ABSTRACT
For the U.S. founders, the preservation of a liberal democratic republic necessarily dictated a foreign policy of politico-military disengagement. Entanglement in the European balance-of-power system would encourage a substantial military establishment, the disproportionate growth of executive power, onerous taxation, a secretive and unaccountable foreign policy, and other restraints on liberty. In the words of John Quincy Adams, it therefore was imperative for America that “she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” The dominant strain of U.S. foreign policy thinking today says almost the opposite: rather than restraining U.S. military action, liberalism demands U.S. military deliverance abroad. This chapter considers one cause of that revolution: progressive era leaders’ effort to restore unity. By the 1890s, urbanization, industrialization, immigration, and the curtailed reincorporation of the South had frayed societal cohesion. For Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressives, the crisis grew from the excesses of liberalism unchecked by republicanism and by the resulting moral decadence of the Gilded Age. In their appraisal, restoring republican virtu required not only a reformation of domestic institutions but a new foreign policy that would demand the moral regeneration of the “strenuous life.” Going “abroad in search monsters to destroy” would unify Americans in a virtuous cause. That thinking still plays a large part in the beliefs guiding U.S. foreign policy.
