake we made in the past. For example, many argue the 9/11 was blowback for arming the Mujahideen and supporting secular Arab dictators. We should leave the world alone, and they will do the same to us. Unsurprisingly, this tradition is the least popular amongst foreign policy “experts”, who are people interested in other countries and spend their days thinking of things we should in the world. Yet, it has at times been dominant in American political culture, like the inter-war years.
The irony is that the Jeffersonian tendency is what sustains the schemes of Hamiltonians and dreams of Wilsonians.
At the end of World War One, as Turkey was being born out of an amputation of the Ottoman Empire, they asked for their new nation to become an American mandate. With no particular love for America, they requested this to head off a more durable French or English. The plan worked excellently. Wilson agreed to the mandate at Versailles, but the US congress disagreed with that. So, in effect Wilson shewed the Europeans away, and Congress made sure the mandate would never start in the first place.
Other countries are more comfortable with America immense power, because they know Americans will uncomfortable fully applying it. As soon as Americans start dying, people will start asking what we are doing in these distant lands anyway. The fact that in the face of their costs we chose stalemate or defeat to inferior forces in all our recent wars (Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan ) helps semi-persuade adversaries that our immense military deployments are less threatening than they may seem. The imposed self-restraint of Jeffersonainism helps keep our interventions much more limited and our rule much more indirect than any comparable military power in world history.
But, this forbearance is eroding. The best piece on foreign policy in my lifetime was Weaponized Interdependence. The basic idea is that with our intertwined economies the main points of leverage used in international relations other will be commercial not martial. Think of all the current flashpoints over TSMC, Hauwei, SWIFT, Russian Gas, maybe one day Rare Earths. Countries that have firms with immense market power or seeming irreplaceability will use that to their advantage.
Where as, the Jefferson impulse strain could put a limit on American hard power (sufficient body bags will awaken it). The US has wielded the power of its financial dominance with very little forbearance, even sanctioning Europe just for abiding by the Iran deal!! (something Biden has not yet reversed)! It’s hard to see Wilsonian or Hamiltonian foreign policy elites running into a wall of domestic political opposition because of our rules for foreign bank transactions. If Americans keep wielding our power without Jeffersonian restraint, we may find that the world is no longer so comfortable with us holding it.