In a lengthy and beautifully crafted address on Independence Day, July 4, 1821, then-President John Quincy Adams delivered an extraordinarily detailed and learned lesson on the founding of America. It’s one that still deserves repeated and close reading — though much of it will simply not be understood by most Americans today, for it is dense in references to history no longer taught widely in the United States.
Adams’ most memorable sentences are often quoted:
‘[America] has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining her own. She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when the conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart. She has seen that probably for centuries to come, all the contests of that Aceldama the European world, will be contests of inveterate power, and emerging right. Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence, has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will recommend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.’
The declamation that America ‘goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy’ is a favorite text of both the pre-World Wars One and Two isolationists in America, but of course both global conflicts reached out and drew the United States into them.
Now, far, far more than in 1917 and 1941, the assumptions of our sixth president simply no longer apply.
There is no longer any ‘abroad.’
The idea of an ‘abroad’ about which Americans could be either indifferent or at most the subject of a distant approval or remote scorn, is dead.
To repeat: There is no such thing as ‘abroad.’
Not even remotely.
What remained of the concept after Pearl Harbor was shattered by Sputnik in 1957, and then by successive generations of missile technology. With the rise of hypersonic missiles only fools would believe that there is an ‘abroad’ anywhere on the globe that the United States can disregard.
