What is exceptional about the last seventy-five years is not America or the liberal order it has forged to serve its interests, but the sheer power that the United States was able to amass owing to its favorable geographic position and relative distance from bloody and costly conflicts across the oceans that guard its borders. […]
The history of republics, as a less common form of government overall, should also bear a similar level of scrutiny. None other than a Founding Father of the United States, Alexander Hamilton, writing in Federalist Number 6, made the case for historical skepticism toward the idea of innate eternal peace among countries with democratic systems and commercial ties. Examining Athens, Venice, Holland, and others, Hamilton observed that the ubiquity of trade and a democratic spirit did little to quench the thirst for war and conquest in those societies. In fact, the young United States split with its mercantile mother culture of Britain while allying with the absolute monarchy of France and then refused to back Revolutionary France in the latter’s fight with Britain, disavowing grand ideological foreign policy projects in favor of Washingtonian realism that advised caution about making permanent attachments to other nations in either enmity or amity. Läs artikel