A Response To David Beito

Over at the History News Network blog, David Beito responds to my critique of Ron Paul’s Manchester Union-Leader defense of non-interventionism and notes the following regarding the early history of the American Republic:

In 1804, for example, French Louisiana was directly on the southwestern border, Spanish Florida was to the south, and British Canada was to the north. While the French and Spanish threats soon disappeared, the British superpower continued to dominate the northern border for another century. As late as the 1890s, the two countries almost went to war.

In reality of course, long before 1804, the Napoleonic Wars were in full swing in Europe and the French, and the allies in Spain, were far more concerned with the British Navy and the Russians than with a tiny little Republic on the North American continent. Moreover, by 1804 the French had already sold the Louisiana Territory to the United States (a purchase approved by President Jefferson under questionable Constitutional authority, by the way) and the territory with Spanish Florida was the site of little more than cross-border Indian raids. Yes, the British were the big leviathan to the North, but, again, their focus was elsewhere in the early 19th Century and, with the exception of the War of 1812, for a long time after that.

Beito goes on to state:

By contrast in 2007, the nations on the southern and northern U.S. borders pose no credible military threat. Viewed from this angle, a policy of non-interventionism makes even more sense in the modern world than it did in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

This is a straw man. Nobody is seriously suggesting that Mexico, Canada, or even tin-horn dictators like Hugo Chavez or Fidel Castro pose a threat to the United States, or that they are ever likely to in the future. But that doesn’t mean threats don’t exist, or that those threats are any less serious than the ones faced by the early Republic.

In fact, given the advances in war-making technology that have occurred over the past two centuries, I think it’s clear that the threats are potentially more serious.

Beito’s argument also suffers from one that I find all too common among libertarians, and it’s one that I’ve fallen victim to myself in the past. It’s the idea that America’s vital national interests end where America’s borders end. There may have been a reasonable basis for that case back in the early 19th Century — although even then President Jefferson determined that America’s national interests included making war against a group of pirate states on the coast of North Africa — but it’s not reasonable today.

We live in a world where a missile launched from half the world away can kill millions of people in an hour. We also live in a world where that depends on the free flow of goods through shipping lanes, airports, and transportation hubs. To argue that the United States need not concern itself with events outside it’s borders is to fail to recognize that, unlike 1804, America’s interests don’t stop on the beaches of the Atlantic anymore.

Update: David has updated the post I responded to to reflect the fact that he intended to refer to 1803 rather than 1804. Outside of the fact of the Louisiana Purchase, though, it doesn’t change the essential point of my response. There really isn’t any historical evidence that French Louisiana was the source of a serious threat to American security in the early part of the 19th Century, and the extent to which Napoleon ever considered it the launching pad of an American branch of his empire can be seen in the ease with which President Jefferson was able to grab nearly a third of a continent from him.

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