and possibly some higher design, the United States was removed and extricated from the
corrupting politics of the European balance of power system, with its attendant ambition,
aggrandizement, and amorality.
35
Although elevated to the level of timeless grand-
strategic doctrine under Washington and Hamilton, to the Puritans isolation was not
strategic but virtuous.
36
The United States was free to pursue its own internal
development and democratic experiment on a new continent, without risk of losing its
purity or pursuit of national salvation through European interference. As William Ellery
Channing would later write in 1830, Americans “delight to believe that God…has
brought a new continent to light, on order that the human mind should move here with a
new freedom, should frame new social institutions, and should explore new paths and
reap new harvests.”
37
The Enlightenment and Universalism
The second major source of the American moral commitment to democracy
promotion was the influence of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Through
Enlightenment faith in a common rationality, a cosmopolitan spirit, and the universal
consistency of human nature, many of the liberal norms that came to define American
national identity were framed in absolute and universal terms. The political principles
that motivated the revolution, according to Louis Hartz, were proclaimed in nothing less
than the “absolute language of self-evidence.
38
Early American leaders such as Paine,
35
McDougall notes that this was more unilateralist than truly isolationist, but this distinction does not affect
the larger argument that the early American leaders believed that by virtue of their geographic position they
could be extricated from the European balance of power system.
36
Kennan addresses and refutes the Puritan myth of virtuous isolation in American Diplomacy, arguing that
American isolation was maintained not by its superior virtue but by British seapower and the continental
balance of power system; Kennan, American Diplomacy, p.5
37
Quoted in Nye, The Almost Chosen People, p.185.
38
Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since
the Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1955), p. 58.
Convention