Welcome to Madison’s Footnotes, the substack page for the Madison’s Notes podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.
Recently, as the United States celebrated the semi-quincentennial anniversary of our nation’s founding, we have a special Fourth of July episode to close out Season 5 of Madison’s Notes. While our previous two episodes featured Josiah Ober who discussed ancient Greece and classical democracy, along with Michael Hawley who discussed the Roman statesman Cicero and his influence on John Locke and the modern world, today we jump from Greece and Rome to America.
So in Episode 12 of Season 5, I have as our guest Walter Russell Mead to talk about American grand strategy since the Declaration of Independence. A Yale graduate, Mr. Mead is the Alexander Hamilton Professor at the University of Florida’s Hamilton School, a distinguished fellow at the Hudson Institute, a Foreign Affairs contributor, the Wall Street Journal’s “Global View” columnist, as well as the host of the podcast, “What Really Matters.” He is the author of the books Mortal Splendor (1987), Special Providence (2001), Power, Terror, Peace, and War (2004), God and Gold (2007), and The Ark of the Covenant (2022), and the contributor to The American Revolution and America’s Role in the World (2026).
Drawing on Special Providence, we discuss the history of the four American schools of foreign policy—the Hamiltonians, Jeffersonians, Jacksonians, and Wilsonians—and how his analysis of the American traditions has held up a quarter of a century later. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and length. Please enjoy.
Mr. Mead, welcome to Madison’s Notes.
It’s great to be here.
As I understand, you studied English at Yale as an undergraduate. How did you get from there into grand strategy?
Sometimes I think of what Mae West once said: “I used to be Snow White, but I drifted.”
And I drifted into foreign policy. I was interested in world history as well as American history and literature, and over time as the 1970s and ‘80s went on and the Cold War was moving toward a climax, it just seemed particularly like a subject that needed some attention, so I got involved.
How did you end up becoming a professor of it?
Back in the ‘80s and ‘90s, I started doing a lot of different kind of journalism. I was doing a monthly column at the Los Angeles Times, and a money investment magazine, Worth Magazine, asked me to do a series of articles that would be deep dives into different countries looking at their investment potential for Americans who at that time were just starting to have to manage their own retirement accounts.
Before that, most Americans in professional jobs would end up with what they called “defined benefit pensions,” where the company just automatically pays you because of your service. But they shifted over to this model that we have now of the tax-deferred retirement accounts, so people had to learn to be investors. They might want to invest internationally.
When apartheid was ending in South Africa—because when I went, de Klerk was still president, but Mandela had been elected—they sent me for six weeks to travel all over South Africa, talk to people from the president to just ordinary people, look at different industries and so on, and come up with a take on whether or not this was investable.
After that, I went to Egypt, Chile, Brazil, Russia, and a number of other places for Worth, and I found I liked it. You learn a lot, and a lot of countries are willing to talk to somebody read by American investors about what’s going on in their country. From there, I began to write more think-tank-y pieces.
I ended up writing one on Cuba, and the president of the Council on Foreign Relations at the time, Les Gelb, was very impressed with that, and he ultimately asked me to become a fellow there. I guess from there, Bard College was interested in me while I was still a fellow at the council, and asked if I would be interested in doing some teaching. So I just drifted.
While you were drifting, how did you get into writing Special Providence? Where did you get your idea for the four schools?
Honestly, I didn’t have the idea of the four schools when I started writing. I thought it was just going to be your conventional story of American foreign policy until I really began to look at the history, and I saw that the actual past of American foreign policy was very different from certainly what I had learned in school and what was generally believed by educated people at the time.
The sort of conventional story—which I think some people still cling to—is that before World War II, America didn’t really have much international engagement. We were thousands of miles from everywhere. We just were on our own. And, briefly at the time of Woodrow Wilson, we got involved internationally, but then decided that was a mistake, went back to sleep until the Japanese bombed us at Pearl Harbor, and then ever since then, we’d been globally engaged.
But you actually go back and you look at American history, and you find out that Americans were very active globally long before 1941. Our first permanent naval presence in the South Pacific was in 1821. We had essentially a base equivalent in the Mediterranean from around that time. We saw that American forces were engaged. We had fought two battles in Korea. Marines had been in China. We’d actually had marines in Africa, both North Africa and Sub-Saharan. And then if you look at American politics, a lot of the big political battles were about what we would recognize today as foreign policy.
