Much of the world’s current instability in relation to the United States can be traced to a lack of a cohesive long term foreign policy and American interventionism. Although, America’s foreign policy changes with every incoming presidential administration in which each President decides, based on political expediency, in what countries he will interfere and what polices he will pursue, one thing remains constant from administration to administration, interventionism.
As a result of interventionism, neither America’s allies nor its enemies know what to expect out of America from one four year period to the next, except that America will interfere or not interfere with their sovereignty if it fits the political agenda of the elected President. Recent examples of this include involvement in the Contra War in the 1980s, the Kosovo War in the 1990s, and the Iraq War in the 2000s.
In addition to active involvement in the internal affairs of other governments, America’s foreign military bases, financial support for foreign governments, and membership in collective security agreements such as NATO, SEATO and the UN are symptomatic of our interventionist foreign policy.
Very few Americans understand how the Constitution defines “dollars” or the constitutionally delegated monetary powers and prohibitions to Congress and the States. As a result, Americans take many unlawful monetary policies for granted, because they have known nothing different and have not questioned the national government’s authority to do the things it has done.
Every American should question if the government has the authority to emit a legal-tender paper currency irredeemable in silver or gold coin. If they have the authority to seize the people’s gold like the FDR administration did in 1933. If they are authorized to make the notes of private banks obligations of the United States and legal tender or allow private banks, through an administrative agency exercising unlimited discretion, to draw money from the Treasury without specific appropriations made by law.[1]
The youthful tidal wave plunging over America’s southern border has brought the immigration debate to a critical crescendo. While most Americans are struggling with what is the moral and ethical thing to do with the children, the two political parties are struggling with how they are going to out-maneuver the other in a political chess match that has the future control of America at stake. The debate centers on giving citizenship, with full voting privileges, to people who come to America illegally.
Note: Some articles are in multiple Categories in the column to your right, but every article in the blog is listed and hyper linked under only one category below.
The case against secession was best made before 1861 by James Buchanan and Abraham Lincoln, the 15th and 16th Presidents of the United States. Buchanan made his case during his December 3, 1860 State of the Union address and Lincoln made his case during his March 4, 1861 first inaugural address. Unfortunately for their cases against secession, their speeches were filled with a smorgasbord of logical fallacies and unsupported political rhetoric.
Their speeches also showcase how politicians mislead the public, wittingly or unwittingly, into policies that are destructive to the entire nation. The war that transpired as a result of the general acceptance of their rhetoric was completely unnecessary and avoidable. Its prevention required a President willing to act within constitutional bounds and only resort to war for a just cause and then only as the very last resort to restore justice under God’s Law.
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Remember Your Heritage!
American Founding Principles is an organization dedicated to helping the American electorate understand the origins of their liberty and the means to preserve it. The US Constitution, by itself, will not preserve American liberty. It is only by understanding constitutional original intent and holding elected and appointed officials accountable to original intent that Americans can preserve their remaining liberties or restore the liberties that they have already lost. As such, much of this blog focuses on the original intent of the US Constitution as applied to current national issues relevant to both domestic and foreign policy.
The primary underlying tenant of Constitutional interpretation is that it is a common legal maxim that all contracts are to be construed according to the meaning of the parties at the time of making them. For anyone today, to interpret the Constitution contrary to its original intent is to change the Constitution by circumventing the constitutionally mandated amendment process from Article V of the Constitution.
We hope you find American Founding Principles useful to building your understanding of original American values and if you have any questions or have something to add, please send a response or leave a comment.
America was once the freest nation in the history of the world and set the standard for others countries to follow. It has since lost much of the freedom for which the founding cultures sacrificed their lives, fortunes and sacred honor and now America can no longer make this claim.
Evidence of this decline is objectively displayed in the Wall Street Journal and the Heritage Foundation’s 2013 Index of Economic Freedom, available at http://www.heritage.org/index/, in which America is ranked tenth behind Denmark out of 177 ranked countries. The index measures ten benchmarks of economic freedom that it defines as the fundamental right of every human to control his or her own labor and property.[1]
The Law of Nations, which governs how one nation relates to another, was so much a part of our founding culture that the framers of the Constitution only referenced it once in the Constitution, in which it states: “To define and punish piracies and felonies committed on the high seas and offences against the Law of Nations.”[1] Although, only referenced once in the Constitution it was referenced thirteen times, according to Madison’s notes, by Constitutional Convention delegates during the Constitutional Convention and Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story in his Commentaries on the Constitution referenced it numerous times when expounding on Constitutional clauses dealing with foreign policy. Additionally, one can also see evidence of the Law of Nations articulated in George Washington’s farewell address, the Monroe Doctrine, in every President’s Congressional request for a declaration of war until the Civil War, and in other writings of our founders. The absence of a declaratory statement identifying the Law of Nations as the foundation of American foreign policy should not be taken to mean that its tenants are any less binding today. Just like English Common Law was the foundation upon which the Constitution was written, so too is the Law of Nations the foundation upon which the framers defined the foreign policy powers delegated to our national government from the people.
