Richard Samuelson agrees with my response to Peter Robinson and forwarded me a letter to the editor he wrote to Commentary addressing Norman Podhoretz’s similar invocation of John Quincy Adams. Here’s the letter:

To the Editor:
In his recent essay, “Strange Bedfellows: A Guide to the New Foreign-Policy Debates,” Norman Podhoretz does his customary insightful job. In the spirit of his essay, I thought I would like to add one bit of evidence. Mr. Podhoretz points out that “when John Quincy Adams cautioned against going ‘abroad in search of monsters to destroy,’ he was not thinking of driving foreign merchants our of business.” Actually, Adams’ tended even less to isolationism than Mr. Podhoretz implied.
Many people quote the strictures Adams expressed against entangling the U.S. in European affairs, which come from his July 4th address in 1821. Few, however, note that a few years later Adams cautioned against isolationism. In his Farewell Address, Washington said Americans should have “as little political connection as possible” with Europe. President Adams argued in 1826 that Washington was giving the prudent counsel of the day, not an eternal rule for American foreign policy. “I can not overlook the reflection that the counsel of Washington in that instance, like all the counsels of wisdom, was founded upon the circumstances in which our country and the world around us were situated at the time when it was given. . . . [But] compare our situation and the circumstances of that time with those of the present day, and what, from the very words of Washington then, would be his counsels to his countrymen now?”
Adams went on to argue that the situation in his day was still such that relative non-engagement in European political affairs was prudent, but he argued that the U.S. had a duty to the new republics in South America because “we have an immensely growing commercial, and must have and have already important political, connections; with reference to whom our situation is neither distant nor detached; whose political principles and systems of government, congenial with our own, must and will have an action and counteraction upon us and ours to which we can not be indifferent if we would.” One can hardly doubt what Adams would advise in today’s situation in which modern transportation and communication have extended the U.S.’s neighborhood across the ocean, and what he would think of the recent resurgence of isolationism. We should not let isolationists get away with citing him improperly as an authority on their side. Moreover, if, as the distinguished diplomatic historian Samuel Flagg Bemis notes, Adams’s published writings and diplomatic correspondence were an important influence upon Washington’s Farewell address, then he had some claim to give an authoritative interpretation of Washington’s advice.