America at 250 by Francis P. Sempa

Foreign Policy Realism Helped Win Our Independence

Freedom. Liberty. Democracy. These words constitute the ideology of the American Revolution. But ideology does not win wars. Ideology does not protect our freedom. Ideology does not provide for our national security. America’s war against Great Britian was won, in part, because our political and military leaders practiced foreign policy realism.

It was not our appeals to liberty, freedom, and democracy that caused France and Spain to help our cause between 1775 and 1783. Neither France nor Spain at that time were democracies. Their leaders cared nothing about Americans’ freedom and liberty, and they opposed the ideology of democracy. The beautiful and inspirational words of the Declaration of Independence may have moved individual French and Spanish subjects, but they were anathema to the rulers of France and Spain.

America’s statesmen at the time understood this. Our chief wartime diplomat during the war, Benjamin Franklin, didn’t care what form of government existed in France and Spain—he cared about their ability and willingness to aid America in its war against Great Britain. In the geopolitics of that time, the American Revolution was a sideshow to the larger European struggle for power.

The great British historian J.R. Seeley wrote about this in 1883 in “The Expansion of England.” Seeley understood that the three wars between England and France known to history as the War of the Austrian Succession, the Seven Years War, and the American War of Independence—fought between 1740 and 1783—were part of a larger struggle for the control of North America. Fought in the aftermath of the War of the Spanish Succession—in which England’s Commanding General John Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough, led a victorious alliance to defeat the France of Louis XIV—those three wars, Seeley wrote, “were intimately connected, and form…a trilogy of wars.” England, France, and Spain viewed the American Revolution within the context of the European and global balance of power.

During the War of Independence, Benjamin Franklin first secured covert assistance for the United States from Britain’s European rivals, then later after our victory at the Battle of Saratoga, negotiated the Treaties of Amity and Commerce and of Alliance with France’s Louis XVI, signed in 1778. A year later, Spain joined the war against the British, hoping to take back Florida and Gibraltar from their European rival. Franklin has been called the first American diplomat and the first American ambassador.

As events later proved, Franklin’s realism was essential to our victory against Britain, most notably at the pivotal Battle of Yorktown when the French Navy blockaded the Chesapeake Bay and gained a naval victory over Britain at the Battle of the Capes. And Franklin was not the only foreign policy realist among America’s early statesmen—the list is quite long and impressive, and includes George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson (at times), John Marshall, Silas Deane, John Jay, and John Quincy Adams. Aside from Jefferson, ideology played very little role in the world views of these early Americans. For them it was always “America First.”

Benjamin Franklin paved the way. He was the nation’s first foreign policy realist.

Francis P. Sempa is the author of the books “Geopolitics: From the Cold War to the 21st Century” and “America’s Global Role.” He is a contributing editor to “The American Spectator” and writes a regular column for “Real Clear Defense.”