Op-Ed
By John Yoo
Political Questions
March 23, 2025
Editors note: Having solved all the problems of natural law in our previous extended exchanges here on Political Questions (as if!), John returns now to spank me, Hadley Arkes, Michael Deis, and (posthumously) Angelo Codevilla on the subject of American foreign policy. (You can refresh your memory with the previous installments here, here, and here.) Rest assured, a rebuttal is coming!
—Steve
I am happy that I achieved one thing in my debate with Steve Hayward on last week’s episode of the Three Whiskey Happy Hour: he was forced to call out the Straussian reinforcements! But, as far as I know, Leo Strauss wrote little to nothing about foreign policy, and his intellectual descendants appear to share no established school of thought on the question. In the 2000’s, Bush critics accused Straussians as the theorists for a neo-conservative effort to spread democracy throughout the Middle East. Today, Steve Hayward, and now our friends Hadley Arkes and Michael Deis, apparently think Straussian approaches lead to the opposite policy: American retreat from the international order that it successfully built and led since 1945.
They seek inspiration from Angelo Codevilla, my friend and sparring partner during Claremont Institute fellow programs, who had a distinguished career as a Naval officer and national security official in addition to his academic positions. Codevilla stood out as different, as he did in so many dimensions, in developing a foreign policy that sought to draw on Straussian themes. For him, the nature of the regime should dictate its foreign policy. He believed that Secretary of State John Quincy Adams had things about right. Adams famously said that the Declaration of Independence was “the only legitimate foundation of civil government” and that the government by consent had “demolished at a stroke the lawfulness of all government founded upon conquest.” At the same time, however, Adams declared that America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” In Codevilla’s account, the United States should preserve its natural rights paradise at home, cheer on from afar the struggles of other peoples to become free, but to follow a general policy of non-intervention abroad unless our security is directly threatened.
Steve believes that Codevilla had found the right combination of Straussian focus on the nature of the governing regime and a more modest, restrained foreign policy. In our podcast episode, I criticized this view for making the mistake of attributing war and peace to the nature of the state. I invoked Kenneth Waltz’s classic, The Man, State, and War, which grouped the thinking of political theorists on the causes of war into three “images”: those who think war is caused by individuals and human nature; those who think the nature of the state causes war; and those who think war is caused by the anarchical nature of the international system. I would have thought with all of those “natures” at work, Steve would have been immediately persuaded!
Our friend Hadley Arkes has come to Angelo’s defense. “Angelo and I were always together on the question of the centrality of the political regime as the touchstone in foreign policy,” Hadley begins in his post. He gives as his prime example the fact that the United States fought in World War II not to stop German aggression but to invade Germany itself and remake German society: “By the liberal theories of international relations, the war in Europe could’ve stopped as soon as the Allied armies came to the border of Germany. After all, we had stripped away from Germany the fruits of its aggression. To go further—to enter the territory to form an Occupation and remake the regime—was to go much further than liberal theory might allow. But the sense was, quite profoundly settled, that the war had emerged precisely from the nature of that regime in Germany, and the problem would not be solved until that regime was remade from within. Any real doubts on that one, by the way?”
Hadley also approvingly looks upon other forms of American intervention. He says that American presidents correctly assisted the democratic revolution in the Philippines. He also cites moving a mobile hospital to Pakistan for humanitarian assistance. “The intervention in Pakistan with a medical unit cannot be attributed to a democratic regime. But it does have something to do with a Christian people, who think, as Lincoln did that no one made in the graven image was sent into this world to be treated as a nothing. Every life is counted.” Hadley appears to endorse something like a Good Samaritan rule in foreign affairs. “Does the capacity to affect the outcome confer some presumptive responsibility for the results? If someone is drowning and I cannot swim, I would have no obligation to go to the rescue. But we did have a capacity to go to the rescue of people in Pakistan.”
I ask Steve and Hadley: who’s the Wilsonian now? Someone following John Quincy Adams, as I take Codevilla to be, would frown on humanitarian intervention unattached to a pursuit of American national interests. There may be a gain to the United States in overthrowing Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines or helping provide medical relief in Pakistan. But if the ground is to save lives abroad because we are a Christian nation, without regard to our national interests, have not Arkes and Steve signed on to Wilsonianism? The main constraint appears to be only the resources available to the United States to do good.
