Democracy Vs. Liberty: Trump Fails To Understand The Founders, As Have All Presidents Since Wilson

Authored by Steve H. Hanke of the Johns Hopkins University. Follow him on Twitter @Steve_Hanke.

In the aftermath of World War I, President Woodrow Wilson set out to make the world safe for democracy. Since then, U.S. Presidents have marched to the drumbeat of Wilsonian idealism. Indeed, most U.S. foreign policy is carried out under the pretext — and in some cases perhaps the genuine belief — that America is delivering democracy to the rest of the world. President Trump’s recent pronouncements at the United Nations are neither new nor unusual. 

Most people, including most Americans, would be surprised to learn that the word “democracy” does not appear in the Declaration of Independence (1776) or the Constitution of the United States of America (1789). They would also be shocked to learn the reason for the absence of the word democracy in the founding documents of the U.S.A. Contrary to what propaganda has led the public to believe, America’s Founding Fathers were skeptical and anxious about democracy. They were aware of the evils that accompany a tyranny of the majority. The Framers of the Constitution went to great lengths to ensure that the federal government was not based on the will of the majority and was not, therefore, democratic.

The Constitution divided the federal government into legislative, executive and judicial branches. Each branch was designed to check the power of the other branches. The Founders did not want to rely only on the voters to check government power. As a result, citizens were given very little power to select federal officials.

Neither the President, nor members of the judiciary, nor the Senate were elected by direct popular vote. Only the members of the House of Representatives were directly elected by popular vote. Even in this case, the franchise was quite restricted.

If the Framers of the Constitution did not embrace democracy, what did they adhere to? To a man, the Framers agreed that the purpose of government was to secure citizens in John Locke’s trilogy of the rights to life, liberty and property. The Framers wrote extensively and eloquently. On property, for example, John Adams wrote that “the moment the idea is admitted into society, that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence.”

The Founders’ actions often spoke even louder than their words. Alexander Hamilton, a distinguished lawyer, took on many famous cases out of principle. After the Revolutionary War, the state of New York enacted harsh measures against Loyalists and British subjects. These included the Confiscation Act (1779), the Citation Act (1782) and the Trespass Act (1783). All involved the taking of property. In Hamilton’s view, these Acts illustrated the inherent difference between democracy and the law. Even though the Acts were widely popular, they flouted fundamental principles of property law. Hamilton carried his views into action and successfully defended — in the face of enormous public hostility — those who had property taken under these three New York state statutes.

The Constitution was designed to further the cause of liberty, not democracy. To do that, the Constitution protected individuals’ rights from the government, as well as from their fellow citizens. To that end, the Constitution laid down clear, unequivocal and enforceable rules to protect individuals’ rights. In consequence, the government’s scope and scale were strictly limited. Economic liberty, which is a precondition for growth and prosperity, was enshrined in the Constitution.

After European settlement, America consisted of thirteen English colonies. They benefited from a rather light administration from London and salutary neglect. This contrasted with the French colonies, which were controlled from Paris, and the Spanish colonies, which had entire institutional superstructures imposed from Spain.

Everything did not go well in the American colonies, however. One major colonial problem centered on money. Officially, British silver coins were the coin of the realm in America. But there were problems. The Navigation Acts prohibited the export of silver coins from England. There was also a prohibition against any of the colonies establishing mints. As a result, there was an endemic shortage of silver coins in the colonies. To fill this large gap, bills of credit were issued and circulated freely during the first half of the eighteenth century.

This resulted in high inflation, which forced most of the colonies to abandon fixed exchange rates and a specie standard. Things finally deteriorated to such an extent that the British Board of Trade imposed the Currency Acts of 1751 and 1764. These prohibited the issuance and use of bills of credit not fully backed by specie. The prohibitions against paper money created an enormous source of resentment in the colonies. Coupled with the better-known Stamp Act of 1765, the prohibitions on bills of credit set the stage for the Declaration of Independence and the ensuing Revolutionary War.

The Revolutionary War added to America’s money problems. The best estimates place the cost of the Revolutionary War at about 15 to 20 percent of the colonies’ GNP. Roughly 85 percent of it was financed with fiat money. During the 1775-80 period, annual inflation was about 65 percent. Subsequently — and prior to the Constitutional Convention (1787) — the economic situation was one in which individual states increased taxes and regulations dramatically and money remained unstable. In addition, there was a great deal of political corruption and scandal. And to top it off, the economy was in a general slump which was punctuated by the crisis of 1787.

As a reaction to the overall political-economic situation, the Constitutional Convention convened in 1787 in Philadelphia. In due course, the Constitution was crafted and ratified in 1789. It is a short, clear, intelligible document. The Constitution’s preamble contains only 52 words which are followed by seven short articles and ten amendments known as the Bill of Rights (1791).

The original Constitution established the rule of law and limited government. It is noteworthy that about 20 percent of the Constitution itemizes things that the federal and state governments may not do, while only 10 percent of the Constitution is concerned with positive grants of power. In total, the legitimate powers granted by the Constitution were less than those that had existed. The bulk of the Constitution — about 70 percent — addresses the Framers’ conception of their main task: to bring the United States and its government under the rule of law.

The Constitution is primarily a structural and procedural document that itemizes who is to exercise power and how they are to exercise it. A great deal of stress is placed on the separation of powers and the checks and balances in the system. These were not a Cartesian construct or formula aimed at social engineering, but a shield to protect the people from the government. In short, the Constitution was designed to govern the government, not the people.

The Bill of Rights establishes the rights of the people against infringements by the State. The only thing that the citizens can demand from the State, under the Bill of Rights, is for a trial by a jury. The rest of the citizens’ rights are protections from the State. For roughly a century after the Constitution was ratified, private property, contracts and free internal trade within the United States were sacred. The scope and scale of the government remained very constrained. All this was very consistent with what was understood to be liberty.

A remark about the Framers and the public is in order. There were 55 Framers and 35 had attended college. The college entry standards in those days were very high and strict. At the age of 14 or 15, the normal college entry age, students were required to be fluent in both Latin and Greek and proficient in the Classics. They were skilled at the art of rhetoric and were keenly aware of the necessity of garnering public support for their constitutional project. For the Framers, policies needed to be developed from the bottom up.

