“For too long, Americans have been fined, harassed, and even charged by foreign authorities for exercising their free speech rights. Today, I am announcing a new visa restriction policy that will apply to foreign officials and persons who are complicit in censoring Americans. Free speech is essential to the American way of life a birthright over which foreign governments have no authority,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio tweeted, articulating what might be considered an official policy of the U.S. administration.
He added, “Foreigners who work to undermine the rights of Americans should not enjoy the privilege of traveling to our country. Whether in Latin America, Europe, or elsewhere, the days of passive treatment for those who work to undermine the rights of Americans are over.”
This statement follows after I discovered that the State Department has a Substack account where it recently posted an essay titled “The Need for Civilizational Allies”, which was thematically similar to Vice President J.D. Vance’s speech at February’s Munich Security Conference.
The essay observes that the American Founders were culturally indebted to Europe:
Our transatlantic partnership is underpinned by a rich Western tradition of natural law, virtue ethics, and national sovereignty. This tradition flows from Athens and Rome, through medieval Christianity, to English common law, and ultimately into America’s founding documents. The Declaration’s revolutionary assertion that men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights echoes the thought of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and other European heavyweights who recognized that all men possess natural rights that no government can arbitrate or deny. America remains indebted to Europe for this intellectual and cultural legacy.
One can leave it to historians to judge whether this is a worthy summation, whether tying disparate strings into one civilizational cycle is ahistorical, or to nitpick about selection biases. But this is a clarifying doctrinal endeavor on many levels. On one hand, the new State rhetoric on “civilizational allies” might sound unnecessarily preachy and more French revolutionary than American. A British friend of mine memorably described Vance’s Munich speech as “just like the neocons, but with a new ideological software”—Americans cannot stop lecturing Europeans and all that.
But it appears that there’s a concrete policy rationale behind it. If the EU is indeed a potential “trade and regulation” hegemon, then wrecking the EU with carrots and sticks applied to various components within it makes total sense.
It also makes sense to strip Europe of its hypocritical “NATO is an alliance of values” grandstanding when the core values within the alliance are no longer coherent. Consider that it has often been used, especially by northern and western Europeans, to be sanctimonious while freeriding on American security, both during George W. Bush’s era of ultra-neoconservatism and Donald Trump’s of foreign policy restraint. But if NATO or the “West” is truly an alliance of values, then the U.S. gets to define those values as well, and those values include the core values that Americans cherish, including freedom of speech and religion, property rights, and the pursuit of prosperity. If it is not an alliance of values, as the Europeans tacitly suggest, then it is an alliance based on geographical interests, in which case Ukraine matters a lot less to the U.S. than to, say, Poland or Germany.
At the risk of oversimplifying, the U.S. tried to institutionalize peace in the continent after the Second World War and especially since the end of the Cold war. Along the way, it created this bloated supranational institution that is now a trade rival to the U.S. One might argue that there are signs that the Americans have started to reverse the process by deinstitutionalizing the continent, that is to say, by sidelining the European Union while amplifying aligned powers within. Basically, the State essay’s rhetoric, only employed as rhetoric, would have been preachy, but when it informs coercive policies towards the EU, then there appears to be a broader rationale behind it.
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That said, historically, revolutions (and reactions) are best exported through examples, not through imposition from abroad. Any imposition prompts a coalition to oppose it; power begs to be balanced, and balancing goes both ways. If the U.S. opposes the consolidation of the EU as a superpower, that’s a healthy impulse, and a natural balancing act follows. State policies can be geared towards classic “divide and rule.” If the U.S. tries to force American values on Europe, then it will result in a large section of Europeans thinking that America is a revolutionary power, akin to the Jacobins or the Bolsheviks—an enemy nation determined to cause social chaos.
As John Quincy Adams said, America “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.”
In foreign policy, equilibrium during multipolarity is the greatest aspirational virtue. It is crucial for the current diplomats to remember that.
