President Trump told the nation yesterday that no Americans were hurt by Iran’s missile attack in response to the death of Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani. He stated that Iran appears to be “standing down” and indicated that American forces would not respond further.
Unsurprisingly, reaction in America to Soleimani’s death has fallen largely along partisan lines. For example, a Fox News commentator stated that “Soleimani was an unparalleled organizer and a pitiless murderer. His death was richly earned.” A CNN commentator, by contrast, called his killing a “reckless gamble.”
This partisan divide is sadly familiar, of course. But I recently read an explanation for it that was both insightful and relevant to more than our politics.
Four ways to do foreign policy
New York Times columnist Ross Douthat views American foreign policy through a prism developed by scholar Walter Russell Mead, who created this famous typology named for four American statesmen:
- Hamiltonian: protection of commerce
- Wilsonian: moral principle
- Jeffersonian: maintenance of a democratic system
- Jacksonian: populist values and military strength.
Douthat describes the Hamiltonians as “business-minded internationalists, cold-eyed and stability-oriented and wary of wars that seem idealistic rather than self-interested.” He describes the Wilsonians as “idealists, whether neoconservative or liberal-humanitarian, who regard the United States military as a force for spreading democracy and protecting human rights.” He claims that most foreign policy leaders in Washington “belong to one of these two groups.”
According to Douthat, however, “far more American voters are either Jacksonians or Jeffersonians.” He describes Jeffersonians as “more common on the left than on the right,” an impulse that “regards global hegemony as a corrupting folly and America’s wars as mostly unwise and unjust.” Their defining attitude is “No blood for…
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