On “The Nation” and Empire

On “The Nation” and Empire

Our magazine has refused to accept what contributor Gore Vidal once described as the “cozy unremitting war” that puts this country in a state of conflict, year after year.

The American Eagle spreading its wings from the Philippines to Puerto Rico in a drawing of the US empire in 1898. (Cornell University / PJ Mode Collection of Persuasive Cartography)

The United States was a youthful 89 years old when The Nation was founded by abolitionists at the end of the Civil War. Over the ensuing 161 years, our magazine has maintained a set of North Star values that have guided us through the darkest moments in this country’s 250-year journey. Among the steadiest of these values has been our opposition to the imperial adventures, bloated Pentagon budgets, and warped priorities that wrongheaded presidents and pliant congresses have led our country into. We have not opposed every war. But we have consistently refused to accept what our longtime contributor Gore Vidal once described as the “cozy unremitting war” that puts this country in a state of conflict, or on the verge of it, year after year, decade after decade, century after century. So it was that, as Nation editors and writers prepared this special issue marking the 250th anniversary of American independence, we were also busy opposing Donald Trump’s illegal, immoral, unnecessary, and undeclared war with Iran . The president’s ill-advised decision to pick this fight quickly spawned regional conflicts , global economic chaos , and mass opposition . But we have not opposed the war merely out of disdain for Trump’s reckless disregard for the consequences of his actions. We opposed it as the latest example of an American pattern of disregarding diplomacy in favor of a military adventurism that destroys lives, wreaks havoc abroad, and—as Secretary of State John Quincy Adams warned on July 4, 1821—so deeply involves the US in foreign intrigues that leaders abandon the pursuit of domestic tranquility and leave us with an America that is “no longer the ruler of her own spirit.”

As the United States celebrates the 250th anniversary of its founding, it is striking to note that the founders warned against many of the very harms of military adventurism that The Nation has decried throughout its history. “No nation,” James Madison warned , “could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” Addressing the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Madison declared: “A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defense against foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.” Later, in the mid-1790s, Madison argued :

War is, in fact, the true nurse of Executive aggrandizement. In war a physical force is to be created, and it is the Executive will which is to direct it. In war the public treasures are to be unlocked, and it is the Executive hand which is to dispense them. In war the honors and emoluments of office are to be multiplied, and it is the Executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed. It is in war, finally, that laurels are to be gathered, and it is the Executive brow they are to encircle.

In those first decades of American independence from the clutches of the British Empire, Madison’s concerns were widely shared by other founders, as well as by ordinary Americans. “[America’s] glory is liberty , not dominion . Her march is the march of the mind. She has a spear and a shield, but the motto upon her shield is, Freedom , Independence , Peace ,” Adams announced in a message to Congress. Indeed, he stressed:

She goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own…. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue…. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force …. She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.

We mark this July Fourth by recognizing that The Nation has grounded its opposition to military adventurism in many of the same values articulated by the founders. From its inception, The Nation has challenged America’s imperial misadventures and the military-industrial complex that developed to advance them. In 1893, nearly 30 years after the magazine’s founding, when European and American businessmen overthrew the queen of Hawaii and sought the annexation by the US of the island she ruled, The Nation denounced the takeover as antidemocratic and warned of what might come next:

People talk about the grand civilizing and protecting mission of the United States. We are not to shrink selfishly and timidly within our own borders, but are to go forth, as a state-erran…