Thomas Jefferson and American Foreign Policy

Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson

From Foreign Affairs, Spring 1990

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Summary:  Jefferson's conceptions of the US national interest, and of the diplomatic postures by which it was most fit to be advanced, still inform US foreign policy today, in respect of uneasy contrast between withdrawal and reformation. "For Jefferson, as for subsequent American statesmen, the desire to change the world was at war with the desire not to be corrupted by the world... The combination of universalism and parochialism is the result of a self-consciousness over role that forms a constant in the nation's history". Yet "the conventional contrast of the roles of exemplar and crusader has often obscured the affinity that may always exist between them", as between thought and action. Jefferson's own statecraft illustrated the hazards of crusadership, as his early sympathy for the French Revolution and desire for American territorial expansion led to a 'neutralism' which effectively supported Napoleon Bonaparte and brought about war with Britain.

Robert W. Tucker is Professor of American Diplomacy at the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at The Johns Hopkins University. David C. Hendrickson is Associate Professor of Political Science at Colorado College. They are the co-authors of The Fall of the First British Empire: Origins of the War of American Independence. Their book, Empire of Liberty: The Statecraft of Thomas Jefferson, from which this essay is drawn, will be published by Oxford University Press in May.

Two hundred years ago, on March 21, 1790, Thomas Jefferson arrived in New York City to assume his duties as secretary of state, the first under the new national government. No man had a greater impact on the day-to-day conduct of American foreign policy than Jefferson during his long life of public service. And throughout the course of American history few can rival Jefferson as a living symbol of the nation's purpose. That his writings might be invoked on every side of a given controversy has always added to the uses of the Jeffersonian past; all the great conflicts of the nineteenth century-over slavery, union and democracy-found partisans on either side appealing to the "sagacious aphorisms and oracular sayings" of the great Virginian. The same has been true in foreign policy, where Jefferson's name has been invoked on all sides of the ever-recurring debates on the nation's diplomatic stance.

It is in Jefferson's sense of values that the deepest association exists between his own outlook and the American mind. The institutions that characterize American public life today-the standing military establishments, the ballooning debt and high taxes, the whole complex of banks, corporations and financial markets, the subordinate position of state governments in relation to national power, the exalted status of federal judicature-all this he would have beheld with a kind of sacred horror, as constituting the victory of Alexander Hamilton's Federalist vision of American life. Uncannily, however, the ideals of American life remain Jeffersonian, even in the midst of all these powerful and corrupting institutions; we cannot help but turn to Jefferson, even with the knowledge that the values he championed can often be made a subject of reproach against him.

The main source of Jefferson's continuing appeal lies in the facility with which he evoked the meaning of the American experiment in self-government. He thought of America the way we like to think of ourselves, and saw its significance, as we still now tend to do, in terms larger than itself. Whether in relation to the domestic experiment at home or the conduct of the republic toward foreign powers, his most characteristic utterance was the contrast he drew between the high moral purpose that animated our own national life and action, and the low motives of power and expediency that drove other nations. Even the labor of the farm had a meaning beyond the hard drudgeries of existence-of clearing the forest, tending to crops and providing shelter. To the meanest dirt farmer Jefferson gave the conviction that he-the American-was part of a form of civilization higher than the polished societies of Europe, with their artificial distinctions between social classes, their oppressive restrictions on human freedom, and their crushing burden of debt and taxes. That a republic so constituted should be guided in its foreign policy by the same calculations of power and expedience as animated the states of Europe was unthinkable. Those who felt power and forgot right could teach only negative lessons, by showing the path by ...

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