At the time, Americans were literate and well informed, via pamphlets and manuscripts, about the political debates of the day. There were four times as many newspapers in the United States as there were in France, which was the center of continental thinking and debate on many constitutional and philosophic matters. The Federalist Papers were published in 1787 and 1788 in New York City’s Independent Journal, an ordinary newspaper. These important essays — written under pseudonyms by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay — were of very high quality and set the stage for the Constitutional Convention and the resulting product. In passing, it is worth mentioning that Hamilton organized this project, wrote most of the essays, and of all the Founding Fathers, performed most of the intellectual work for the least historical credit. That said, two notable economists have given Hamilton his due. Lionel Robbins thought the Federalist Papers were “the best book on political science and its broad practical aspects written in the last thousand years.” And if that were not enough, Milton Friedman wrote in 1973 that Federalist Paper 15, written by Hamilton, “contains a more cogent analysis of the European Common Market than any I have seen from the pen of a modern writer.”

After the Constitution was ratified and George Washington was elected President, the new federal government lacked credibility. Public finances hung like a threatening cloud over the government. Recall that paper money and debt were innovations of the colonial era, and that once the Revolutionary War began, Americans used these innovations to the maximum. As a result, the United States was born in a sea of debt. A majority of the public favored a debt default. Alexander Hamilton, acting as Washington’s Secretary of the Treasury, was firmly against default. As a matter of principle, he argued that the sanctity of contracts was the foundation of all morality. And as a practical matter, Hamilton argued that good government depended on its ability to fulfill its promises.

Hamilton won the argument and set about digging the country out of its financial debacle. Among other things, Hamilton was — what would today be called — a first-class financial engineer. He established a federal sinking fund to finance the Revolutionary War debt. He also engineered a large debt swap in which the debts of individual states were assumed by the newly created federal government. By August 1791, federal bonds sold above par in Europe, and by 1795, all foreign debts had been paid off. Hamilton’s solution for America’s debt problem provided the country with a credibility and confidence shock.

The state of economic affairs in the United States, roughly until World War I, was in the spirit of the Constitution. The economy flourished, with large increases in labor and capital inputs as well as strong productivity growth. There was, of course, one near fatal interruption during this period: the Civil War. The war consumed 15 to 20 percent of GNP, about the same proportion as during the Revolutionary War. War finance was somewhat similar in the Confederacy (the South) as it was during the Revolutionary War. About 60 percent of the financing for the southern effort was paper money. The North also resorted to fiat money financing, but at only a 13 percent rate. Consequently, there was an inflationary surge.

In addition to the major disruption caused by the Civil War, it is worth mentioning one major anomaly in the U.S. economy: lands owned by the federal, as well as state and local, governments.

Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury, wanted to sell the public lands as fast as possible. This did not happen. In consequence, the government still owns a huge amount of real estate. Its surface area is about six times larger than the total area of France. This is a stateowned enterprise. As you might expect, it is also unproductive. Detailed studies of SOE lands indicate that they are only about 25-30 percent as productive as comparable private ones.

America’s SOE lands have been the center of repeated debates about the free market system in the United States. Indeed, the American Economic Association put itself at the center of one of these debates. One, possibly the major, motivation for establishing the American Economic Association was as a protest against laissez-faire attitudes in the United States. Not surprisingly, the May 1885 American Economic Review contains three papers justifying the retention of government-owned timberlands!

On the eve of World War I, government expenditures were less than 2 percent of GNP and 99 percent of the population paid no income tax. The income tax had just been introduced, but the top rate was only 7 percent and applied to incomes exceeding $500,000. The federal government had around 400,000 employees, less than 1 percent of the labor force. About 165,000 troops were on active duty. No federal regulations of capital or labor markets existed. Agricultural production and distribution were also unregulated.

There was no minimum wage rate and no social security. One area where there was a rather aggressive interference in the economy concerned the rates and tariffs that the railroads charged. Antitrust was also strong.

The conflagration of World War I marks a violent break with the letter and spirit of the Constitution. Property rights were suspended on a large scale. There were wide-scale nationalizations of rail, telephone, telegraph and to a lesser degree ocean shipping. Over 100 manufacturing plants were nationalized. The government got involved in labor-management relations under the Adams Act in 1916. Conscription was instituted. The Espionage Act was passed in 1917. The Sedition Act of 1918 imposed penalties for anti-government expression, subverting the Bill of Rights. The novelist, Upton Sinclair was actually arrested for reading the Bill of Rights and Roger Baldwin, one of the founders of the American Civil Liberties Union, was arrested for reading the Constitution. President Woodrow Wilson accomplished all this under emergency powers granted to him by Congress in 1916.

Much of this anti-Constitutional apparatus was scrapped after World War I. However, residues remained and eventually resurfaced. All it took were other national emergencies — the Great Depression, World War II, the Vietnam War, and so on. With each, laws were enacted, bureaus created and the budgets enlarged. In many cases, these changes turned out to be permanent. The result is that crises acted as a ratchet, shifting the trend line of government size and scope up to a higher level.

It comes as no surprise that governments spend more money and regulate more actively during crises — wars and economic bailouts are expensive and complicated. But a more active government also attracts opportunists, who perceive that a national emergency can serve as a useful pretext for achieving their own objectives.

The U.S. and other countries seem no more aware of this today than they were in the past. And yet history has provided many examples to illustrate how damaging it is. Take the Great Depression. At that time, the organized farm lobbies, having sought subsidies for decades, took advantage of the crisis to pass a sweeping rescue package, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, whose title declared it to be “an act to relieve the existing national economic emergency.”

Almost 80 years later, the farmers are still sucking money from the rest of society and agricultural policy has been enlarged to satisfy a variety of other interest groups, including conservationists, nutritionists and friends of the Third World. Then, during World War II, when government accounted for nearly half the U.S. GDP, virtually every interest group tried to tap into the vastly enlarged government budget. Even bureaus seemingly remote from the war effort, such as the Department of the Interior (which is in charge of government lands and natural resources), claimed to be performing “essential war work” and to be entitled to bigger budgets and more personnel.

