In today’s dangerous world, in which the United States has, since World War II, become increasingly like the British Empire against which it won its independence, to what historical tradition can the U.S. look, to find a path forward? To what policies can the U.S. turn to address the bankruptcy of the trans-Atlantic financial system, the inadequacy of its economic infrastructure, the shortcomings in its culture?
On this July 4, it were well to recall what Secretary of State John Quincy Adams told the House of Representatives on July 4, 1821, that while the United States would offer its prayers and well-wishes to people around the world seeking their freedom, America “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,” he said.
“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.”
In this case, what would happen to the Republic? “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.”
That history was referenced in the recollection of the connections between the U.S. and Russia, dating back to the time of the U.S. War of Independence, shared by President Vladimir Putin with President Donald Trump during their phone conversation on July 3, which took up topics of potential mutual benefit, and the issues of war and peace, particularly in Southwest Asia and Ukraine.
Instead of attempting regime change and trying to reshape the world through force, the United States would do better to celebrate its independence by adopting a mission commensurate with the causes for which it was founded. The first of the “Facts submitted to a candid world” in the Declaration of Independence, on the necessity of breaking from the England of King George III, was, “He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.”
The LaRouche Organization’s “Economic Recovery Plan 2025 in the Spirit of 1776” is full of wholesome policies and concepts, necessary for the public good.
The Schiller Institute’s upcoming July 12-13 conference in Berlin, Germany (also streamed online) will assemble speakers and activists who have taken it upon themselves to create a new paradigm, based not on hegemony and zero-sum thinking, but the truly human capability of creative reason to fundamentally transform humankind’s power, economic and cultural.
The International Peace Coalition meeting on July 4 takes up the cause of renewing the international conspiracy that should be.