Even for a question like slavery, you would say, “Well, that is the most domestic of issues and was settled in the most domestic of events, a civil war.” But if you look at the reasoning for Lincoln signing the Emancipation Proclamation and the timing of the Emancipation Proclamation, it was in very large measure about keeping England out of the war. Even on something like slavery, you couldn’t really understand American history without understanding the international context.
So I was seeing on the one hand the standard historical picture didn’t work, and then on the other hand, as the Cold War was ending, you saw the old political coalitions break up.
During the Cold War, American foreign policy debates were essentially divided between hawks and doves. Hawks were always hawkish. They thought we weren’t doing enough to stop the Soviet Union. We needed to do more. Doves always thought force is not so great, and maybe we should be leading by example, or whatever. But in any case, it was very reliable. If somebody was a hawk on Cuba, they would be a hawk on Vietnam.
If they were a dove in one place, they’d be a dove in another. People didn’t change sides much. Then at the end of the Cold War, half the hawks suddenly want to bomb Serbia, and so do half the doves, and the other half, both of hawks and doves, want nothing to do with it. I realized that the intellectual structure of the political framework for American foreign policy was more complicated than I or others had realized in the Cold War.
Then I put those two questions together in my head: “Why is the past so different from what everybody tells me the past is, and why have those stable Cold War oppositional groups broken apart in this post-Cold War environment?” It was out of that background that I started thinking about, researching, and ultimately writing what became Special Providence.
Special Providence is not your average foreign policy textbook. It doesn’t read like something written by Hans Morgenthau. It’s also partly a cultural history with a very literary sensibility to it. Describing these four traditions, is also about four ways of thinking what it means to be an American. Please describe for me these four traditions.
Alright. The one I usually start with is Alexander Hamilton, after whom I’ve named the school.
America has the revolution, and suddenly we’re an independent country, and now we have to figure out what our foreign policy is going to be. Who’s our friend? Who’s our enemy? Do we want enemies and friends? What are our interests? How do we know what they are? How do we advance them?
You have to start from scratch, and you had a very small number of Americans who’d ever been involved in foreign policy. That was what the British Parliament did. Franklin and Adams and a few others who’d been engaged in diplomacy during the Revolution were the only Americans with any real experience. Alexander Hamilton is pondering this question, and he asks himself basically, “What is the most successful country in the world?”
The answer he came up with was Great Britain, which at the time certainly—even though it had lost the war in the American colonies—was clearly the strongest global naval power, was clearly the most prosperous and industrially advanced, and was also the country which seemed to have—and this was controversial in America, but Hamilton believed it—liberty. The British subject was freer than the Spanish or French or German subject was at the time.
In a combination of liberty, power, and wealth, let’s be like England. Let’s do what they did. For Hamilton, this was domestic policy. The Bank of the United States, which was modeled on the Bank of England, was trying to use the government to support industry in ways similar to what England had done.
But also looking at foreign policy, the British had this global navy which protected their trade. Their trade helped make them rich, and those riches allowed them to keep the navy strong, but also allowed British living standards to rise, make Britain richer, and stabilize the political order at home. So Hamilton had the idea that, again, America should be interested in global trade and have a strong navy.
And the government should act to create a strong national economy. The government should be involved in the economy, but as a pro-business factor. We should have a stable credit system, and a Bank of the United States. We should support domestic manufacturers.
In any case, this is the Hamilton program. And ever since then, while the details change, there have been a lot of people in the United States who’ve often very influential in the foreign policy world, and who’ve seen that we ought to do more or less what England was doing in the 18th century and what Hamilton began to recreate here in the United States.
George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton in their way were both Hamiltonian presidents. The free trade agenda after World War II to create a global trading order that would provide international stability and prosperity for Americans was very much a core Hamiltonian concept. So that’s one core school.
But Hamilton had his rivals, as anyone who’s watched the musical or read the Ron Chernow biography would know. One of those rivals was Thomas Jefferson, and he forms another school: the Jeffersonians. Can you please tell me about that one?