Within the U.S. government, the war on terrorism has given cover to a multitude of parochial opportunists, whose proposals range from bailing out the airlines to nationalizing vaccine production. As a result, former President George W. Bush — a so-called conservative — ushered in a record-setting expansion of government. This trend continued with the left-of-center President Obama. And now, populist President Trump promises more of the same. 

What lessons can we learn? First, “democracy” and “freedom” are not interchangeable words. Second, only the first century of the American experience represents a standard for freedom. Expanding democracy is a slogan which requires great caution. It can easily result in elected tyranny. Freedom is the concept. Our challenge is to persuade every citizen that benefits flow from freedom’s practical applications. Freedom might then flourish in very diverse and unexpected forms in different parts of the world.

Doug Casey On The End Of The Nation-State

Authored by Doug Casey via InternationalMan.com,

There have been a fair number of references to the subject of “phyles” in Casey Research publications over the years. This essay will discuss the topic in detail. Especially how phyles are likely to replace the nation-state, one of mankind’s worst inventions.

Now might be a good time to discuss the subject. We’ll have an almost unremitting stream of bad news, on multiple fronts, for years to come. So it might be good to keep a hopeful prospect in mind.

Let’s start by looking at where we’ve been. I trust you’ll excuse my skating over all of human political history in a few paragraphs, but my object is to provide a framework for where we’re going, rather than an anthropological monograph.

Mankind has, so far, gone through three main stages of political organization since Day One, say 200,000 years ago, when anatomically modern men started appearing. We can call them Tribes, Kingdoms, and Nation-States.

Karl Marx had a lot of things wrong, especially his moral philosophy. But one of the acute observations he made was that the means of production are perhaps the most important determinant of how a society is structured. Based on that, so far in history, only two really important things have happened: the Agricultural Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. Everything else is just a footnote.

Let’s see how these things relate.

The Agricultural Revolution and the End of Tribes

In prehistoric times, the largest political/economic group was the tribe. In that man is a social creature, it was natural enough to be loyal to the tribe. It made sense. Almost everyone in the tribe was genetically related, and the group was essential for mutual survival in the wilderness. That made them the totality of people that counted in a person’s life—except for “others” from alien tribes, who were in competition for scarce resources and might want to kill you for good measure.

Tribes tend to be natural meritocracies, with the smartest and the strongest assuming leadership. But they’re also natural democracies, small enough that everyone can have a say on important issues. Tribes are small enough that everybody knows everyone else, and knows what their weak and strong points are. Everyone falls into a niche of marginal advantage, doing what they do best, simply because that’s necessary to survive. Bad actors are ostracized or fail to wake up, in a pool of their own blood, some morning. Tribes are socially constraining but, considering the many faults of human nature, a natural and useful form of organization in a society with primitive technology.

As people built their pool of capital and technology over many generations, however, populations grew. At the end of the last Ice Age, around 12,000 years ago, all over the world, there was a population explosion. People started living in towns and relying on agriculture as opposed to hunting and gathering. Large groups of people living together formed hierarchies, with a king of some description on top of the heap.

Those who adapted to the new agricultural technology and the new political structure accumulated the excess resources necessary for waging extended warfare against tribes still living at a subsistence level. The more evolved societies had the numbers and the weapons to completely triumph over the laggards. If you wanted to stay tribal, you’d better live in the middle of nowhere, someplace devoid of the resources others might want. Otherwise it was a sure thing that a nearby kingdom would enslave you and steal your property.

The Industrial Revolution and the End of Kingdoms

From around 12,000 B.C. to roughly the mid-1600s, the world’s cultures were organized under strong men, ranging from petty lords to kings, pharaohs, or emperors.

It’s odd, to me at least, how much the human animal seems to like the idea of monarchy. It’s mythologized, especially in a medieval context, as a system with noble kings, fair princesses, and brave knights riding out of castles on a hill to right injustices. As my friend Rick Maybury likes to point out, quite accurately, the reality differs quite a bit from the myth. The king is rarely more than a successful thug, a Tony Soprano at best, or perhaps a little Stalin. The princess was an unbathed hag in a chastity belt, the knight a hired killer, and the shining castle on the hill the headquarters of a concentration camp, with plenty of dungeons for the politically incorrect.

With kingdoms, loyalties weren’t so much to the “country”—a nebulous and arbitrary concept—but to the ruler. You were the subject of a king, first and foremost. Your linguistic, ethnic, religious, and other affiliations were secondary. It’s strange how, when people think of the kingdom period of history, they think only in terms of what the ruling classes did and had. Even though, if you were born then, the chances were 98% you’d be a simple peasant who owned nothing, knew nothing beyond what his betters told him, and sent most of his surplus production to his rulers. But, again, the gradual accumulation of capital and knowledge made the next step possible: the Industrial Revolution.

The Industrial Revolution and the End of the Nation-State

As the means of production changed, with the substitution of machines for muscle, the amount of wealth took a huge leap forward. The average man still might not have had much, but the possibility to do something other than beat the earth with a stick for his whole life opened up, largely as a result of the Renaissance.

Then the game changed totally with the American and French Revolutions. People no longer felt they were owned by some ruler; instead they now gave their loyalty to a new institution, the nation-state. Some innate atavism, probably dating back to before humans branched from the chimpanzees about 3 million years ago, seems to dictate the Naked Ape to give his loyalty to something bigger than himself. Which has delivered us to today’s prevailing norm, the nation-state, a group of people who tend to share language, religion, and ethnicity. The idea of the nation-state is especially effective when it’s organized as a “democracy,” where the average person is given the illusion he has some measure of control over where the leviathan is headed.

On the plus side, by the end of the 18th century, the Industrial Revolution had provided the common man with the personal freedom, as well as the capital and technology, to improve things at a rapidly accelerating pace.

What caused the sea change?

I’ll speculate it was largely due to an intellectual factor, the invention of the printing press; and a physical factor, the widespread use of gunpowder. The printing press destroyed the monopoly the elites had on knowledge; the average man could now see that they were no smarter or “better” than he was. If he was going to fight them (conflict is, after all, what politics is all about), it didn’t have to be just because he was told to, but because he was motivated by an idea. And now, with gunpowder, he was on an equal footing with the ruler’s knights and professional soldiers.

