People frequently invoke my Farewell Address as a warrant for isolation, as though I counseled America to pull up the drawbridge and ignore the world. I did not. What I warned against was the habitual attachment to any foreign nation — the kind of loyalty that outlives its usefulness, that causes a country to treat another power's quarrels as its own simply out of sentiment or treaty inertia. The danger I identified is not cooperation; it is dependency. When a republic cannot question an alliance without being accused of betrayal, that alliance has become a faction operating across borders, and factions corrode judgment.

The proper test for any alliance is simple, though it demands honesty: does this arrangement serve the interests of the American people, measured against the concrete costs — in treasure, in lives, in the restriction of our own policy choices? Alliances that spread the burdens of security broadly, that bind partners to shared rules rather than binding America to another's adventures, can satisfy that test. What cannot satisfy it is pledging unconditional support to any power, however friendly, because doing so surrenders the very independence that makes American partnership worth having in the first place. A republic that cannot say no is not an ally; it is a client.

I am told that in the generations since my time, the United States entered into collective security arrangements of extraordinary scope — binding dozens of nations to mutual defense. I hold no brief against the underlying logic: shared commitments can deter aggression more cheaply than unilateral preparation. But the discipline I would counsel is this: review these compacts in every season as a merchant reviews his ledger. Do the partners contribute proportionate effort? Does the arrangement still reflect actual threats, or does it persist because institutions, once built, resist dissolution? Sentiment is not strategy. An alliance maintained out of habit, rather than calculation, will eventually require Americans to pay a price they never consciously agreed to pay.

My counsel, then, is neither permanent entanglement nor reflexive withdrawal. It is principled skepticism — the habit of asking, in every era, whether our foreign commitments serve the Republic's safety and liberty or merely serve the comfort of those whose careers depend on the existing arrangement. The Republic's interests are not static; they shift with circumstance, with the balance of power, with the nature of the threat. Wisdom lies not in freezing the answer but in maintaining the discipline to keep asking the question. That discipline is what I meant by independence, and it remains the prerequisite for everything else.