Walter Russell Meade on Hamiltonian State Craft

Walter Russell Mead has written an excellent essay in the most recent Foreign Affairs.  Its title:  " Return of Hamiltonian State Craft:  A Grand Strategy for a Turbulent World". 

 

This essay challenges some of my most fundamental ideas, particularly the drive for global governance.  Walter Russell Mead feels this is an illusory dream, other than limited governance agreements on specific issues that the participating nations see in their own self-interest.  

 

Hamiltonian State Craft rests on three beliefs according to Mead:

 

1.     The first business of government is to ensure the conditions that allow private business to flourish.  A solid currency, a stable financial system and deep capital markets, together with the rule of law, are key parts of the infrastructure that sustains American life. 

 

2.     The second big Hamiltonian idea is the critical role of the nation in national feeling.  Americans must embrace a duty of care toward one another.  Nationalism or patriotism is a moral necessity, not a moral failing.  Americans are not just citizens of the world, but also citizens of the American republic.  I believe my service in the Navy has built a deep commitment to this idea.  I also agree that we have obligations to our fellow citizens that do not extend in the same way to all of humankind.

 

Patriotism lends American business a legitimacy without which its future is insecure.  Companies like Procter & Gamble can certainly view themselves as a global company but it would be a mistake not to understand a commitment to our nation as a preeminent goal. 

 

3.     The third idea Mead draws from Hamilton’s legacy is the concept of realism in foreign policy.  Here, Mead gets to the nub of the matter.  Hamilton “did not believe that humanity was naturally good or naturally disposed to settle down in democratic and egalitarian societies, all harmoniously at peace with one another.  Short of divine intervention he did not expect the arrival of a perfectly just society, a perfectly honest government or a perfectly (constructed) national order".  Hamilton believed that people were naturally flawed.  They were “selfish, greedy, jealous, petty, vindictive and sometimes extraordinarily brutal and cruel.  Elites were arrogant and grasping; mobs were ignorant and emotional.”

 

All true, all this will be always true.  But it does not negate the need for imagination and discipline to change the order of things, even if we know it won’t be perfect.  How otherwise could the Common Market have come together?  How otherwise could we finally come to recognize the legitimacy and rightness of marriage between two races?

 

My saying this is in line with what Mead ascribes to Hamilton.  He “was not a determinist.”  He didn’t think there were any social science laws that governed everything. 

 

He believes that Hamiltonian policymakers can act ruthlessly in support of national interest and, at the same time, be models of enlightened state craft in bringing together the world on issues where the world must work together like nuclear proliferation and climate change.

 

 

There is great wisdom in what Mead writes.  My one caution, my one warning, is that this “ultimately realistic view of the world and people” not constrain us from trying to do what more we can in our own way whether that’s in our family, community, nation or world, to provide circumstances that not only ensure the safety and prosperity of the American people but also the people of the world, knowing that to the extent we can do it, it will be limited and knowing we will be advancing our own national cause as well.