Right now I believe we’re at the cusp of another change, at least as important as the ones that took place around 12,000 years ago and several hundred years ago. Even though things are starting to look truly grim for the individual, with collapsing economic structures and increasingly virulent governments, I suspect help is on the way from historical evolution. Just as the agricultural revolution put an end to tribalism and the industrial revolution killed the kingdom, I think we’re heading for another multipronged revolution that’s going to make the nation-state an anachronism. It won’t happen next month, or next year. But I’ll bet the pattern will start becoming clear within the lifetime of many now reading this.

What pattern am I talking about? Once again, a reference to the evil genius Karl Marx, with his concept of the “withering away of the State.” By the end of this century, I suspect the US and most other nation-states will have, for all practical purposes, ceased to exist.

The Problem with the State—And Your Nation-State

Of course, while I suspect that many of you are sympathetic to that sentiment, you also think the concept is too far out, and that I’m guilty of wishful thinking. People believe the state is necessary and—generally—good. They never even question whether the institution is permanent.

My view is that the institution of the state itself is a bad thing. It’s not a question of getting the right people into the government; the institution itself is hopelessly flawed and necessarily corrupts the people that compose it, as well as the people it rules. This statement invariably shocks people, who believe that government is both a necessary and permanent part of the cosmic firmament.

The problem is that government is based on coercion, and it is, at a minimum, suboptimal to base a social structure on institutionalized coercion. Let me urge you to read the Tannehills’ superb The Market for Liberty, which is available for free, download here.

One of the huge changes brought by the printing press and advanced exponentially by the Internet is that people are able to readily pursue different interests and points of view. As a result, they have less and less in common: living within the same political borders is no longer enough to make them countrymen. That’s a big change from pre-agricultural times when members of the same tribe had quite a bit—almost everything—in common. But this has been increasingly diluted in the times of the kingdom and the nation-state. If you’re honest, you may find you have very little in common with most of your countrymen besides superficialities and trivialities.

Ponder that point for a minute. What do you have in common with your fellow countrymen? A mode of living, (perhaps) a common language, possibly some shared experiences and myths, and a common ruler. But very little of any real meaning or importance. To start with, they’re more likely to be an active danger to you than the citizens of a presumed “enemy” country, say, like Iran. If you earn a good living, certainly if you own a business and have assets, your fellow Americans are the ones who actually present the clear and present danger. The average American (about 50% of them now) pays no income tax. Even if he’s not actually a direct or indirect employee of the government, he’s a net recipient of its largesse, which is to say your wealth, through Social Security and other welfare programs.

Over the years, I’ve found I have much more in common with people of my own social or economic station or occupation in France, Argentina, or Hong Kong, than with an American union worker in Detroit or a resident of the LA barrios. I suspect many of you would agree with that observation. What’s actually important in relationships is shared values, principles, interests, and philosophy. Geographical proximity, and a common nationality, is meaningless—no more than an accident of birth. I have much more loyalty to a friend in the Congo—although we’re different colors, have different cultures, different native languages, and different life experiences—than I do to the Americans who live down the highway in the trailer park. I see the world the same way my Congolese friend does; he’s an asset to my life. I’m necessarily at odds with many of “my fellow Americans”; they’re an active and growing liability.

Some might read this and find a disturbing lack of loyalty to the state. It sounds seditious. Professional jingoists like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, or almost anyone around the Washington Beltway go white with rage when they hear talk like this. The fact is that loyalty to a state, just because you happen to have been born in its bailiwick, is simply stupid.

As far as I can tell, there are only two federal crimes specified in the US Constitution: counterfeiting and treason. That’s a far cry from today’s world, where almost every real and imagined crime has been federalized, underscoring that the whole document is a meaningless dead letter, little more than a historical artifact. Even so, that also confirms that the Constitution was quite imperfect, even in its original form. Counterfeiting is simple fraud. Why should it be singled out especially as a crime? (Okay, that opens up a whole new can of worms… but not one I’ll go into here.) Treason is usually defined as an attempt to overthrow a government or withdraw loyalty from a sovereign. A rather odd proviso to have when the framers of the Constitution had done just that only a few years before, one would think.

The way I see it, Thomas Paine had it right when he said: “My country is wherever liberty lives.”

But where does liberty live today? Actually, it no longer has a home. It’s become a true refugee since America, which was an excellent idea that grew roots in a country of that name, degenerated into the United States. Which is just another unfortunate nation-state. And it’s on the slippery slope.

Mapping Europe's Secessionist Movements

Despite the elites" desperate hope that recent "losses" in Holland France "prove" the anti-establishment movement is fading (although they all saw soaring popularity), with Europeans ready to protest, there are still numerous regions urging secession...

There have been 486 military conlicts in Europe in the last 2000 years and while the last decade or two has been "peaceful", we suspect that will not last.

As BofAML"s Transforming World Atlas details, many areas in Europe have strong secessionist movements (e.g. Scotland, Catalonia, Basque, Flanders, Veneto) or have political parties agitating for greater ruling autonomy.

European political union remains elusive, so does fiscal union, and monetary union is tarred by the fact that nine EU countries - soon to be eight - (Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Sweden, and The UK) do not use the Euro.

Is America's Alliance with Turkey Doomed?

Authored by Sukru Hanioglu via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

The historic breakdown in Anglo-Ottoman relations is a useful model for evaluating today’s troubled alliance between the United States and Turkey

SHORTLY BEFORE his death in 1869, the pro-Western former Ottoman grand vizier and foreign minister Keçecizâde Mehmed Fuad Pasha commented, “It appeared preferable that . . . we should relinquish several of our provinces rather than see England abandon us.” In response to this commitment, the British made the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire against Russian aggression a key pillar of their foreign policy.

Yet, in spite of the significance that Istanbul and London attached to their alliance in the 1850s, both sides were determined to eradicate each other by 1914. As Prime Minister Herbert Asquith put it, Britain was “determined to ring the death-knell of Ottoman dominion, not only in Europe, but in Asia as well.” In response, the Ottoman government described the British as “the greatest enemy” of not only the sultan’s empire but also of Islam itself.

