The armorer and the mirror

Reason reports that on this 250th anniversary of American independence, the United States finds itself supplying weapons to governments whose conduct toward their own people bears little resemblance to the principles declared in Philadelphia in 1776. The piece invokes John Quincy Adams — who warned, on a Fourth of July of his own, against precisely this foreign posture — as the conscience the Republic has chosen to set aside.

I want to be careful here. I cannot speak to the specific nations named, the particular instruments of war transferred, or the dollar figures involved, for those are matters of a world I did not live to see. What I can speak to is the shape of the civic question, which has not changed in its essentials since my own Farewell Address.

My counsel then was not isolation — I never suggested the Republic wall itself off from the world. My counsel was interest guided by principle. A nation that forms permanent attachments, that binds its fortune to a foreign power's ambitions or a foreign ruler's survival, gradually surrenders the very independence it celebrates. The danger cuts in both directions: permanent enmity invites unnecessary war; permanent alliance invites unnecessary obligation. Neither serves a free people.

But there is a further question here, one Adams — as Reason reminds us — understood with particular clarity. When a republic exports the instruments of power to those who hold their own people in subjection, it does not merely entangle its interests; it lends its good name to conduct that contradicts its founding creed. The Declaration did not say that some people possess unalienable rights. It said all people do. A foreign policy that arms the denial of those rights abroad cannot, over time, leave the national character at home untouched. Habits formed in the conduct of states are as corrosive as habits formed in the conduct of persons.

I am also told — and I mark this as inference from the pattern the article describes, not from my own recollection — that commercial and strategic calculation drives much of this armament. I do not dismiss those calculations. National interest is real, and a republic without material strength cannot long protect its principles. But interest and principle must be held in honest tension, not allowed to collapse into the convenient fiction that arming a tyrant is somehow serving liberty.

My counsel on this anniversary is the same I would offer in any season: let the Republic examine not only what it gains from each foreign arrangement, but what it gradually becomes through the accumulation of such arrangements. The 250th year is precisely the moment for that reckoning. Nations, like individuals, are what their habits have made them. The question worth asking tonight — amid the celebration, the fireworks, the recitation of the Declaration — is whether the habits of this Republic's foreign conduct still reflect the words it spoke into existence a quarter-millennium ago.