Thomas Jefferson looked at what Hamilton was doing and saying: “Are you mad? We’ve just had a war with Great Britain because it’s a horrible tyranny, and its over-powerful government was extinguishing our liberty. You want to turn us into the thing we’ve been fighting?” In some ways, this really was the emotional core of Jefferson’s opposition. Jeffersonians start from a different place: what is the national interest? They say, “What is the most important thing about America?” And they would say, “It’s our liberty. It’s our limited government. It’s the fact that here voters get to choose representatives, and that our government is close to the people.”
And they say, “Look, if we go to this Hamiltonian business of global trading system, it’s going to be alliances with other countries. We’re going to get sucked in to all of this international politics. We’re going to have to have a really large army and navy to protect ourselves and to protect our allies. We are going to go into debt because it’s going to just take a lot of spending to create that machine.
“That debt is going to help fuel the development of a class society in America because you’ll have rich people who are making money from the debt and poor people who have to pay the taxes that fund the debt. We’re going to be just like England. It’s going to be horrible. So what we should do instead is to have as little as possible to do with other countries. Fine, trade with them, sure, but, alliances, getting involved: no.”
Jefferson flirted with an alliance with France in the 1790s, but he basically got over that, and so the Jeffersonian idea is that the less foreign policy we have, or the less we have to expend on it, the better off we’re going to be. In a way, Jeffersonians are a little bit like libertarians.
Libertarians will say, “Domestically, the smaller the government we have, the better off the economy will be and the freer we’ll be as a people.” They fear government spending as a transfer of wealth from some classes to other classes, and they fear the creation of a machinery of extraction that will destroy American liberty.
In foreign policy, they fear something similar: that an ever-growing national security state—what President Eisenhower called “the military-industrial complex”—will become such a powerful force that ultimately it destroys American liberty. This is what powers even today what some people call the isolationism of someone like Kentucky Senator Rand Paul or other anti-interventionist Americans.
Did Jefferson, however, govern as a Jeffersonian? With the Louisiana Purchase, he grew advance the country. He favored an agrarian style (at least rhetorically) of republicanism, but in your book, you seem to make the argument that he governed as a Hamiltonian.
Actually, not so much governed, but by the end of his life, he actually supported the Monroe Doctrine, which is one of the most misunderstood pieces of American statecraft. In fact, in my mind, it’s a brilliant example of Jeffersonian strategic thought.
That is, during the Napoleonic Wars, the British had supported the Latin Americans who were throwing off Spanish rule, and in a slightly different way, the Brazilians with Portugal. You go to places like Chile, and you realize that they have national heroes like Bernardo O’Higgins, this British admiral who was also very much involved in some of these wars.
After the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the Bourbons are restored to power in France, and their relatives, the Spanish Bourbons, are thinking, “Now that the war is over, let’s go back and restore some order in our former colonies.” And with France helping them, the Spanish might have made something happen.
For Americans, this is a threat. For the British, it’s also a threat. Basically now that the Spanish are out, they’re able to trade freely across Latin America. The Brazilians have signed a nice free trade treaty with them. They don’t want to give that up, so what are we going to do? The answer that John Quincy Adams and James Monroe came up with was, “We will issue a declaration that you cannot colonize the New World, and you can’t establish monarchical rule in new places in the New World.”
That sounds like a huge commitment. We’re going to defend Latin America. That sounds like the opposite of Jeffersonian isolation. But actually what the reason that we could make that declaration is we knew the British would do that out for their own interests. So the British Navy, at no cost to the United States, would be doing what America most wanted.
The British had said, “Why don’t we jointly issue a declaration in which we both agree to give up new territory, and in exchange for that, we will join you in protecting Latin America?” The Jeffersonians refused to pay that price. They actually still wanted some more land, and they saw that quite a bit of it might be available for grabbing in the future.
So they said no. They issued their own statement, which was then enforced by the British and this idea that Britain would defend the Americas from the other European powers was really the cornerstone of American national strategy until World War I, when the British could no longer play that role, and we had to figure out, “What are we going to do?”