The startling breakdown in Anglo-Ottoman relations might serve as a useful model for policymakers to evaluate the troubled alliance between the United States and Turkey. The sixty-year period between the Crimean War of 1853–56 and the July Crisis of 1914 resembles the era that opened with the admission of Turkey into NATO in 1952 and appears to be ending today. As the Anglo-Ottoman case warns, alliances formed in response to an external threat between powers that view each other as cultural “others” may deteriorate after the threat diminishes. Suffering from such alliance fatigue, erstwhile partners become clashing rivals.

THE ANGLO-RUSSIAN Great Game, waged across the vast lands stretching from Europe to Central Asia during the nineteenth century, rendered the Ottoman Empire an invaluable strategic asset in the eyes of British policymakers. Although the British public frowned upon the Ottoman Turks’ “peculiar Oriental ways,” and regarded them as “uncivilized Mohammedan barbarians” for their treatment of Christian subjects, Whitehall recognized that they could serve as a bulwark against Russia.

The Ottomans, likewise, recognized the value of having Britain as an ally given the looming threats posed by their neighbors, Russia and Austria. Though the Ottomans previously regarded the British as an untrustworthy non-Muslim power, the cooperation was a win-win venture, and the two powers agreed to partner economically and militarily. The strategic collaboration between them reached its zenith in 1853 when, along with other allies, they successfully waged war against Russia in Crimea.

America’s relative indifference to the Ottoman Empire and the early Turkish Republic was reminiscent of Otto von Bismarck’s famous remark that European Turkey “was not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier.” The United States and the Ottoman Empire fought World War I on opposite sides, but did not clash with each other. Moreover, while President Woodrow Wilson discussed the future of the Ottoman Empire in his Fourteen Points, the United States did not actively participate in its partition. In 1922–23, Washington merely sent observers to the Conference of Lausanne, which produced the final peace treaty between the victors of World War I and Turkey. Though these observers helped Turkey reject British demands on Mosul oil through the Turkish Petroleum Company—an enterprise that was Turkish in name only—American involvement in Turkish affairs ended there. The United States secured the interests of American oil companies while frustrating British plans to cartelize Middle Eastern oil. Beyond this, Turkey was not worth the bones of a single American GI.

Though Turkey was a remote power representing an inherently different culture, exchanges between the nation’s modern founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt reveal that, by the late 1930s, Washington viewed Ankara’s example as a model for the region. Early on in the Cold War, the United States moved to expand its relationship with Turkey. President Harry Truman reckoned that a friendly Turkey would be a strategic asset capable of containing the Soviet expansion into the Middle East, keeping the Soviet Black Sea fleet at bay and providing military bases whence to attack the Soviet Union. Turkey could additionally safeguard American interests in a region gaining in importance thanks to its rich oil reserves. Ankara similarly stood to benefit from U.S. protection. Threatened by Joseph Stalin, who condescendingly demanded the return of two provinces in Eastern Anatolia to their “motherland” and requested “joint” control over the straits, Turkey desperately sought help from America. After Turkey joined NATO in 1952, a relationship similar to the Anglo-Ottoman partnership developed.

Notwithstanding differences of setting, the backgrounds of the Anglo-Ottoman and American-Turkish partnerships are so alike that one may consider the latter as a continuation of the former. We can evaluate the current alliance fatigue and future of U.S.-Turkey relations by comparing them with those of the Anglo-Ottoman partnership. Five commonalities come into relief: selling the partnership, enduring cultural differences, becoming regional rivals, asymmetric relations and unsolicited domestic interventions.

BOTH THE Anglo-Ottoman and Turkish-American relationships succumbed to alliance fatigue. Each party had difficulty selling the merits of the partnership to the public. This was partly due to specific political events, but also because of enduring cultural differences previously ignored for the sake of sustaining the strategic alliances.

British statesmen who hoped to establish an alliance with the Ottoman Empire were unable to change negative public perceptions of it by the turn of the nineteenth century. When the House of Commons debated supporting the Ottoman Empire against Russia in 1791, Edmund Burke objected. He intensely disliked “this anti-crusade” and opposed “favoring such barbarians.” This impression hardly changed during the Greek War of Independence (1821–29), in which the Ottomans allegedly oppressed defenseless Christians.

After 1839, though, positive press coverage made it easier to sell the benefits of an Anglo-Ottoman partnership. The implementation of the tanzimat, the Ottoman Empire’s grand reorganization program, allowed British public intellectuals to portray reformist Ottomans as genuinely liberal and amenable to Westernization, in contrast to absolutist powers such as Russia. By the end of the Crimean War, the Ottomans had become staunch allies in defending the liberal cause and often followed British counsel. For example, Sultan Abdülmecid (r. 1839–61) granted equality in all respects to his non-Muslim subjects in 1856, at the behest of Britain. Nationalists who defended extensive autonomy or separatism gradually gained the upper hand in non-Muslim Ottoman communities that viewed this measure to be “too little, too late.” This consequently led to a long-term struggle between the Ottoman center and its non-Muslim communities.

In reality, Ottoman reformist statesmen were liberal only insofar as the territorial integrity of their empire was not challenged. When liberal policies threatened to dismantle the empire into the États Désunis de Turquie, as Fuad Pasha sarcastically remarked, the Ottomans had to draw a red line. Heavy-handed Ottoman repression in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Bulgaria in 1875–76 tarnished the positive perception the Crimean era had yielded. The British public’s outcry against Istanbul’s treatment of Ottoman Christians influenced British policymakers. At the Constantinople Conference of 1876, Lord Salisbury worked with Count Nikolay Pavlovich Ignatyev of Russia and incensed Ottoman statesmen by demanding extensive reforms favoring Ottoman Christians.

Thereafter, Britain cold-bloodedly watched the Russians defeat the Ottomans in 1877–78. Though the British could have aided the Ottomans, they refrained as their public had low esteem for the “bloodthirsty Muslim tyrants.” After signing the Treaty of Berlin in 1878, which established the autonomous Principality of Bulgaria, Britain continued pressuring the Ottomans to adopt reforms supporting the Macedonian Christians and Armenians. Abdülhamid II (r. 1876–1909), the new Ottoman sultan—who assumed the mantle of caliph, the ostensible leader of all Sunni Muslims—responded by initiating a policy of pan-Islamism, which threatened the British in their heavily Muslim colonies, particularly India and Egypt. This was mostly an empty threat, but the British eagerly bought in. They once again made the Ottomans the illiberal “other.”

