Welcome to Madison's Notes, the official podcast of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. I'm your host, Ryan Shinkel.
Welcome to Madison's Notes, the official podcast of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. I'm your host, Ryan Shinkel. At the time of this podcast's release, it will be the start of 4th of July weekend, as well as the semi-quincentennial birthday for our nation with the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, not to mention the final episode of season 5 on Madison's Notes.
While our previous two episodes featured first Josiah Ober to talk about ancient Greece and classical democracy, followed then by Michael Hawley who discussed the Roman statesman Cicero and his influence on John Locke in the modern world, today we will jump from Greece and Rome to America with the help of our very special guest, Mr. Walter Russell Mead.
Having studied English at Yale, Mr. Mead moved into foreign policy and grand strategy, becoming the Alexander Hamilton Professor of Strategy and Statecraft with the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida and the Ravenel B. Curry III Distinguished Fellow in Strategy and Statesmanship at the Hudson Institute. Along the way, he was previously the editor at large at The American Interest, is a frequent contributor to Foreign Affairs magazine, and is the host of the podcast What Really Matters, as well as the Global View columnist at The Wall Street Journal.
He is also the author of several studies in American Grand Strategy: Mortal Splendor (1987), Special Providence (2001), Power, Terror, Peace and War (2004), also God and Gold (2007), a historical study of the Anglo-American international relationship, and The Arc of the Covenant (2022), a historical study of the Israeli-American international relationship.
Today, we will discuss the Declaration of Independence with a special focus on his book Special Providence and its history of the four American schools of foreign policy, the Hamiltonians, Jeffersonians, Jacksonians, and Wilsonians, and how his analysis of the American traditions has held up nearly a quarter of a century later. We'll also be drawing from his contribution to the recent volume from the American Enterprise Institute, The American Revolution and America's Role in the World, 2026.
As a personal note, Mr. Mead may not know this, but I interviewed once, a long time ago, for a research internship with him. In preparation, I was told to read Special Providence. While I could not obtain a physical copy anywhere in time, this was a Thursday, the interview was on a Monday, Barnes & Noble didn't even have it in storage. I spent hours cramming away with the online version that weekend. The book was a revelation for me for thinking about American history and policy. And now I have the chance to ask him some questions, which at the time, I had a bunch of them, but didn't have the opportunity. Now, however, I do to do just that. So, Mr. Mead, welcome to Madison's Notes.
So, please tell me, as I understand, you studied English at Yale as an undergraduate. How did you get from there into grand strategy?
I sometimes think of what Mae West once said. She said, 'I used to be Snow White, but I drifted.' And I drifted into foreign policy. I was interested in world history as well as American history and literature. And over time, it seemed particularly as the 1970s and '80s went on and the Cold War was moving toward a climax, it just seemed like a subject that needed some attention, so I got involved.
And how did you end up becoming a professor of it?
Back in the '80s and '90s, I started doing a lot of different kind of journalism. I was doing a monthly column at the Los Angeles Times and a money investment magazine, Worth magazine, asked me to do a series of articles that would be deep dives into different countries looking at their investment potential for Americans who at that time were just starting to have to manage their own retirement accounts.
Before that, most Americans in professional jobs would end up with what they call defined benefit pensions where the company just automatically pays you because of your service, but they shifted over to this model that we have now of the tax-deferred retirement accounts. So, people had to learn to be investors. So, they might want to invest internationally.
So, when apartheid ended in South Africa or when it was ending, because when I went de Klerk was still president, but Mandela had been elected, they sent me for 6 weeks to travel all over South Africa, talk to people from the president to just ordinary people, look at different industries and so on, and come up with a take on whether or not this was investable.
And after that also for Worth, I went to Egypt, Chile, Brazil, Russia, a number of other places, and I found I liked it. You learned a lot, and a lot of countries are willing to talk to somebody read by American investors about what's going on in their country. And from there, I began to write more think-tanky pieces, ended up writing one on Cuba, and the president of the Council on Foreign Relations at the time, Les Gelb, was very impressed with that, and he ultimately asked me to become a fellow there.
