Intellectual Foundations of Early American Diplomacy

This paper will attempt to clear away some misconceptions about early American foreign policy. The source of the misconceptions is Felix Gilbert’s influential To the Farewell Address: Ideas of Early American Foreign Policy. Unlike E.S. Corwin, Samuel Flagg Bemis, and other authorities on early American diplomacy, Gilbert was not primarily concerned with the diplomatic process, with the parry and thrust of negotiators. Rather, he explored the ideas that guided, and the presuppositions that underlay, early American diplomacy. In addition, he attempted to place early American diplomacy in the context of American diplomatic history as a whole. Finally, he offered a theory about the relationship of early American diplomacy to the American Revolutionary experience.1 Gilbert wrote his book during a period when a group of writers, led by Hans J. Morgenthau, claimed that the irresponsible oscillations of American diplomacy between Wilsonian “idealistic internationalism” and isolationism helped to cause the Second World War. Morgenthau and his circle advocated a “realistic” approach to foreign policy–a recognition that politics among nations was an amoral struggle for power and that a country should calculate its goals accordingly. The Founding Fathers, they claimed, perceived this truth and practiced upon it, but succeeding generations of American statesmen were represented as benightedly straying into either isolationism or idealistic internationalism.2