By the 1900s, the Ottoman public was convinced that Britain had a hidden agenda of establishing an Armenian kingdom and separating Macedonia from the empire. For their part, the British public spotted an Ottoman specter behind the intensified Islamist sentiments in Egypt, India and other parts of its empire. The diminishing Russian threat paved the way for the Anglo-Russian entente of 1907, a diplomatic revolution. This practically marked the end of cooperation between London and Istanbul, though neither party officially pronounced it “dead.” Rather, they acted like friends for seven more years, despite holding different opinions on several issues and experiencing acute alliance fatigue.

After its establishment, the Republic of Turkey formed an autocratic single-party system based on a cult of personality centered on Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. In the wake of World War II, however, this regime became antithetical to a new “free world” order led by the United States. Turkey then quickly switched to a multiparty system, becoming the “easternmost bastion of Western democracy.” Turkey earned this title when it joined NATO in 1952. It had dispatched a brigade to Korea, the third-largest United Nations military unit after the United States and Great Britain. As a formal U.S. ally, President Dwight D. Eisenhower declared, “No doubt the strongest and most reliable protector of the European civilization is the Turkish Army.”

Eisenhower’s lofty words belied the reality of the U.S.-Turkey relationship. Because the American public showed little interest in Turkey during the early decades of the Cold War, Washington was able to turn a blind eye to the shortcomings of Turkish democracy. In fact, American policymakers viewed the Turks as “Finns with mountains,” as Time magazine introduced them to the American public. This image portrayed Turkey as a secular Muslim state with a burgeoning democracy in an unstable region. Turkey’s recognition of Israel in 1949—which made it the first predominantly Muslim state to do so—only bolstered this perception. As long as Turkey supported American regional interests, Washington overlooked human-rights abuses, including Ankara’s heavy-handed suppression of left-wing movements. The Cyprus crisis between Turkey and Greece caused more headaches in Washington than the coups staged by the Turkish military.

Until the end of the Cold War, the Pentagon and State Department deflected criticisms raised mainly by the Greek and Armenian political lobbies regarding Turkey’s human-rights record, treatment of minorities and deficiencies in democracy. After the Soviet threat subsided, however, these issues became thorns in U.S.-Turkey relations. American interest in the status of Turkish citizens of Kurdish origin and the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate particularly alarmed Ankara. Meanwhile, a rising percentage of the Turkish public came to believe that the United States was conspiring to separate parts of eastern and southeastern Turkey for a future Kurdish state, and to use the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate to settle centuries-old scores with Islam.

Another sore point in this relationship was the change in American perception of Islamic movements. During the Cold War, Washington viewed Islamism as a valuable tool in the fight against Communism. American administrations even discouraged Turkey’s French-style laïcité for alienating pious Muslims. Though the United States became more receptive to Turkish secularism after the end of the Cold War and 9/11, many policymakers still welcomed the electoral victory of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in 2002. They hoped that the AKP would disseminate a “moderate Islam” capable of advancing democracy. Needless to say, it did not live up to these expectations.

Washington has come to regret its initial support for the AKP and its criticisms of Turkish secularism. It has become increasingly frustrated at Recep Tayyip Erdo?an, the party’s leader, for his strong anti-Western rhetoric. Not only has Erdo?an referred to the European Union as a “Christians’ club,” but he once called upon Muslim countries “to unite and defeat the successors of Lawrence of Arabia.” Washington has suspiciously viewed Erdo?an’s attempts to become a leading voice in the Muslim world, as he has reinforced the notion of a “clash of civilizations” by accusing the West of waging a modern anti-Muslim crusade.

American dislike of Erdo?an’s behavior is reminiscent of the British abhorrence of Abdülhamid II, who defended the rights of Muslims as their spiritual leader. These developments have relegated Turkey from a praiseworthy defender of Western civilization and democracy to an “other” representing Islam and autocracy. Conversely, according to Turkish public perception, the United States has become a wolf in sheep’s clothing: a superpower silently plotting to partition Turkey.

THE PARTIES to the Anglo-Ottoman and Turkish-American alliances illustrate how geographically distant states can become regional rivals. One reason why the Ottomans originally cooperated with Great Britain was London’s relative remoteness. Though Ottoman statesmen perceived Britain to be fickle, they recognized Whitehall’s limited interest in the Middle East. They bargained that Britain would honor Ottoman interests in its regional policy in return for political and strategic partnership. As it turned out, Britain had no desire to do so. Likewise, it refused to grant carte blanche to the Ottomans for their domestic policies.

Much to the infuriation of Istanbul, Britain often negotiated with regional powers harboring anti-Ottoman sentiments and local groups rejecting Istanbul’s central control. For instance, Britain did not support the Sublime Porte against Greek expansionism. Ottoman leaders found British gestures like gifting the Ionian Islands to Greece in 1864 extremely confrontational. British agents also provided assistance to leaders of disfranchised Ottoman communities. They sided with local leaders clamoring for autonomy or separation in Serbia, Wallachia and Moldavia. Britain brazenly advised Ottoman statesman to support non-Muslim minority privileges and autonomy in order to maintain control over those communities. Not surprisingly, the Ottomans did not appreciate this counsel.

Frustrated with the British after the Great Eastern Crisis of 1875–78, Ottoman policymakers abandoned “Perfidious Albion” in the wake of the settlement reached at the Congress of Berlin in 1878. British requests for further reforms in Macedonia and the so-called “Six Provinces” inhabited by the Armenians, thus, fell on deaf ears. In 1895, the British proposed a joint naval demonstration among the Great Powers to force the Sublime Porte to implement the provisions of an Armenian reform program. Luckily for the Ottomans, this never materialized. When the conservative Mürzsteg Agreement (1903) led by Russia and Austria-Hungary failed to produce tangible results, Britain assumed leadership of the Macedonian Question, much to the dismay of the Ottomans. By then, Sultan Abdühamid II had lost trust in Britain.