And I guess from there, Bard College then was interested in, while I was still a fellow at the Council, would I be interested in doing some teaching. So, I just kind of drifted.
While you were drifting, how did you get into writing Special Providence? Where did you get your idea for the four schools?
Honestly, I didn't have the idea of the four schools when I started writing. I thought it was just going to be a kind of a conventional story of American foreign policy until I really began to look at the history and I saw that the actual past of American foreign policy was very different from certainly what I had learned in school and what was generally believed by educated people at the time.
The sort of conventional story, which I think some people still cling to, is that before World War II, America didn't really have much international engagement. We were thousands of miles from everywhere. We just were on our own and briefly at the time of Woodrow Wilson, we got involved internationally, but then decided that was a mistake, went back to sleep until the Japanese bombed us at Pearl Harbor. And then ever since then, we'd been globally engaged.
But you actually go back and you look at American history and you find out that Americans were very active globally long before 1941. We had, I think our first permanent naval presence in the South Pacific was in the 18-teens, maybe 1819. We had essentially a base equivalent in the Mediterranean from around that time. We saw American forces were engaged. We fought two battles in Korea. Marines had been in China. We'd actually had Marines in Africa, both North Africa and sub-Saharan.
And then if you look at American politics, a lot of the big political battles were about foreign policy, what we would recognize today. And even a question like slavery, you would say, well, that is the most domestic of issues and was settled in the most domestic of events, the Civil War. But if you look at the reasoning for Lincoln signing the Emancipation Proclamation and the timing of the Emancipation Proclamation, it was in very large measure about keeping England out of the war. So, even on something like slavery, you couldn't really understand American history without understanding the international context.
So, I was seeing on the one hand the standard historical picture didn't work. And then on the other hand, as the Cold War was ending, you saw the old political coalitions break up. During the Cold War, American foreign policy debates were essentially divided between hawks and doves. Hawks were always hawkish. They thought we weren't doing enough to stop the Soviet Union. We needed to do more. Doves always thought force is not so great and maybe we should be leading by example or whatever.
But in any case, it was very reliable. If somebody was a hawk on Cuba, they would be a hawk on Vietnam. If they were a dove in one place, they'd be a dove in another. People didn't change sides much. And then the end of the Cold War, half the hawks suddenly want to bomb Serbia and so do half the doves. And the other half, both of hawks and doves, want nothing to do with it.
And so, I realized that the intellectual structure of the political framework for American foreign policy was more complicated than I or others had realized in the Cold War. And when I put those two questions together in my head, why is the past so different from what everybody tells me the past is and why have those stable Cold War oppositional groups broken apart in this post-Cold War environment, it was out of that background that I started thinking about and researching and ultimately writing what became Special Providence.
Special Providence, it's not just a foreign policy textbook. It's not something written by Hans Morgenthau. This is a cultural history, something that has a very literary sensibility to it, describing these four traditions. It's also about four ways of thinking what it means to be an American. Can you please describe for me these four traditions?
All right. The one I usually start with is Alexander Hamilton, a school I've named for Alexander Hamilton.
America has the revolution and suddenly we're an independent country and now we have to figure out what is our foreign policy going to be. Who's our friend, who's our enemy? Do we want enemies and friends? What are our interests? How do we know what they are? How do we advance them? So much you have to start from scratch and you had a very small number of Americans who'd ever been involved in foreign policy. That was what the British Parliament did. Franklin and Adams and a few others who'd been engaged in diplomacy during the revolution were the only Americans with any real experience.
So Alexander Hamilton is pondering this question and he asked himself basically, what is the most successful country in the world? The answer he came up with was Great Britain, which at the time certainly, even though it had lost the war in the American colonies, was clearly the strongest global naval power, was clearly the most prosperous and industrially advanced, was also the country which seemed to have, and this was controversial in America, but Hamilton believed it, liberty, the British subject was more free than the Spanish or French or German subject was at the time.
