Alexander Hamilton: Early American Internationalist
Under the leadership of President Donald Trump, the United States is heading away from the idea of a world governed by law and reason.
Under Trump, the United States has withdrawn from the Paris Climate Accords and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (sometimes called the Iran Nuclear Deal). During the earlier administration of George W. Bush, our country withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and from negotiations on the Small Arms Treaty, the International Criminal Court, and the Kyoto Protocol on Global Warming. If one judges our government’s attitude toward treaties and international agreements over the last few decades, and the political rhetoric on this subject that comes from various media sources, one would think that the red, white, and blue has always been hostile to the establishment of international law and treaties.
However, a look at the history of our country tells another story. Alexander Hamilton, one of our forefathers, expressed a concern with international law and norms. Like the rest of the founders of our country, Hamilton was a humanistic thinker of the enlightenment era who appreciated the thought of ancient Greek and Roman thinkers – Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, and Polybius.
In addition to his devotion to Greco-Roman thought, Hamilton also contemplated ideas regarding the law of nations – or international law – and wrote about the concept in his writings. Hamilton, George Washington’s Secretary of the Treasury, recommended the writings of enlightenment philosopher John Locke but also Renaissance thinker Hugo Grotius. Grotius, a Dutch jurist, laid the foundation for international law, or the idea that laws can be established for countries to follow. For the jurist, the roots of international law are in natural law – the idea that there are certain laws that are inherit in nature or in a high power like a deity.
Grotius was the first to form the idea of a society of states governed not by warfare or force but by laws and an agreement for enforcement those laws. International relations theorist Hedley Bull said: “the idea of international society which Grotius propounded was given concrete expression in the Peace of Westphalia, and Grotius may be considered the intellectual father of this first general peace settlement of modern times.”
Hamilton showed interest in how international law would affect the new democratic-republic. Writer Michael Lind refers our first Secretary of the Treasury’s reference to international law in the Pacificus Letters where Hamilton defends Proclamation of Neutrality in 1793, President Washington’s decision not to support America’s revolutionary war ally France in its wars in Europe. In this vote of confidence for the Proclamation, Hamilton supported a core norm of the law of nations – declarations of neutrality. In Pacificus No. 3, Hamilton talked about the executive branch of our government being responsible for interpreting treaties when the judiciary is not competent.
As one of the authors of the Federalist Papers, Hamilton was concerned with the ways in which the federal government and our country’s lesser governments interacted with other countries. He led a political party called the Federalists. The party had its roots in the political faction that opposed the Articles of Confederation, our first form of government after the American Revolution. The Articles featured stronger individual state governments and a weaker federal government. Most historians agree the Articles – with its weak federal government – made the new country hard to govern. In the earliest years of our history, state governments passed laws that made it tough for our new country to live up to the Peace of Paris, the agreement that ended the Revolutionary War. This state-based legislation made it difficult for British creditors to be repaid, a key portion of Paris. In the Federalist Papers, Hamilton argued the peace of the whole nation should not be sacrificed for what a part of the country wants. Hamilton warned us that unwise state judgements against a foreign country could “of undresses, be an aggression upon his sovereign, as well as one which violated the stipulations of treaty or the general law of nations.”
Has any citizen heard much about “the law of nations” in today’s political discourse? How do we return to the lead of enlightenment thinkers like Hamilton and Renaissance thinkers like Grotius? How do we return to the idea of the law of nations?