There are two other schools: the Jacksonians and the Wilsonians. I associate the Jacksonians with the Scots-Irish, the riflemen of the Revolution, Patton or MacArthur, the people you need when you’re actually in a war.
Wilsonians are tied to Protestant missionaries sending people across the world, having active interests in those areas, and then soliciting the US government to be involved. In 1827, for example, the missionary Jeremiah Evarts once had John Quincy Adams intervene with a US naval ship in the Hawaiian Islands during his presidency.
Can you please tell me about these two schools?
Sure. Let’s start with the Wilsonians. Woodrow Wilson, of course, was from Virginia and later president of the University of Princeton.
The New England Puritans had a very different concept of government than what we normally think of as the American form of government, but it’s still a very powerful force in the country. The New England idea was not so much to limit government, but to limit the people in government to the good people.
In New England, you had to be a church member of the established churches (except in slovenly Rhode Island) in order to be able to vote. There was very little sense that those governments composed of the saints should be limited. Hey, make adultery illegal, really enforce morals, enforce the good. We still see that in America.
I think in some ways wokeism is that government should enforce that which is good on all those sinners out there. And in international stuff, this notion goes to the idea of American missionaries going out there to bring Christianity and economic development and enlightenment to the rest of the world—which is one of America’s oldest and most effective social movements.
It has had a massive impact on the world: the American participation in the spread of global Christianity. It is actually as active today as it’s ever been. It doesn’t get a lot of look in from the elite media, but whether you look at Catholic, Protestant, or Latter-day Saints mission efforts, they’re very strong, and there are whole countries like South Korea whose religious demography has been largely transformed by generations of work, first by American missionaries and then by local converts.
Here they’re thinking, “America’s prosperity—America’s glory, it’s not just for us. God hasn’t given these things to us because He loves Americans more than other people, or because we’re better than other people. Rather, because we have received all these blessings, it is our duty to share them. So we know that democracy makes people richer. We know that observing human rights not only makes people happier, but makes for better governance. We know what the principles are that will allow people to live freely and successfully. Therefore, let us go share that with the world, and American foreign policy should be aimed at bringing about this global transformation to a world of peace.”
In some ways, the greatest Wilsonian anthem in our canon is “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory of the Coming of the Lord,” written by Julia Ward Howe as she saw Union soldiers marching south to free the slaves. If you look at the words of that song, “I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a thousand circling camps.” The Union army bringing liberty is God marching through the world, bringing about a better future for mankind.
And so this Wilsonian idea—that it’s America’s job to bring democracy, to bring freedom and prosperity all over the world, by force if you have to under certain circumstances—remains a very active force in American thinking about how the world works and what we should do.
There’s an interesting change in the lyrics. It used to be, “As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free, while God is marching on.” But it was switched to, “As He died to make men holy, let us live to make men free.”
Oh, all this PC rot. It’s just the triumph of sentimentality, and it is as worthless as everything else that these people do.
We used to actually have a real battle hymn. The republic used to be a real country.
No more. Alas.
And speaking of having battle hymns and a real country: the Jacksonians.
Yeah. Jacksonians don’t think we should convert the world to Americanism or Christianity or anything else in general. They’re very suspicious of big corporations and big corporate empires. I think the Jacksonians are a sleeping giant, that a lot of the time you don’t hear very much from them because there isn’t any threat, and so there’s nothing they’re that interested in. Whenever they wake up, then they often drive the entire foreign policy system.
In some ways I remember the story that you couldn’t stop Jacksonians from fighting World War II. Before Pearl Harbor, they weren’t particularly interested. And when they were fighting it, they wanted to fight it hard. During the last five months of the war in 1945, American bombing, often directed intentionally at civilian targets in Japan, killed several hundred thousand, even without the nuclear attacks.
And Jacksonians, that didn’t bother them at all. That kind of exercise of raw power against people whom you think of as unprincipled, dishonorable enemies is still very much a part of the American way of war, or at least of the way of war that appeals to certain people in America.
To bring the Declaration of Independence into the discussion, would these different schools be contesting over it? How does it fit in as a foreign policy document, if it does?
I think they would all agree with the Declaration of Independence in the sense that none of them really want to hand it back to the English. Although I do remember both in 2016 and 2024 when Trump was elected, you would see lots of memes on the internet of Americans going to London saying, “We’re sorry. Please take us back.”
