A Reader Thinks John Quincy Adams Would Approve Of Trump's Foreign Policy
11/08/2016
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Re: "Let Us Now Praise Famous Trumps"

From: Grey Stalwart [Email him]

Peter Brimelow writes

Trump is against promiscuous interventions overseas—in fact, he’s against what both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson warned against: entangling alliances. The GOP Establishment—and the entire political class—is for them.
John Quincy Adams had cogent advice on foreign entanglements and national purpose. If only George W. Bush had read and heeded his words!

On the 45th Anniversary of the passage of the Declaration of Independence, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams delivered the following remarks to the members of the 22nd Congress in attendance.

Washington, DC — 4 July 1821

She has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations, while asserting and maintaining her own. She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when the conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart.

Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.

She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself, beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.

Her glory is not dominion, but liberty. Her march is the march of the mind. She has a spear and a shield; but the motto upon her shield is Freedom, Independence, Peace. This has been her declaration: this has been, as far as her necessary intercourse with the rest of mankind would permit, her practice.

See previous letters from the same reader.
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