Losing and Restoring the Republic
by Jacob G. Hornberger

It is impossible to overstate the fundamental differences between the foreign-policy philosophy of our American ancestors and the foreign-policy mindset that guides our country today. The philosophy of our ancestors was nicely summed up in the Fourth of July address to Congress in 1821 by John Quincy Adams.

In essence Adams said, There are lots of bad things all over the world — dictatorships, tyranny, oppression, famine, and starvation. Nevertheless, he said, the U.S. government did not go abroad “in search of monsters to destroy.” Instead, the American people devoted their time and energies to developing the freest and most prosperous nation in history, which the world could then emulate.

However, Americans did not leave hanging those who were suffering political or economic oppression. They told the world, If circumstances in your country become intolerable and if you are willing and able to escape, even though every other nation might reject you and forcibly return you to your country there will always be at least one country that will accept you and your family permanently, with virtually no questions asked.

In their attempt to create a free society, our ancestors recognized a vitally important point — that the main threat to their freedom lay with their own government. They didn’t trust government, not even when such people as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison were president. This lack of trust in government was manifested in the Constitution, the document that brought the federal government into existence and that expressly limited that government’s powers to those few that were enumerated in the document.

But even that wasn’t sufficient to satisfy our American ancestors. They also demanded passage of the Bill of Rights, which expressly forbade the federal government to infringe fundamental, preexisting rights of the people, such as freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right to assemble, and the right to keep and bear arms.

Additionally, the Constitution and the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments required U.S. officials to recognize and honor long-established civil liberties, some of which stretched back to Magna Carta, that had been carved out over centuries in response to the government’s attempts to punish citizens in criminal prosecutions. Among them were habeas corpus, due process of law, right to counsel, trial by jury, the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures, and protection from cruel and unusual punishments.

John Quincy Adams told the Congress that if America ever rejected its limited-government philosophy in foreign affairs and began going abroad “in search of monsters to destroy,” she would become a “dictatress” of the world, which would simultaneously damage the spirit of liberty that accompanies a free society.

The dictatress of the world

Who can deny that today, having abandoned the limited-government foreign policy of our ancestors, the United States has indeed become the dictatress of the world? What other nation has a government with the omnipotent power to go into nearly any nation on earth, kidnap any of its citizens, and send them to monstrous foreign regimes for the express purpose of torture and perhaps even extrajudicial execution? Or worse yet, to simply send them to a secret overseas prison to be tortured and perhaps executed?

No one can deny that we live in a country in which the president wields the omnipotent power to take the entire nation into war on his own initiative. That is, our ruler wields the power to ignore the constitutional restraint that requires him to secure a congressional declaration of war before waging war. He has the power to execute “signing statements” indicating the power to ignore any law enacted by Congress. He has the power to order his federal agencies to spy on the American people, even secretly and surreptitiously monitoring their telephone calls and email. The discomforting reality is that in his role as a military “commander in chief” in the never-ending “war on terror,” the president now has the power to ignore all constitutional restraints on his power.

Moreover, in what would constitute one of the most monumental legal revolutions in American history, the president, operating in conjunction with the CIA and the U.S. military, now claims the omnipotent power to take any American into custody as an “enemy combatant,” deny him due process of law and trial by jury, torture him, and detain him for the rest of his life.

As the commander in chief in the never-ending “war on terror,” the president essentially wields the same omnipotent powers as such military rulers as Napoleon and Santa Anna.

The root of the problem

There is something important to recognize: All of these powers revolve around U.S. foreign policy, specifically the U.S. government’s role as international policeman, interloper, intervener, invader, occupier, provider, and imposer of sanctions and embargoes.

U.S. officials often tell us that 9/11 changed the world. Actually, it did no such thing. The 9/11 attacks instead reflected the anger and rage that U.S. foreign policy had produced in the past and then provided the excuse for U.S. officials to continue such policy in the future.

Consider Iran, 1953. The CIA, which in reality constitutes the president’s private army, secretly and surreptitiously ousted Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, Mohammed Mossadeqh, a man who had been selected as Time magazine’s “man of the year.” Reinstalling the shah of Iran to power, the CIA then helped him establish a domestic version of the CIA, a terrifying and brutal secret police force called the Savak, which proceeded to terrorize and torture the Iranian people, with the full support of the U.S. government. That went on for 25 years, until the Iranian revolution in 1979, when the Iranian people not only ousted the shah from power but also took officials in the U.S. embassy hostage in angry retaliation for what the U.S. government had been doing.

One year later, 1954, Guatemala. Again, the president’s private army, the CIA, ousted the democratically elected president of that country, installing a brutal military dictatorial puppet into office. CIA officials celebrated this coup as a tremendous success, awarding medals to those agents who had pulled it off. Never mind that the coup engendered a civil war that would last 30 years, which killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans. After all, in the mindset of U.S. officials, they’re just Guatemalans. Just like Iranians. Just like Iraqis. The deaths of any number of foreigners in Third World countries are “worth it” if U.S. foreign policy is advanced.

Not all the U.S. government’s interventionist operations were successful. At the Bay of Pigs, the CIA’s regime-change operations failed to oust from power Cuba’s communist dictator, Fidel Castro. The Vietnam War, in which 60,000 American men died for nothing, was also a failure. But there were also interventionist “successes” — Chile, Grenada, Panama, to name three.