Congress should terminate U.S. Defense Treaties
We do not need assistance from any other nation to defend ourselves
For 160 years after ratification of the Constitution, the United States stood aloof from defense treaties and grew from a tiny acorn into a might oak following President George Washington’s Farewell Address: “The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations, is, in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible.”
Then Secretary of State and future President John Quincy Adams amplified on the Farewell Address in his July 4, 1821, address to Congress. It is the greatest salute to a foreign policy of invincible self-defense in United States history:
She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart.
She has seen that probably for centuries to come, all the contests of that Aceldama the European world, will be contests of inveterate power, and emerging right.
Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be.
But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.
She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all.
She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.
She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.
She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.
The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force....
She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit....
[America’s] glory is not dominion, but liberty. Her march is the march of the mind.
The United States first broke ranks from the foreign policy of Washington and Quincy Adams in 1949 with NATO. The 1951 United States Security Treaty with Australia and New Zealand (ANZUS Treaty) and the 1951 Security Treaty between the United States and Japan soon followed. Then came a mutual defense treaty with South Korea in 1953.
These sharp departures from the nation’s longstanding foreign policy were ill-conceived. The Soviet Union and China were not existential threats to us. We were existential threats to them.
But our military establishment, like all others, magnified foreign danger manifold to justify military spending and public adulation of the armored knight. These treaties were contemporaneous with the United States overthrow of Iran’s popular Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, a CIA sponsored coup in Guatemala, the domino theory to support the French in Vietnam, and the 1955 Taiwan Defense Treaty.
These muscular projections of the American Empire like the treaties all pivoted on an hysterical exaggeration of the putative Communist menace. The Soviet Union and China were at loggerheads. The Soviet Union was preoccupied with suppressing chronic insurrections in East Germany, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. The alleged United States missile gap and bomber gap with the Soviet Union were concoctions.
Experience discredited the hysteria. The United States became a de facto ally of Vietnam against China after the Vietnam War concluded in 1973. Prime Minister Mossadegh was never a Communist dupe. His overthrow ushered in the corrupt, megalomaniacal Shah of Iran, who was ousted by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979. We were instrumental in making Iran an archenemy of the United States.
Guatemala has never been more than a featherweight in Central America. The CIA’s 1954 coup against Socialist Jacobo Arbenz begot three decades of genocidal, corrupt military rule. President Jimmy Carter revoked the Taiwan Defense Treaty in 1979. New Zealand abandoned the ANZUS Treaty in 1986. The Soviet Union dissolved in 1991 from internal decay and weakness.
The United States should return to the time-honored foreign policy of Washington and Quincy Adams with a congressional statute that withdraws the United States from NATO and terminates our defense treaties with Australia, South Korea, and Japan. Treaty. In 1798, Congress terminated a defense treaty with France concluded before ratification of the Constitution. In the Head Money Cases, the Supreme Court affirmed the power of Congress to preempt treaties by subsequent legislation.
Terminating our defense treaties would align us with international law. We would no longer be pledged to engage in war when our sovereignty had not been invaded or imminently threatened. Under the International Military Tribunal’s Nuremberg decisions and the Charter of the United Nations, the United States commits the war crime of aggression if it resorts to belligerency not in self-defense to actual or imminent aggression against its territory. Among other things, the United States committed the crime of aggression against Iraq in 2003, Somalia in 2007, Libya in 2011, and Syria in 2015. President Biden has declared at least four times he would go to war with China if it attacked Taiwan, which would constitute another United States war crime of aggression.
It is no defense to aggressive war that it was initiated ostensibly to defend third parties from attack. Adolf Hitler’s argued Nazi Germany invaded Czechoslovakia to defend Sudeten Germans. The invasion was nevertheless punished as a war crime by the International Military Tribunal.
Consider communicating with your Representative or Senator urging them to support a statute terminating our participation in NATO and our defense treaties with Australia, South Korea, and Japan.
Whose judgments do trust more? President George Washington and Secretary of State John Quincy Adams or President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Tony Blinken?