Abandoning the Declaration Abroad
The Declaration of Independence expresses a view of international relations that has informed America’s stance toward the world for centuries. That vision is starting to blur.
THE VERY HEART OF AMERICA’S political tradition, the Declaration of Independence articulates many of the tenets that have shaped and guided the United States since 1776. So, as we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration, let us recall that it offered principles not only for domestic politics but for the international arena as well.
Most of us are familiar with the Declaration’s invocation of natural rights and popular sovereignty as the legitimate basis of government. But what is perhaps less well known is the Declaration’s vision of international order: a vision of sovereign states accountable to their own people, equal to one another, but with both rights and duties to other states. It took centuries to construct such an international order, however imperfectly, but it has served both America and the world well. Because Donald Trump and his appointees and advisers neither understand nor appreciate this achievement, his administration is haphazardly dismantling this vision and abandoning the document that has been America’s political and moral compass.
To understand the Declaration’s guidance on international order, let’s begin with the way it appeals to the “opinions of mankind” by submitting facts “to a candid world.” In doing so, the signers of the Declaration sought the recognition of other nations as a legitimate sovereign state in its armed struggle against imperial Britain. The signatories notified the world that America was assuming “the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature” entitled it by dissolving ties with Britain.
Underpinning these steps is the idea, embedded in the Declaration, that governments lawfully and legitimately derive their power from the people, and are instituted by the people for their safety and happiness. To make these claims, the authors of the Declaration—Thomas Jefferson, joined in a committee by John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston—drew on the cosmopolitan ideas of John Locke, as well as lesser-known figures like Algernon Sidney. Both men argued that popular sovereignty was the truly legitimate basis of sovereign states. But the authors of the Declaration also drew on a leading theorist of the law of nations: Emer de Vattel, who argued that just as sovereign states derived their legitimacy from free and equal persons, in the international sphere, “free and independent states are moral persons” equal to one another in rights and duties. This is the basis of the law of nations.
In its appeal to the international community, the Declaration catalogued the acts of George III that violated the rights of Americans, claiming they amounted to “despotism.” In republican thought, resisting such despotism by force of arms was justified by natural law as well as the law of nations. George III’s despotic acts included domestic complaints, such as his refusal to “assent to laws” for the “public good” and his dissolving of representative institutions. But there was also an international component. The King obstructed “the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners,” as well as “refusing to pass” laws to “encourage” migration. Other grievances included George III’s sending “swarms of Officers to harass our people” while protecting these officers “from punishment for any Murders which they should commit,” violating the sovereign rights of the colonists.
In light of these facts, the Declaration absolved the colonies of any allegiance to Britain and let the world know that Americans were taking up their rightful place in the international order. They would be “Free and Independent States” with the “full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do.”
With its focus on natural rights and liberty, the Declaration’s vision of international politics is intertwined with its vision of domestic politics. Just as a sovereign people is bound by the moral standard that all human beings are created free and equal and endowed “with certain unalienable Rights,” so too are sovereign states bound by standards of justice—ones that transcend their borders and require them to respect the sovereignty of other states that are in turn accountable to their people.
Following Vattel’s The Law of Nations, the Declaration offered a vision of liberal order at home and abroad. As Vattel argued, “nations being composed of people naturally free and independent” ought to be treated as if they were themselves “free persons who co-exist in a state of nature.” Other states followed this view of popular sovereignty at home and the law of nations abroad. Venezuela, for instance, issued its own Declaration of Independence on July 5, 1811, asserting its independence from imperial Spain based on the popular sovereignty of its people. The Venezuelan patriotas let the world know, as America had, that it was taking its rightful place as a “free and independent State” in the international order.
THE AMERICAN DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE pointed to a world of natural rights where sovereign states would be responsive to their people at home and respectful of other sovereign nations abroad. To put this in modern terms: liberal constitutional government at home aligns with international law and order abroad, drawing, as they do, on the same basic justifications and reinforcing one another.
This vision of domestic and international order may seem aspirational, but the authors of the Declaration were not naïve idealists who saw nations as inherently benign. They were, after all, engaged in an armed struggle against Britain, which was violently trying to impose its will on them. Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, and the other revolutionaries were acutely aware that states could abuse their people at home just as they could be aggressive abroad.
Nor, despite its high-minded principles, did the Declaration’s vision disregard the fact that states act in self-interested ways. On the contrary, the liberalism of the Declaration, both at home and abroad, was tough-minded, starting from self-interest (though a long-range and enlightened sense of self-interest). The republican ideas that inspired the Declaration recognized that sometimes war was necessary: the right of revolution meant the use of force to preserve and protect sovereignty was just. In his Discourses Concerning Government, Sidney even speculated that a republican government would be better prepared to wage war than a monarchy precisely because of its connection to the people. And Vattel, even while pointing to the duties nations owe one another, insisted that “the duties that we owe to ourselves” are paramount. The Declaration’s radical vision of democratic self-government shaped American thinking about both war and foreign policy—a standard not always lived up to, but one that was appealed to by American leadership, even as it was also chastened by it.
