Washington’s Advice, Imprudently Ignored

Washington, however, never delivered his message as an oration—if he had, his fellow Americans almost surely wouldn’t have heard it; Washington was famously soft-​spoken, a function, so the legend goes, of his notoriously painful teeth. Instead, the 6,088-words addressed to his “Friends and Fellow Citizens” appeared on September 19, 1796, in the American Daily Advertiser, an independent paper, printed just a few blocks from the executive mansion in Philadelphia where Washington lived and worked.

The text had been written and rewritten over five years, with Washington initially calling on the triumvirate that wrote the Federalist Papers, the collection of essays arguing in favor of ratifying the Constitution, to assist. But James Madison and John Jay had fallen into disfavor with the chief executive by 1796, and so the bulk of the final draft mostly bears Alexander Hamilton’s imprimatur, as was later immortalized in Lin-​Manuel Miranda’s blockbuster Broadway musical.

This essay focuses on four key themes from Washington’s message. First, Washington believed in maintaining a small military suited for defense. Second, he wanted his country to lead by example, not by force. Third, he stressed the importance of neutrality, and of placing the United States’s interests at the center of the nation’s foreign policy. Fourth, and lastly, Washington worried incessantly of the danger of disunion. Alas, Washington’s warnings against partisanship, and especially of how factionalism could open the path to foreign influence that could destroy the nation, seem eerily prescient.

Even a cursory glance at our present politics reveals how far we have departed from Washington’s wise counsel, beginning with his advice to “avoid the necessity of those overgrown military establishments which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.”

Later he explained “our detached and distant situation invites and enables us” to avoid the “frequent controversies” which beset the European states. If the nation remained united “under an efficient government,” he predicted, others would be less inclined to harass it and more inclined to respect American neutrality. In the meantime, he asked, “Why forego the advantages of so peculiar a situation? Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground?” The suggestion seemed absurd to Washington.

To be sure, “overgrown” is a subjective measure. But it is doubtful that Washington would look upon a U.S. military deployed in hundreds of military installations and posts scattered around the world and conclude that this force, the largest in the world, and more costly than the next nine or ten nations combined, was mostly oriented toward the defense of these United States.

He likely would also be appalled by the cost, now approaching $1 trillion annually, especially given the degree to which today’s (hardly “efficient”) U.S. government relies on debt to sustain such profligate spending. “Public credit” was warranted, Washington explained, in matters of true emergency, but he advised his countrymen to “use it as sparingly as possible.”

“Timely disbursements to prepare for danger frequently prevent much greater disbursements to repel it,” Washington knew—thus the importance of arming to maintain the peace, or in times of crisis. But such temporary expenditures must be tempered, he advised, by the overarching concern with “avoiding…the accumulation of debt.” Such debts “which unavoidable wars may have occasioned” should be discharged “by vigorous exertion in time of peace,” else the nation “ungenerously [throw] upon posterity the burden which we ourselves ought to bear.”

Washington, who served most of his life as a soldier, understood the importance of what today we call “hard power.” But, in that respect, Washington was more realist than idealist. John Avlon, in his book Washington’s Farewell: The Founding Father’s Warning to Future Generations, explains that the very first draft of the Farewell emphasized the importance of preparing for war to preserve the peace. Washington wished that the United States “may always be prepared for war, but never unleash the sword except in self-​defense, so long as justice and our essential rights and national respectability can be preserved without it.”

Such sentiments made their way into the final draft, which emphasized the importance of leading by example, and resisting the urge to wage war over minor disagreements. “It will be worthy of a free, enlightened, and at no distant period, a great nation, to give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of a people always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence.”

By that standard, and even setting aside the sprawling national security state noted above, one suspects that the United States’s conduct in foreign affairs would give Washington pause. Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump all waged wars of choice, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and elsewhere. Still today, Joe Biden launches military operations in the Middle East and Africa under authorities granted following September 11, 2001.