So combination of liberty, power and wealth, let's be like England. Let's do what they did. And for Hamilton, this was domestic policy, Bank of the United States, which was modeled on Bank of England, trying to use government to support industry in ways similar to what England had done, but also looking at foreign policy, the British had this global navy which protected their trade. Their trade helped make them rich, and those riches allowed them to keep the navy strong, but also allowed British living standards to rise, make Britain richer, and stabilize the political order at home.
So, Hamilton had the idea that again, America should be interested in global trade, have a strong navy, that the government should act to create a strong national economy. Government should be involved in the economy, but as a pro-business factor. We should have a stable credit system, Bank of the United States. We should support domestic manufacturers. In any case, this is the Hamilton program, and ever since then, while the details change, there've been a lot of people in the United States, often very influential in the foreign policy world, who've seen that we ought to do more or less what England was doing in the 18th century, and what Hamilton began to recreate here in the United States.
George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton in their way were both kind of Hamiltonian presidents. The free trade agenda after World War II to create a global trading order that would provide stability internationally and prosperity for Americans was very much a core Hamiltonian concept. So, that's one core school.
Hamilton had his rivals, as anyone who's watched the musical or read the Ron Chernow biography would know. One of those rivals was Thomas Jefferson, and he forms another school, the Jeffersonians. Can you please tell me about that one?
Thomas Jefferson looked at what Hamilton was doing and said, 'Are you mad? We've just had a war with Great Britain because it's a horrible tyranny, and its overpowerful government was extinguishing our liberty. You want to turn us into the thing we've been fighting.' And in some ways this really was the emotional core of Jefferson's opposition.
And for Jeffersonians, they start from a different place. What is the national interest? They say, what is the most important thing about America? And they would say it's our liberty. It's our limited government. It's the fact that here voters get to choose representatives, that our government is close to the people.
And they say, look, if we go to this Hamiltonian business of global trading system, it's going to be alliances with other countries. We're going to get sucked in to all of this international politics. We're going to have to have a really large army and navy to protect ourselves and to protect our allies. We are going to go into debt because it's going to just take a lot of spending to create that machine. That debt is going to help fuel the development of a class society in America because you'll have rich people who are making money from the debt and poor people who have to pay the taxes that fund the debt. We're going to be just like England. It's going to be horrible.
So, what we should do instead is to have as little as possible to do with other countries. Fine, trade with them, sure, but alliances, getting involved? Jefferson flirted with an alliance with France in the 1790s, but he basically got over that. And so, the Jeffersonian idea is that the less foreign policy we have or the less we have to expend on it, the better off we're going to be.
In a way, Jeffersonians are a little bit like libertarians. Libertarians will say domestically, the smaller the government we have, the better off the economy will be and the freer we will be as a people. And they fear government spending as a transfer of wealth from some classes to other classes and they fear the creation of a machinery of extraction that will destroy American liberty.
In foreign policy, they fear something similar, that an ever-growing national security state, what President Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex, will become such a powerful force that ultimately destroys American liberty. And this is what powers, even today, what some people call the isolationism of someone like Kentucky Senator Rand Paul or other anti-interventionist Americans.
Did Jefferson, however, govern as a Jeffersonian? With the Louisiana Purchase, he did advance the country a bit. He favored an agrarian style, at least rhetorically, of republicanism. But in your book, you seem to make the argument that he governed as a Hamiltonian.
Actually, not so much governed, but by the end of his life, he actually supported the Monroe Doctrine, which is one of the most misunderstood pieces of American statecraft. In fact, in my mind, it's a brilliant example of Jeffersonian strategic thought.
That is, during the Napoleonic Wars, the British had supported the Latin Americans who were throwing off Spanish rule and in a slightly different way, the Brazilians with Portugal. And you go to places like Chile and you realize that they have national heroes like Bernardo O'Higgins and this British admiral was also very much involved in some of these wars.
After the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the Bourbons are restored to power in France and their relatives, the Spanish Bourbons, they're thinking, 'Now that the war is over, let's go back and restore some order in our former colonies.' And with France helping them, the Spanish might have made something happen. For Americans, this is a threat, but for the British, it's also a threat.