Abraham Lincoln summed it up as “LET US HAVE FAITH THAT RIGHT MAKES MIGHT” (a rare case of Lincolnian all-caps). Lincoln’s hope, beyond refounding America as a nation “conceived in liberty” and “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” included the creation of a moral code of warfare to govern Union troops during the Civil War. This became a precursor to the Geneva Conventions on the basis that war, like international politics, should be governed by rules.
In August, 1941, shortly before America entered World War II, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill set forth a vision of the post-war world in the Atlantic Charter. The charter committed both America and Britain to wage war against authoritarianism, while also committing each nation to the principles of democratic self-government for all peoples. This commitment included not seeking territorial expansion as part of the war effort, as well as liberalizing international trade and the freedom of the seas. The charter, which echoed the Declaration, became the basis of the liberal international order America helped craft after the war. That order, which set the terms for a sustained period of international growth and cooperation, reflected a recognition that moral principles can serve an enlightened self-interest that is the basis of justice at home and abroad.
DONALD TRUMP IS ABANDONING the Declaration’s principles abroad, just as he has abandoned them at home. By insisting that his own personal morality is the only thing that binds his power, Trump offers a caricatured version of the “might makes right” outlook Lincoln rejected. White House deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser Stephen Miller dresses up Trump’s nihilistic grasping as wise and prudent realism governed by “the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio offered a more refined, diplomatic version of this vulgar realpolitik at the Munich Security Conference this past February, which even included a nod to values shared by liberal democratic governments. Yet Rubio rooted sovereignty not in the political ideals that drew his parents to America as immigrants from Cuba, which he dismissed as “abstractions,” but in the sort of ethnic nationalism on display in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, which he immediately visited after his speech in Munich. It seemed lost on Rubio that in 1938, Munich was the site where Britain and France sacrificed Czechoslovakia to feverish German claims of nationhood and ethnocultural identity. The undersecretary of defense for policy, Elbridge Colby, a preening realist, similarly dismissed the “cloud-castle abstraction of the rules-based international order.” States, he insisted, should act on interest and not on sentiment.
Indeed. But what is America’s national interest? How should it be determined?
While it masquerades as sophisticated realism, the Trump administration’s myopic vision of the global order is at odds with America’s genuine self-interest in a world of self-governing nations. It downgrades American ambition to that of a regional bully, threatening to not only make America less prosperous and secure, but also less powerful. The administration does so because it neglects the fact that standing up for democratic ideals and international institutions both inherently and practically serves America’s national interest. It neglects the very basis of how we, as a free people, determine our national interest—as if the “iron laws of history” determine American interests rather than democratic deliberation.
Is it any surprise that the fiasco in Iran began with no debate about American interests and no consultation with American allies, only an insistence on American power? The result of the Trump administration’s realist bluster and reflexive use of force is a diminished sense of American power, the suffering of the Iranian people, and the closing of the Strait of Hormuz, a once-free sea lane that is vital to global economic interests. This is just one of countless instances where an insistence on “American First” has made America less secure and less prosperous. In a similar fashion, Trump’s purported economic realism has led to an erratic approach to tariffs, driving allies like Canada and Europe closer to China. As with Iran, the result will make Americans less prosperous and less secure. Even more, “America First” highlights that we are an unreliable ally and trading partner, making it difficult for the next administration to remedy such harm. The “iron laws of history” teach that other nations will follow their self-interest, which is likely to turn on creating partnerships that don’t depend on America.
Living up to and fostering the moral principles of the Declaration embedded in the international order has been an ongoing struggle (and on occasion, it has invited a crusading spirit that is at odds with liberal order abroad and American interests at home). The rules-based post–World War II international order that America has championed led to unprecedented peace and prosperity. It has made America both more secure and more powerful, and it did so because enlightened statesmen like Roosevelt, Harry Truman, George C. Marshall, and Dwight Eisenhower recognized that liberal democratic ideals and multilateral institutions like NATO could best serve American interests.
This is also a world that America has obligated itself to—in many instances by law. The founding generation knew that international treaties could be valuable. As a result, Article VI of the Constitution makes treaties the law of the land. It’s a law that the Trump administration has a constitutional obligation to follow. America’s obligations to NATO, including to Greenland, therefore, are a matter of law that the president, under Article II of the Constitution, must “take care” to “faithfully” execute. (Yes, George Washington warned about “permanent alliances” in his Farewell Address, but read the whole thing: You will see he not only rejects “infidelity to existing engagements,” but he also advocates “justice towards all nations” as it will be worthy of “a free, enlightened, and at no distant period, a great nation, to give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of a people always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence.” This is a supercharged liberal view of international order.)
Let us remember that America bound itself to these laws and treaties not at a moment of weakness, as Trump would have us believe, but at a moment of world-striding strength. In doing so, America’s leadership offered a far-sighted vision of our national interest, one best served by a world that attempted to adhere to rules and respected democratic self-government in other nations. A weak man is setting out to bring down this order, degrading America because he does not understand that our deepest political traditions are what make it great.
George Thomas is Wohlford Professor of American Political Institutions at Claremont McKenna College and author, most recently, of The (Un)Written Constitution.
Great Independence Day reading. Merges love-of-country with love of wisdom.