The Age of Trump Could Use the Wisdom of John Quincy Adams

D onald Trump admires Andrew Jackson. The 45th and 47th president likes to be seen as a tough leader willing to make hard decisions for the good of the American people, even if those decisions are unpopular with the nation’s elites. In this way, he certainly sees himself in the seventh president, whose election in 1828 famously remade American politics in a more populist image than the Founding Fathers wanted for the American republic.

While admirable in its own way, Trump’s decisiveness also runs the risk of becoming impulsiveness, best seen in his approach to foreign policy. In Venezuela and now in Iran, Trump lurches from decisive attacks to appeasement. In the case of Iran in particular, he seems to have given away the proverbial diplomatic farm. The Islamic Republic is still intact. The Iranian people are not free. The United States does not control the Strait of Hormuz. And the ayatollahs are $300 billion richer.

Jacksonian decisiveness is all well and good, but what Trump needs in addition to Jacksonian willpower is the methodical and studious approach to statecraft exemplified by that most un-Jacksonian of American statesmen and the sixth president, John Quincy Adams. Adams was certainly unlike Trump. Cerebral and formal, meticulous and scrupulous, Adams does not appear at first glance to be a model for the type of statesman 21st-century Republicans have come to associate with American greatness. But Adams’s sophisticated diplomacy did in fact lead to national security — and even greatness — because Adams, unlike Trump, understood that raw force and mere material considerations could not provide the means and motivations of a republic that was destined to become more than a regional power. Adams, for example, seized the opportunity for the U.S. to buy Florida from Spain in 1819. Four years later, he formulated the Monroe Doctrine and warned European powers from interfering in the Western Hemisphere. That did not mean Adams was wedded to idealistic dreams of a global revolution led by the United States wherein all countries would become American-style democracies, but he did believe that the moral quality of American statesmanship would set it apart from the machinations of the Old World.

Trump likes American power, and in a world where too few people appreciate what the American republic has done for the world, his honest appraisal of international ingratitude is refreshing. Europeans are rightly reminded by the Trump administration of what the United States has done for them. But European thanklessness seems to have led Trump to see American ideals as quaint relics of a happier era that are no longer useful or realistic in American statecraft. The Chávez regime in Venezuela has received a new lease on life, provided America gets good gas prices from South American oil fields. And the Islamic theocracy in Iran is now getting a kickback from American taxpayers for not hassling international shipping. These decisions are being made under the rubric of clear-sighted realism, and yet they do not seem to put America in a better position regarding its adversaries than the neoconservatism of the George W. Bush presidency did. America, in fact, needs Bush’s idealism and Trump’s realism, and a historical model for that combination can be found in the diplomacy and writings of John Quincy Adams.

In 1821, then–Secretary of State Adams famously told the U.S. House of Representatives that the American republic does not go “abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.” In good realist fashion, he said America knew “that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.” Put simply, there were plenty of foreign wars and revolutions that America shouldn’t be involved in in the era of democratic and liberal revolutions between 1815 and 1848. Not all freedom fighters, it seemed, deserved American assistance. Some revolutionaries were just crooks.

Americans in the 21st century are more realistic than the Americans of the past. Gone is the heyday of the Cold War, when many, if not most, Americans saw themselves as instruments of freedom. For modern Americans, Adams can be seen as a prophet of realism. But Adams was not only a realist: He believed that for America to be great, America would have to be good. If the great powers of Europe wanted to know what America had done for the world, Adams wanted the answer to be a list of American virtues more than a crude recitation of the United States’ economic and military achievements. America, Adams wrote in 1821, “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. America, in the assembly of nations, since her admission among them, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity.”

Adams knew in his own time that when America spoke among the nations, her voice carried special influence because “she has uniformly spoken among them, though often to heedless and often to disdainful ears, the language of equal liberty, of equal justice, and of equal rights.” Of course, Adams noted, America’s idealistic admonitions would often not be heeded and would often be disdained. But that did not mean American statesmen should throw out ideals and live in a world of brute military and economic strength. Adams hoped that the fundamental maxims of American policy would not “change from liberty to force.” In our own day, we should take care lest our nation’s understandable diplomatic resentments lead us to exchange our belief in the primacy of liberty for an overreliance on force.