Stewart M. Patrick
Tuesday marks the centenary of one of the most extraordinary foreign policy debates in American history, which has renewed resonance today. On March 19, 1919, 3,000 lucky spectators crammed into Boston Symphony Hall to hear Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge, the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, square off against A. Lawrence Lowell, the president of Harvard University. Both men were Republicans and Boston Brahmins. But they disagreed on a big political question. Should the United States, having helped win the Great War, join a League of Nations to defend the peace? The Lodge-Lowell debate was the opening salvo in a titanic, yearlong battle over President Woodrow Wilson’s internationalist vision.
It is remarkable how current the transcript reads. In the age of Donald Trump, Americans are again divided over whether multilateral cooperation is consistent with national sovereignty. Until recently, this question seemed resolved. From Franklin D. Roosevelt through Barack Obama, 13 successive U.S. presidents embraced global leadership, upheld international institutions and managed an open, liberal world order.
President Trump has repudiated this legacy. His “America First” agenda resurrects the slogan of interwar isolationists who believed that the nation could and should insulate itself from global troubles. To understand this attitude, look to the past.
Many issues surfaced during the Lodge-Lowell debate a century ago. But the core theme was sovereignty—the future of the United States as an independent republic, able to act freely and shape its own destiny. Three issues were front and center. Was membership in the League of Nations consistent with American self-government under the Constitution? Would new commitments by the League constrain America’s autonomy at home and abroad? And would League membership advance or impede America’s practical interests?
Lodge declared the League of Nations’ founding charter “fatally flawed,” especially Article 10, in which members pledged to preserve “the territorial integrity” and “political independence” of all nations. This was a “tremendous promise” to make, according to Lodge. Besides abandoning George Washington’s sound advice to “steer clear of any permanent alliances,” it would repudiate the Monroe Doctrine, “that invisible line we drew around the Western Hemisphere… to exclude other nations from meddling in American affairs.” To make matters worse, the charter, or Covenant, would violate the Constitution, infringe on congressional prerogatives and imperil U.S. popular sovereignty, Lodge insisted. Other nations would be able to “meddle with our tariff,” he said, and the League might try to overturn a restrictive U.S. immigration policy that “defends this country from a flood of Japanese, Chinese and Hindu labor.”
Lowell offered a spirited riposte. The Covenant posed no threat to sovereignty, since League members were “under no obligation, legal or moral,” to enforce Article 10. The League Council—a forerunner of the United Nations Security Council—lacked the “power to direct or order anything.” The U.S. government, which enjoyed an effective veto in that body, would retain complete authority when it came to the use of force. In sum, the Council was hardly the “supersovereign body” of its critics’ fevered imaginings.
Nor was the Covenant unconstitutional, as its detractors alleged, since its ratification would depend on the Senate’s explicit advice and consent. Certainly, the League would constrain the United States modestly. But this was inherent in international law. “Practically every treaty you make does to some extent limit or inhibit the power which Congress might otherwise exercise,” Lowell noted.
Embracing international cooperation does not sacrifice national sovereignty but rather embodies and expresses it.
The League’s opponents dreamed that America could somehow insulate itself, Lowell continued, when in fact “isolation has passed away.” “Things have changed since the days of Washington,” he argued, and “when the world is moving forward… it is a great mistake to walk backwards and look backwards.” It was no longer possible to limit U.S. security policy to the Western hemisphere. To Lodge’s claim that League membership would repudiate the Monroe Doctrine, which had long protected the Americas, Lowell responded: “That is perfectly true if your object is to preserve the fence. But if your object is to preserve the fruits inside the fence, you do not fail to preserve them by making the fence cover two orchards instead of one.”
Lodge remained unpersuaded—and unbowed. Granted a final rebuttal, he waxed patriotic, invoking the touchstones of American national identity in language that might sound familiar today. “We are a great moral asset of Christian Civilization,” he declared. “How did we get there? By our own efforts. Nobody led us, nobody guided us, nobody controlled us.” He advocated not isolationism but a distinctly American internationalism: “I want to keep America as she has been—not isolated, not prevent her from joining other nations for these great purposes—but I wish her to be master of her fate… We must try to keep America as she is… in her ideals and principles… Let her go on in her beneficent career… as she has always stood, strong and alive, triumphant, free.”
The Lodge-Lowell encounter was a sovereignty debate for the ages, and Lodge had come well-armed. Insistence on national independence? Check. Faith in American exceptionalism? Check. Reverence for the U.S. Constitution? Check. Defense of U.S. freedom of action? Check. Suspicion of supranational bodies? Check.
The governor of Massachusetts, Calvin Coolidge, who moderated the debate and became U.S. president four years later, graciously deemed it a tie. In fact, the event persuaded many Americans that the League of Nations’ charter was flawed. The fight over whether to join the League grew increasingly partisan, as Wilson stubbornly refused compromises that might have allayed sovereigntist fears. In March 1920, the Senate rejected the Covenant. The following year newly elected President Warren G. Harding reaffirmed that verdict, telling Congress, “In the existing League of Nations, world-governing with its super-powers, this republic will have no part.”
History, however, has vindicated Lowell. The world’s descent into the Great Depression and World War II confirmed the need for effective international institutions to address global security threats and manage economic interdependence. The United States created the architecture for such a world, now known as the liberal international order.
And yet U.S. sovereignty concerns never disappeared. Always bubbling below the surface, they have erupted once again, propelled by economic anxiety, nationalist passions, nativist politics and populist resentment. Trump and his senior advisers, including John Bolton and Stephen Miller, have encouraged and exploited these sentiments, which are at the heart of the administration’s antipathy to international bodies, alliances, treaties and the rule of law.
In their misguided effort to “make America great again,” Trump and his cohort are repeating the mistakes of America’s interwar isolationists. Administration officials label their nationalist orientation “principled realism,” but they ignore two fundamental realities. First, embracing international cooperation does not sacrifice national sovereignty but rather embodies and expresses it. Second, the relentless pursuit of freedom of action is ultimately counterproductive.
America cannot always address global challenges on its own. Lowell, unfortunately, is no longer here to set them straight.
Stewart Patrick is the James H. Binger senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of “The Sovereignty Wars: Reconciling America with the World” (Brookings Press: 2018). His new weekly WPR column will appear every Monday.
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