This gets to the main point of dispute. Neither Steve nor Hadley explain why a nation’s regime type dictates its foreign policy and whether it should. I agree with J.Q. Adams, and my Straussian friends, that the United States is founded on a different political theory than any other nation at the time, one based on the equal rights of man and government by consent. But why does that exceptionalism mean that the United States does and should have a different foreign policy, one that is more pacific and less interventionist? That does not seem to comport with the historical record. It is a myth that the United States existed in some sort of isolationist paradise until woken out of its slumber by World War I. The United States pursued an expansionist foreign policy that saw it grow from a collection of colonies hugging the eastern seaboard to a continent-wide great power in just eight decades. The United States waged war against the Native American tribes, seized the Floridas from the Spanish, bought the Louisiana Territory, annexed Texas, and launched a war against Mexico in 1848 that won us New Mexico, Arizona, and California. In 1898, we started another war with Spain to seize the Philippines and to make clear our hegemony over the Caribbean and Latin America. This is not the foreign policy of a nation that is content to sit at home, cheer on democratic movements from afar, and goes not abroad.
Indeed, I think Hadley’s example of American involvement in World War II supports this view. The United States did not intervene because it supported similar democratic regimes and opposed those with hostile, authoritarian domestic governments. Our major ally in World War II, after all, was the Soviet Union, led by Josef Stalin, one of history’s greatest mass murderers. If American foreign policy were motivated by regime type, it should have come to the aid of Britain and France immediately, rather than waiting for France to fall and for Britain to barely survive the German onslaught. Instead, the United States acted when it appeared that Germany and Japan were beginning to directly threaten American national security interests – one of our long-term strategic goals is to prevent either Asia or Europe from being dominated by a single power that could turn the resources of these great industrial heartlands against us. The United States did not attack Japan to stop its cruel war and occupation of China, nor did it enter the European war as the nature of the Nazi regime and its barbarity became apparent until we were attacked at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 – two years after the start of the war in Europe and four years after the beginning of the Sino-Japanese conflict.
Nor does the U.S. war aim of unconditional surrender show that the nature of the domestic regime dictates foreign policy. Realist theory – which I take to be the counter to Steve and Hadley’s view of things (I am not sure what the “liberal” theory is that Hadley refers to) – doesn’t place off limits changing other nation’s governments. Realist theory starts with the basic assumptions that the international system is characterized by anarchy and that the primary goal of nations is to protect their security. Germany had been at the root of two world wars that had demanded American intervention, at great cost in lives and treasure. The United States decided that rather than return to the Continent a third time, it would pacify Germany, enmesh it in firmly in the Western Alliance, and even allow it to become a partner in the struggle against the Soviet Union. The United States took a similar approach to Japan. Changing the regimes of both countries made them firm allies of the United States during the Cold War; spreading democracy was a secondary consideration.
It could be the case that Steve and Hadley believe that domestic regimes are important because they certain regimes will be more or less warlike. There are certainly some passages in Thucydides, for example, that suggest this. In his account of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides suggests that Athenians sought expansion and empire because of its democracy, and that Sparta’s structure led it to favor the status quo and thus only the containment of Athens. But Thucydides ultimately concludes that it is the international system that made war perhaps inevitable – “the rise of Athens” and the “fear of this in Sparta” caused the war. Another variant of this domestic regime idea is the thesis of the “democratic peace”: that aside from ancient examples, democracies do not go to war with each other. Perhaps Steve and Hadley believe domestic regimes are paramount for foreign policy because democracies like the United States, which prize the individual rights of their citizens, are inherently more peaceful. Although the democratic peace has a strong empirical foundation – although I have never understood how the statisticians make sense of the War of 1812 – the mechanism is unclear. And, it turns out, democracies themselves are not inherently pacific. Democracies may not go to war with other democracies, but the data show that democracies attack non-democracies at a far higher rate than vice-versa. Democratic regime theory did not see nineteenth or twentieth-century Britain, France, or the United States stay home and tend the gardens.
I conclude by asking how Steve and Hadley would apply their reading of Codevilla to the challenges that our nation faces today. The United States’s strategic goals, based purely in self-interest, would be (in declining order of importance): protect the homeland; hegemony over the Western Hemisphere; preventing a hostile power from dominating Europe or Asia; and controlling the global commons of the seas, air, and space. Our task is to achieve these goals in a time when China is rising in Asia (while Russia threatens our European security alliances) while the domestic resources available for defense are declining. This is no easy task and would challenge America’s greatest diplomats and generals.
But Steve and Hadley, I take it, would withdraw from Europe and Asia, end our support for the free trading system on the seas and the air, and perhaps even reduce our footprint in the Americas. Instead, focus on protecting the borders, and always be ready for war, but do nothing to seek it out. For them, America’s exceptional regime requires a policy that focuses primarily on protecting the natural rights of Americans at home and watching the corrupt powers of Asia and Europe fight it out between themselves. World Wars I and II, if not the advent of modern missile and nuclear technology, should have shown that the United States cannot retreat behind the oceans and live a life of glorious isolation. A realist approach concerned first and foremost with the nation’s security requires the United States to worry about foreign rivals, and to stop them before they can reach our shores.