The Anglo-Ottoman relationship deteriorated further in 1882 after Britain became a “neighbor.” Unlike other powers in the Middle East, Britain envisaged a dramatically different future for the region. This vision sparked border disputes such as the Taba Crisis over the frontier between British-ruled Egypt and Ottoman Syria. Moreover, Britain exchanged contracts with and promised protection for local leaders in Arabia such as the sheikhs of Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar. The British ignored Istanbul’s protests, which argued that as Ottoman subjects, these regional leaders were unable to negotiate with foreign states or sign treaties. These intrusions prompted a bitter rivalry that rendered the cooperation of earlier periods practically impossible.

The United States enjoyed a highly positive reputation in the Middle East prior to 1945. This stemmed from its geographic distance and from its image as an anti-imperial power that supported democratic participation in areas under its control such as the Philippines. Many local intellectuals favored an American mandate in Turkey after 1918 and advocated for similar arrangements in other parts of the former Ottoman Empire, such as Syria.

When Turkey found itself under imminent Soviet threat after World War II, it had no choice but to cooperate with the United States, the only state powerful enough to defend it. Many Turkish policymakers thought that America’s geographic distance and marginal involvement in prior regional conflicts would help them establish a beneficial partnership. They hoped that Washington would see the Middle East through Turkish eyes and offer unrestricted support. They also anticipated that the United States would allow Turkey to crush any internal threat for the sake of defending the territorial integrity of the “easternmost bastion of Western democracy.”

Twentieth-century America and nineteenth-century Britain are, admittedly, not interchangeable. But as global powers they achieved their foreign-policy objectives similarly. Like London, Washington was aware of Ankara’s concerns and attempted to appease it insofar as Turkish actions did not hurt American interests. And like Britain, the United States did not design its regional policies in strict accordance with Turkish interests.

President Lyndon B. Johnson jolted Turkish policymakers when he sent them a letter in June 1964, stating bluntly that Turkey’s intervention in Cyprus was impermissible under the provisions of the 1960 Treaty of Guarantee. With respect to Turkish military activity, Johnson wrote, “the United States cannot agree to the use of any United States supplied military equipment.” Just two years after a secret swap deal to withdraw Jupiter missiles from Turkey in exchange for removing Soviet nuclear missiles from Cuba, the “Johnson letter” deeply shook Ankara’s trust and dealt a shattering blow to its willingness to follow American advice. Though Johnson succeeded in preventing a Turkish intervention in Cyprus at the eleventh hour, President Richard Nixon failed to do the same in 1974.

Turkey’s Cyprus intervention spoke volumes about the change in its relationship with the United States. In spite of Nixon’s warnings of a military embargo, Ankara opted for military action. And though Washington still imposed an embargo, the U.S.-Turkey alliance persisted, albeit with difficulty. In reality, Turkish statesmen barely entertained the idea of leaving NATO. Doing so would have weakened Turkey’s military capabilities considerably. Few American policymakers in Washington would risk losing Turkey either. Ankara learned that being an ally of the United States did not guarantee unbridled freedom in conducting its regional affairs. Washington, likewise, realized that providing a security umbrella would not sufficiently keep Turkey under control.

Indeed, the Soviet threat held together an uneasy alliance between a regional and a global power. After the Cold War, managing this cooperation has become even more difficult because of growing mistrust. The American invasion of Iraq in 2003 created a situation similar to the British penetration of the Middle East in the second half of the nineteenth century. The United States had become a regional rival power, threatening Turkey’s vital interests and territorial integrity. Frustrated at this development, the Turkish Grand National Assembly rejected a motion granting bases to American troops in their invasion of Iraq. This rejection did not stem from an inherent anti-American sentiment. Rather, it was a response to a deep-seated belief that Washington had ulterior motives. Similarly, Turkey has become apprehensive of American ties to local Kurdish actors in Iraq and Syria. These connections have fueled the perception that the United States wishes to create a new map of the Middle East. No map, not even a Russian-drawn one, would be more antithetical to Turkey than an American chart.

Because the United States and Turkey are becoming regional rivals, the potential for dispute has increased tremendously. As a growing power, Turkey has begun developing a vision for the Middle East that does not align entirely with that of Washington’s. Accusing Turkey of pursuing overambitious “neo-Ottomanist” policies, Washington has started to regard Turkey as an unreliable actor that threatens other regional powers.

A BILATERAL partnership between a global and a regional power generally results in imbalance and little reciprocity. The former deeply influences, and even intervenes in, the domestic policies of the latter. For instance, while the British could influence in Ottoman politics, policymakers in Istanbul, who had no say in response, had to work with those winning British elections.

The Anglo-Ottoman partnership produced a pro-British faction within the Ottoman civil bureaucracy and military apparatus. Becoming a member of this faction offered bureaucrats and top brass pathways for upward mobility. Soon, Whitehall handpicked its Ottoman counterparts. At the height of the Anglo-Ottoman cooperation, British ambassador Sir Stratford Cunning, nicknamed “Little Sultan” by the Ottoman public, could hire or fire grand viziers. The British embassy gained so much power in Ottoman domestic politics that its dragomans started discussing delicate matters with Ottoman ministers, even conveying messages directly to the sultan.

Over time, these levels of British involvement in Ottoman politics did not strengthen mutual cooperation. Britain’s desire to work with yes-men in Istanbul created an outcry, even among bureaucrats who supported cordial relations with London but wished to act independently and on equal footing. When Sultan Abdülhamid II rose to power, he snubbed Ottoman statesmen who had developed dual allegiances. He occasionally instructed the Ottoman press to chastise British policies. In response, the British, now accustomed to working with their self-selected cronies, further supported pro-British bureaucrats.

During the 1890s, British ambassadors hosted field marshals, former cabinet ministers and high-ranking officials who envisioned instituting “a more liberal system of government” in Istanbul. These individuals requested British assistance in orchestrating subversive initiatives against the regime. They even proposed, “In the event of the deposition of the sultan, it should be the care of the British ambassador that a minor should be chosen to succeed him.”