But I think the fact of independence is something that all these American schools would agree with. I think different schools would have supported different grounds. There’s a long list of grievances in the Declaration of Independence, all the awful things the king did.
Actually, if you look at them, there are Hamiltonian grievances: he’s interrupting our trade with foreign countries. There are Wilsonian grievances: he is depriving us of our liberties under English traditions, he’s messing with our courts and our juries, and he’s breaking the law. Then there are Jacksonian grievances: he isn’t letting us cross the mountains to get new lands from the Indians, for example. And there are Jeffersonian grievances: he’s sending out a swarm of officers to eat up our substance; he’s actually subjecting us to this system of destruction of liberty.
The Revolution was one of those wars that united the different schools, and I don’t think we could’ve persisted long enough to win the war if it hadn’t been able to appeal to so many people, but for different reasons.
Did someone like George Washington encapsulate elements of all of them? Or was he because of Alexander Hamilton’s policies specifically a de facto Hamiltonian?
Our greatest presidents, including Washington, have sometimes sounded like one of the schools and sometimes sounded like another of the schools. I like the analogy that for a great president or national leader, the four schools you should think of as four strings on a violin, that you can produce the music that you need by hitting now one of them, and now another, and of course, you have to do a lot of fingering at the same time.
And so Franklin Roosevelt could sound like an isolationist when he needed to. He could sound like a Jacksonian. He could support Hamiltonian measures like the World Bank or the IMF. Put it this way: any president has to look at two things. Domestic politics: “What do the people want? What do my supporters want?” And then the international situation: “What does America really need to do?”
Your job as a political leader is to build a bridge between those things. You have a sense of what we need to do, but then how do you get the necessary support for it. You have to work both ends of that. Great presidents and good presidents know how to use all four strings to get the music that they need.
The beginning of the declaration has Jefferson’s famous words about the dignity of human beings asserting the powers of the earth under nature’s God.
Then it’s the list of grievances against the king, like an Aristotelian syllogism, the major premise, the minor premise. And the third one, it’s “our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor,” we’re entrusting ourselves to this action together. Hang together or hang separately.
Do you think the final point at the end of the Declaration that brings things together is one of those actions of playing all four strings at once, as you were just saying?
I would say that it’s certainly nice rhetoric. It would appeal to some more than others. It is true that honor was a concept that just about everybody in America believed in then. Do we still? I don’t know. But certainly at the time, “our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor,” everybody likes all of those things, so it was unifying.
Which tradition would be the most predominant before the World Wars, and which tradition would be most predominant after the World Wars?
The Jacksonians most of the time are asleep. In that absence, in general under the high period of the Monroe Doctrine—say 1820 to 1915—the Jeffersonians weren’t the only voice, but they were there. The Hamiltonians had a role. The Wilsonians had a role. But I’d say Jefferson and Hamilton were probably the two leading contenders.
Between 1915 and 1945, we’re all sitting around saying, “We had a really great system. The English basically kept the world peace and managed the world economic system, and they didn’t do it exactly the way we wanted, but it was pretty good, and we were okay. We’d rather let them do it than deal with it ourselves.”
Okay, they’re obviously by the day getting less effective at this. Do we just say, “Who needs that system anyway? Let it all go bust?” Do we say, “Oh, let’s try to help them out. They’re 10% short of what they need, so let’s give them the 10% and then go back to sleep?” Or ultimately, what we ended up deciding for a long time is, “Fine, all right, they can’t do it, but we have to have the order that they produce, so we’re just going to have to do the dirty job ourselves.”
That takes you to 1945. After that, I would say between 194 and 2015, Hamiltonians and Wilsonians basically ruled the roost. Many people forgot the other schools ever really existed or thought of them as living fossils. But after 2015, the Wilsonians in particular have taken a real tumble, far less powerful than they were, and we’re hearing a lot more from the Jacksonians. The Jeffersonians and the Hamiltonians have never really gone away.
You were recently telling me how there was a certain man who had been reading some of your books that had been an influence on the first Trump administration. It was Steve Bannon who called you up and had read something on the Jacksonians, and this had motivated the whole ethos of that first term in the White House.
