YOUR OPINION: President John Q. Adams Gives Statement On Potential Military Intervention in Syria
By Denise Odie Joseph // April 13, 2018
'America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy'
“America does not go 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. 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. 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….” – John Quincy Adams
John Quincy Adams was the sixth President of the United States of America. A child prodigy, he began his career in international diplomacy at the age of 10 when he accompanied his father, President John Adams, on a diplomatic mission to France in 1778. He was a leading opponent of slavery and predicted the dissolution of the Union over slavery.
His sage and poetic non-interventionism, the legacy of the philosophies of Presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, gives us clear guidance on looming U.S. military intervention in Syria from the grave.
Babies die en masse every day, all over the world. Visit any American ghetto to find gaggles of children who have become intimate with drugs, violence and HIV before they ever hit puberty.
Currently, an entire subsection of South African farmers are being systematically slaughtered by perpetrators who openly celebrate not only their brutal crimes against humanity, but also the international community’s deafening silence regarding those crimes.
So, why Syria? Some may argue that in the selective pursuit of monsters abroad, we become monsters ourselves.
Hearts will break where eyes can see, ears can hear, and bodies can feel. This is the world we live in. This is the world we have always lived in.
Our Founding Fathers knew that the history of civilization is characterized by ceaseless strife and bloodshed. And it was precisely because they knew this that they embedded non-intervention deep into the foundation of our infant civilization.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This article is the first in a new series called Foundations, which applies the philosophical intent of America’s Founding Fathers to current events in order to promote education, understanding, and peaceful resolution of conflict in the United States of America and beyond.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Denise Odie Joseph is a lawyer who was educated at Oxford University, The George Washington University, and NYU.
She has in-depth experience in the fields of International Affairs and National Security.
Joseph has been married for 11 years to her husband Louis, who works for Parrish Medical Center, in Titusville, Florida.
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