Biden also emphasizes support for democracy in his policies and speeches. But couching military aggression in beneficent terms isn’t a new phenomenon. Since at least the time of the Spanish-​American War, successive presidents have attempted to use the power of the U.S. military for a host of noble-​sounding reasons. In the case of the Filipinos, William McKinley explained, the goal was to “educate and uplift and Christianize them.” For Woodrow Wilson, who sent troops into Mexico to overthrow the government there, the use of force would teach them to “elect good men.”

Washington “believed that America should be a beacon of freedom…but we should resist the temptation to try to export democracy abroad by point of bayonet,” explains Avlon. “The true message of the Farewell Address on foreign policy is not isolation but independence, striking a wise balance between realism and idealism, always remembering that the United States is a republic, not an empire.”

“The period is not far off,” Washington wrote, “when we may defy material injury from external annoyance” and “choose peace or war, as our interest, guided by justice, shall counsel.” Most of the time, however, neutrality was the wisest course. “I want an American character,” he explained in a letter to Patrick Henry in October 1795, “that the powers of Europe may be convinced we act for ourselves and not for others.”

Washington’s sentiments on this score were best summed up as follows: “The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible.” According to William Ruger, “it is difficult to overstate the importance of Washington’s address” to the first one hundred years of U.S. foreign policy. “He made [foreign] political connections the third rail of 19^th-century American politics, much as Social Security is today.”

It was Washington’s firm belief, articulated in the Farewell Address, that “[t]he nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest.”

He harbored such beliefs for years. Writing to Lafayette in 1786, Washington asserted, “Nations are not influenced as individuals may be by disinterested friendships: but when it is their interest to live in amity, we have little reason to apprehend any rupture.”

These sentiments made their way into the Farewell. “Nothing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated,” Washington explained.

He was motivated, in part, out of fear that such “passionate attachments” to any foreign state, rather than to our own, would inflame internal divisions, which would then be exploited by foreign actors. “Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence,” Washington wrote, “the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government.”

He had witnessed this first-​hand; partisans, including his own Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, vehemently objected to (and perhaps even conspired against) Washington’s decision to remain neutral when Great Britain and others sought to extinguish the flame of Revolutionary France.

Such warnings seem almost quaint today. The United States has not merely abandoned neutrality; many today now denounce the mere suggestion as treasonous. Instead, Americans are formally bound by treaty to come to the aid of those living in more than 50 other countries, suggesting that their security challenges are our own. These alliances have aroused in millions of Americans the very “inveterate antipathies” and “passionate attachments” that Washington warned about. And, as he predicted, such attachments often pit Americans against other Americans.

Indeed, juxtaposed against all the other discontinuities between Washington’s parting words of advice and the actual practice of governing today, perhaps none would dismay him more than the internal divisions that threaten to tear the country asunder. For Washington, the union was the greatest guarantor of Americans’ security and liberty. He foresaw that this “unity of government,” would be “the point in [Americans’] political fortress against which the batteries of internal and external enemies will be most constantly and actively (though often covertly and insidiously) directed.” He therefore advised his fellow Americans to appreciate “the immense value of your national union to your collective and individual happiness,” and he directed them to look down upon “every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest, or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together the various parts.”

Alas, in this instance, such advice has been completely ignored. Today many Democrats seem to want to cut Republicans out of the body politic altogether, seeing them only as obstacles to progress. Republicans, not to be outdone, have lately, and with alarming frequency, valued partisan fealty above loyalty to democracy itself; some have even worked themselves into implausible delusions about the results of the 2020 election and, moreover, seem prepared to declare anything other than a Republican victory in 2024 illegitimate.

Washington’s primary concern was that “geographical discriminations” would tend “to render alien to each other those who ought to be bound together by fraternal affection.” He would, by that standard, recognize Democratic California’s disdain for deep-​red Utah. And he might have predicted that Republican Idaho, which hasn’t voted for a Democrat for president since 1964, would see more in common with Alberta in Canada than with Washington State.

Such internal divisions were “avenues to foreign influence,” Washington warned. He acknowledged that “the spirit of party” was “inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind.” But, taken to extremes, partisanship “agitates the community with ill-​founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, [and] foments occasionally riot and insurrection.”

“The disorders and miseries which result,” he predicted, “gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.”

I think George Washington would espy that looming threat in American politics today. And he would weep.