Basically, now that the Spanish are out, they're able to trade freely across Latin America. The Brazilians have signed a nice free trade treaty with them. They don't want to give that up. So, what are we going to do? And the answer that John Quincy Adams and James Monroe came up with was, 'We will issue a declaration that you cannot colonize the New World, and you can't establish monarchical rule in new places in the New World.'
And that sounds like a huge commitment. We're going to defend Latin America. That sounds like the opposite of Jeffersonian isolation. But actually, the reason that we could make that declaration is we knew the British would do that out for their own interests. So, the British Navy, at no cost to the United States, would be doing what America most wanted.
And the British had said, 'Why don't we jointly issue a declaration in which we both agree to give up new territory? And in exchange for that, we will join you in protecting Latin America.' And the Jeffersonians refused to pay that price. They actually still wanted some more land, and they saw that quite a bit of it might be available for grabbing in the future. So, they said no. They issued their own statement, which was then enforced by the British.
And this idea that Britain would defend the Americas from the other European powers was really the cornerstone of American national strategy until World War I, when the British could no longer play that role, and we had to figure out, 'What are we going to do?'
To round things out, there's two other schools, the Jacksonians and the Wilsonians. The Jacksonians, I associate them with the Scotch-Irish, the riflemen of the Revolution, Patton or MacArthur, the people you need when you're actually in a war. Wilsonians, you tie them to missionaries, to Protestants sending people across the world and then having active interest in those areas and then requiring the US government. Jeremiah Evarts once had John Quincy Adams intervene with a US ship over in the Hawaiian Islands during his presidency.
Can you please tell me about these two schools?
Sure. Let's start with the Wilsonians. Wilson, of course, was from Virginia and later president of the University of Princeton. The New England Puritans had a very different concept of government than what we normally think of as the American form of government, but it's still a very powerful force in the country.
The New England idea was not so much to limit government, but to limit the people in government to the good people. So, in New England you had to be a church member of the established churches, except in slovenly Rhode Island, in order to be able to vote. And then there was very little sense that those governments composed of the saints should be limited. Hey, make adultery illegal, really enforce morals, enforce the good.
And we still see that in America. I think in some ways the wokeism is that government should enforce that which is good on all those sinners out there. And in international stuff, this kind of goes to the idea of American missionaries going out there to bring Christianity and economic development and enlightenment to the rest of the world, which is one of America's oldest and most effective social movements.
It has had a massive impact on the world, the American participation in the spread of global Christianity. It is actually as active today as it's ever been. It doesn't get a lot of look in from the elite media, but whether you look at Catholic, Protestant, Latter-Day Saints mission efforts, they're very strong and there are whole countries like South Korea whose religious demography has been largely transformed by generations of work first by American missionaries and then by local converts.
But here they're thinking America's prosperity, America's glory, it's not just for us. God hasn't given these things to us because he loves Americans more than other people or because we're better than other people. But rather it's because we have received all these blessings, it is our duty to share them.
So we know that democracy makes people richer. We know that observing human rights not only makes people happier but makes for better governance. We know what the principles are that will allow people to live freely and successfully. Therefore, let us go share that with the world and American foreign policy should be aimed at bringing about this global transformation to a world of peace.
So much the greatest Wilsonian anthem in our canon is 'Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord,' written by Julia Ward Howe as she saw Union soldiers marching south to free the slaves. And if you look at the words of that song, 'I have seen him in the watchfires of a thousand circling camps.' God, the Union Army bringing liberty is God marching through the world bringing about a better future for mankind.
And so this Wilsonian idea that it's America's job to bring democracy, to bring freedom and prosperity all over the world by force if you have to under certain circumstances, remains again a very active force in American thinking about how the world works and what we should do.
I think there's an interesting change in the lyrics. It used to be 'as Christ died to make men holy, let us die to make men free. Our God is marching on.' But it switched in terms of how people sometimes sing it where it's 'as Christ died to make men holy, let us live to make men free.'
Oh, all this PC rot. It's just the sort of triumph of sentimentality and it is as worthless as everything else that these people do.
