ON FOREIGN ENTANGLEMENTS: A Warning from the Pages of History

On Foreign Entanglements: A Warning from the Pages of History

THE BROADSHEET — MAY 1796. There is a species of wisdom that arrives too late for the man who ignored it and too early for the generation that has not yet suffered the consequences of his error. George Washington understood this when he penned his Farewell Address to the citizens of these United States. His warning against permanent alliances and foreign entanglements was not the counsel of an isolationist fearful of the world. It was the considered judgment of a man who had spent eight years fighting a war partly financed by foreign interests, who understood that nations, like individuals, rarely give something for nothing.

Washington wrote: 'It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.' He did not say we should refuse all commerce, all diplomacy, all engagement with the nations of the earth. He said permanent alliances — the kind that bind a republic's honor, its treasure, and its sons to the ambitions of foreign courts whose interests may diverge sharply from our own.

The Seduction of Alliance

Every generation believes itself uniquely wise, uniquely capable of managing the entanglements its predecessors warned against. Every generation discovers, often at great cost, that the founders' caution was earned in blood. The temptation is always the same: a foreign power offers something we want — protection, trade, legitimacy, or simply the comfort of not standing alone — and we persuade ourselves that this time the arrangement will remain in our control.

History has a way of disabusing nations of such optimism. Alliances made for one purpose have a tendency to survive long past that purpose, sustained by bureaucratic inertia, sunk costs, and the fear of the diplomatic embarrassment that would attend their dissolution. What begins as a prudent partnership ends as an obligation we cannot easily escape without rupturing relationships we have come to depend upon.

This is not an argument against all foreign engagement. Trade enriches both parties when conducted fairly. Diplomacy prevents wars that would cost far more in treasure and life than any negotiation. Intelligence sharing and limited cooperation serve genuine national interests. Washington himself understood that the young republic could not simply seal its borders against the world. What he warned against was the permanent entanglement — the treaty that commits American blood and wealth to the defense of interests that are not American, the alliance that constrains our freedom of action in exchange for a security that may prove illusory.

What We Owe to History

The Broadsheet does not pretend to answer every question that arises from Washington's warning. The world of 1796 and the world of today are not identical, and a principle must be applied with wisdom, not merely quoted. But there is a question worth asking before each new commitment, each new deployment, each new treaty binding this republic to the affairs of distant lands: Would Washington recognize this as the kind of entanglement he warned us against?

If the answer is yes — if this is a permanent commitment rather than a temporary cooperation, if it binds us to the interests of others more than it serves our own, if it constrains our liberty of action in ways that cannot be easily undone — then the burden of proof falls heavily on those who advocate for it. The founders were not naive. They built a republic capable of engaging with the world. They simply insisted that engagement serve the republic, not the other way around.

Some warnings age like fine wine. The flavors deepen as the years pass and the wisdom of those who issued them becomes clearer in retrospect. Washington's caution about foreign entanglements is one such warning. It is worth reading again — slowly, carefully, and with the humility of those who know how often we have ignored it and what it cost us when we did.

— The Broadsheet