Yeah. I think President Trump put the portrait of Andrew Jackson in the Oval Office. He visited Andrew Jackson’s tomb in the first term, and very much he and many of the people around him see these Jacksonian populists as Trump’s political core and as his base. Nothing is ever exact in politics, but I think that is, in general, correct that Jacksonian America is the America that has been most strongly supportive of President Trump.
However, you’ve been recently writing in Foreign Affairs in the last couple years about the end of Wilsonian foreign policy and the need for a Hamiltonian strategy again. Can you tell me a bit about that, please?
I think Wilsonian America got a little bit ahead of itself after the end of the Cold War.
There was, first of all, that moment people think of as the “end of history,” that liberal democracy had triumphed with the fall of the Soviet Union, and from here on in, the world was naturally becoming more democratic by the day and more focused on human rights. And so America should lead this procession, and it would be easy.
We wouldn’t have to give away that much foreign aid. We wouldn’t have to work that hard. We’d be pushing a snowball downhill. And so we were going to bring democracy to Tanzania or to Afghanistan. You name it, we were going to fix it, and fix it easily. But over time, obviously two things happened. One is that we begin to see—whether it’s in Serbia or later in Iraq and Afghanistan—it’s not as easy to do this as you might think. But also Wilsonian ideas grew more ambitious.
For example, support for women’s rights has always been a component of American Wilsonian ideology and of American foreign policy. You have missionaries in the 19th century driving some people in China crazy by campaigning against the practice of foot binding. In imperial China, affluent women or women with any hope of success had to go through an incredibly painful process of essentially mutilating their feet, for frankly sexually fetishistic purposes, and so that they couldn’t walk as adults due to a horrible practice. American missionaries took the lead in trying to organize opposition to this.
So women’s rights and a social agenda have always been part of that Wilsonian agenda. But after the Cold War, Wilsonians sort of got ahead of or away from the American social consensus so that supporting trans rights in Ireland or Uganda is something that for a lot of Wilsonians is very important. This is a human right. And if we don’t stand up for true principles, our leadership won’t be respected. Our project won’t succeed. But for a lot of other Americans this is a travesty of human rights policy.
Or take abortion. Half the country believes that American foreign policy should be to advocate free access to abortion for women in other countries, and a significant part of the country thinks that’s a horrible idea.
So the Wilsonians found themselves promoting an agenda that in some ways was getting more and more unrealizable. And we’re going to have great women’s schools all over Afghanistan. That’s a terrific idea, but we can’t do it unless we win a war against the Taliban, and we’re not going to do that.
Or you also have Wilsonians then pushing ideas that don’t have enough American political backing to survive a transition from one administration to the next. Partly in consequence of this, obviously also as a result of other global factors, now, you know, almost 20 years we’re seeing the tide of democratization after the Cold War has been gradually rolled back. We saw the abolition of USAID in the second Trump administration.
I think we still are going to see a lot of divisiveness and a lot of weakness in the Wilsonian pursuit of a human rights agenda. I think Wilsonianism is deeply ingrained in the American psyche and American political culture, and it’s not going to go away. But right now, the Wilsonians are at a weak point in their ability to influence American foreign policy. And until they get their act together and think of new strategies and new approaches, we may see them continue to be weaker than they were during much of the Cold War.
Last question. In America 250, what makes you hopeful about the country?
The title of the book Special Providence comes from a quote attributed to the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck who looked at America, what all he saw was a mess inefficiency, corruption, idiots running the foreign policy really lack of a good professional diplomatic service and yet America kept getting stronger and richer and bigger and more powerful and Bismarck at one point allegedly just threw up his hands trying to explain it and said, “God has a special providence for drunks, fools, and the United States of America.”
Special Providence, the book, is an attempt to try to figure out why an America—which day-to-day looks like such a messy, foolish enterprise—over time seems to perform so well. And I guess looking at the country in this 250th anniversary, I think I see signs both of the messiness of public life and the lack of capability in our diplomatic and foreign policy establishment, but also, I see maybe that special providence still at work.
And with that, we will conclude. Mr. Mead, thank you for joining us on Madison’s Notes.
