5 Jul 2023 3:41 pm
that's why Trump was ostracized, he wouldn't support the war machine.razoo » 05 Jul 2023, 9:15 am » wrote: ↑ Push for Anti Imperialism Instead Push for A Peace Economy and Smart Investment
Speaking at a time when the struggle against colonialism was well recalled by living Americans—including his own father, John Adams, the nation’s second president, and former presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison—the veteran diplomat used his address to propose an approach to foreign policy that was at once visionary and restrained.
Adams’s speech from two centuries ago, though too little remembered and even less respected by his successors at the Department of State and the White House, remains the finest expression of the unique balance that a republic must strike if it wishes to avoid paying the unaffordable wages of empire.
Long before Dwight Eisenhower warned of the dangers of deferring to a military-industrial complex, long before George McGovern issued his “Come Home America” call for an end to military adventurism, John Quincy Adams counseled that a career of empire should be rejected as un-American.
After reading aloud the Declaration of Independence in its entirety, he outlined a vision for how the United States could understand its role in a turbulent world:
The genius of the American experiment, said Adams, was found in the revolutionary spirit of 1776, which rejected the corruptions of empire—the worst of which stem from the impulse to meddle in the affairs of other countries.
“Her glory is not dominion, but liberty,” Adams said of the United States.
“Her march is the march of mind. She has a spear and a shield; but the motto upon her shield is Freedom, Independence, Peace.”
“Tragically,” as the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft recognizes, “the circumstances that Adams warned about only too accurately describe the situation in which the United States finds itself today. Far too broad a cross section of the foreign policy establishment accepts perpetual war as a normal condition, willfully blind to the immense harm done as a consequence of recklessly conceived and ineptly conducted armed interventions.”
Since its 2019 founding, the institute has argued for “a fundamental reorientation of US foreign policy…to change the prevailing mindset that defines American leadership in military terms.”
Will not be easy to achieve.
https://www.thenation.com/article/polit ... h-of-july/