In 1902, liberal Ottoman bureaucrats approached the British Foreign Office and requested support for a coup attempt. Sir Thomas Sanderson, the permanent undersecretary, vaguely promised naval cover. This episode illustrated an apparent British commitment to regime change, even in a friendly country. In 1908, even after the Young Turk Revolution reinstated the Constitution of 1876, the British continued to interfere in Ottoman politics. The new leaders in Istanbul accused Britain of inciting uprisings and counterrevolutions. Though Istanbul was not in a position to react, partisan British involvement in Ottoman domestic affairs considerably damaged the Anglo-Ottoman partnership.

With respect to the U.S.-Turkey relationship, all major Turkish political parties as well as the civil and military bureaucracy enthusiastically supported Turkey’s admission into NATO. A wide spectrum of groups, including religious ones, became pro-American, with the exception of the long-suppressed left-wing intellectuals. For a short time, Americans did even not have to take sides in Turkish domestic politics.

This situation changed when anti-Americanism and leftist movements gathered momentum after the 1968 Vietnam War protests. While no major Turkish political party actually entertained the idea of changing allegiances, critics no longer bit their tongues. American statesmen feared the prospect of working with groups who criticized American policies. The United States consequently began distinguishing friends and foes in Turkey. For instance, there was a strong belief in Turkey during the 1970s that Washington preferred right-wing conservatives to left-wing political organizations that promoted closer relations with Non-Aligned countries. Likewise, many believed that America tacitly approved the 1980 military coup. In the last decade, rumors have arisen claiming that the United States has been backing a pro-NATO element within the Turkish military to hedge against the so-called “Eurasians,” who champion rapprochement with Russia and Iran.

After an initial honeymoon, the United States has become critical of the AKP, especially after 2010. American diplomats have behaved as an opposition party in Turkey, and spokespersons of the State Department and Pentagon have explicitly criticized policies implemented by the AKP. Turkish statesmen, even the president, have accused Washington of interfering with Turkish politics by aiding the opposition and Kurdish separatists. American support for Syrian Kurds in the battle against the so-called Islamic State has further strained relations with Turkey, which fears this support may incite internal strife. Moreover, Washington has strongly criticized Ankara’s policy vis-à-vis Syria. The Obama administration viewed Turkish support to some Sunni groups as aiding anti-Western Islamic fundamentalism. In return, Turkey has claimed that the United States has overtly supported the Democratic Union Party (PYD), a Kurdish political party in northern Syria that Turkey considers as dangerous as the Islamic State. U.S.-Turkey relations reached a fever pitch following the July 15 coup attempt. Policymakers in Ankara, including President Erdo?an, accused the United States of supporting mutineers and sheltering Fethullah Gülen, an expatriate Muslim cleric suspected to be the mastermind of the undertaking.

While it is difficult to comment on the degree of U.S. involvement in Turkish politics, alleged American interference has exacerbated yet another major fault line in the partnership.

THE U.S.-TURKEY alliance resembles the dysfunction of post-1907 Anglo-Ottoman relations. But this comparison also reveals opportunities to salvage the partnership. Will the parties be able to resolve their disputes and revitalize their alliance? Will the United States abandon Turkey and work with other actors in the region in its stead? Will Turkey turn its coat and seek alliance elsewhere?

With respect to the first question, the British and Ottoman delegates sketched out a major settlement resolving their differing visions for the Middle East in 1913 and 1914. The Anglo-Turkish Convention of June 1914, ratified by the Ottoman sultan, seemingly addressed all outstanding disputes, ranging from the British sphere of influence in Arabia and autonomous regions like Kuwait to the status of the rebellious leader Abdulaziz ibn Saud, the future king of Saudi Arabia. Yet, this settlement did not prevent Ottoman policymakers from signing an alliance with Germany two months later, immediately prior to the start of World War I. Therefore, while the United States and Turkey may resolve their existing disputes, their alliance may still collapse amid a major global crisis.

Next, will the United States make another country other than Turkey (or Israel) the focal point of U.S. interests in the Middle East? In 1896, fourteen years after Britain occupied Egypt, Lord Salisbury deprioritized preserving the status quo in favor of making Egypt the center of British policy in the region. Similarly, the United States may prefer a less independent and more obedient power to base its interests in the region. For instance, it may work closely with a Kurdish entity, especially after its growing interactions with Kurdish groups in the battle against the Islamic State. Ultimately, this depends on the shape of the Middle East after the conclusion of numerous crises occurring in the region. If the conflict in Syria persists indefinitely, however, then there is also a risk of the United States and Turkey drifting apart, especially if both countries support different substate entities in the conflict.

Ottoman statesmen and the founders of modern Turkey struck alliances with Russian leaders. They did so in desperation after the liberal powers turned against them. For example, the Russian and Ottoman empires signed the Treaty of Hünkâr ?skelesi in 1833 after the British cabinet voted against sending the Royal Navy to the aid of the Ottomans during a war with the rebellious governor of Egypt, Mehmet Ali Pasha. Lord Palmerston, secretary of state for foreign affairs at the time, later maintained, “No British cabinet at any period of the history of England ever made so great a mistake in regard to foreign affairs.” The Ottoman sultan, remarking that “a drowning man will clutch a serpent,” approached Saint Petersburg in desperation. Similarly, when the British backed the Greeks waging a proxy war against Turkish nationalists in 1921, the founders of modern Turkey signed a “treaty of brotherhood” with Bolshevik Russia.

The lesson for the United States is clear: unless Turkey feels desperate, it will not ally with non-Western powers, including Russia. Some Turkish politicians are today feeling desperate and have favored rapprochement with Russia, Iran and China. Erdo?an, in 2013, publicly expressed interest in transitioning from a Dialogue Partner of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization to a full member. But even if Turkey changes sides, it will not last long unless its traditional allies abandon it permanently, which would be extremely unlikely.

*  *  *

The U.S.-Turkey alliance, originally forged because of a common external threat, has become exceedingly fragile since the fall of the Soviet Union. Both states criticize each other rather than sweep aside their differences. More troublingly, they harbor mutual mistrust, which colors their perceptions of each other. While it is difficult to predict the future of the U.S.-Turkey alliance, it has clearly suffered from severe alliance fatigue and needs extensive restoration. Resuscitating the relationship will demand investment and concessions from both parties.