Before Primacy: American Grand Strategy from the Founding to “Manifest Destiny”

Abstract

This chapter explores the evolution of what could be termed the “historical repertoire” of American foreign policy and grand strategy through an examination of the interaction between systemic change and American political culture from the Founding of the Republic to the Polk administration (1844–1849). In particular, this chapter highlights the early dominance of “exemplarist” traditions of statecraft (particularly those associated with Washington and Jefferson) from the Founding to the middle of the nineteenth century. I argue that the core policy preferences of “exemplarist” statecraft (e.g. aloofness from the great power politics of Europe, claims to hegemony in the western hemisphere, and rhetorical championing of republicanism) were not sui generis but were the product of efforts to mediate between the systemic realities confronting the new republic—notably geographic isolation/insularity and the threat posed by British hegemony—and the Whig anti-statism and republicanism that had guided the Revolution and the construction of the Republic’s architecture of limited government.