behavior of both individuals and states. Americans are not an elect or privileged people,
and therefore not immune from the historical and political factors and motivations that
drive other states’ behavior. Americans should focus on improving the quality and
viability of their domestic political order and testing the historical experiment, both
secular and religious, their political community represents.
Democracy Promotion at Home
The second broad set of arguments advanced by the founding fathers in favor of
exemplarist neutrality involved concern for the domestic effects of a vindicationist
foreign policy. Originally, this included both a fear of disunity and faction, later
overcome as US political institutions consolidated, and a fear of the concentration of
power entailed by foreign policy activism.
Many accounts of early American foreign policy highlight the strategic
advantages to unilateralism and neutrality.
91
In particular, Hamilton and Washington
were sensitive to the balance of power and their geopolitical position; American isolation
was not virtuous, as Puritan myth believed, but a source of strategic advantage. The US
could ensure its security by insulating itself from European rivalry and avoiding political
or military commitments; why forego, asked Washington, the “advantages of so peculiar
a situation?”
92
Nonetheless, this strategic orientation of neutrality was informed by an underlying
exemplarist logic about the fear of the domestic corruption of US political institutions.
Originally, this stemmed from a fear of foreign intrigue or influence exploiting US
91
Representative of this secondary literature are McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State, Ch.1; and
Kupchan, End of the American Era, p.164-166.
92
Quoted in Kupchan, , End of the American Era, p.165. The myth that the US existed in virtuous isolation
from old world and extricated from European balance of power until World War I is destroyed in Kennan,
American Diplomacy, Ch. 1.
Convention