COMMENTARY: Securing Freedom by Multiplying Associations – By Peter Berkowitz (Real Clear Politics) / May 16 2021
U.S. foreign policy — from the founding era to the present moment — revolves around a recurring debate about the diplomatic means for securing freedom. As the nation grew and the world changed, it was necessary to revise and refine the understanding of America’s role in international affairs and the character and extent of the nation’s alliances. With the rise — and rising awareness of — the worldwide China challenge, the question of how best to conceive of and manage the U.S. alliance system to secure freedom has taken on renewed urgency.
The nation’s founding generation generally thought that limiting alliances secured freedom. In his 1796 farewell address, President Washington exhorted the new nation, for the sake of “true liberty” and in defense of a “free Constitution” and “free people,” to “steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.” In 1801, in his first inaugural address, President Jefferson echoed Washington’s warning on behalf of America’s free and democratic government: “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.”
But a foreign policy well-suited to securing freedom during an era in which transoceanic communications and travelers — aboard the same wooden sailing ships — took weeks to arrive ill fits a world in which global communications occur instantly and jumbo jets fly across oceans in a matter of hours.
With the onset of the Cold War and the division of the globe into a U.S.-led free world and a communist system under the Soviet Union’s tutelage, the American foreign-policy establishment recognized that enduring friends and partners anchoring a far-flung international alliance system had become crucial to America’s ability to secure freedom at home. Vital as well, they believed, was a system of international organizations and agreements to provide the institutional infrastructure of an international order composed of free and sovereign nation-states.
