This article is adapted from Widmer’s January 2008 presentation at “The Liberal Foreign Policy Tradition,” a conference cosponsored by CIS, the Woodrow Wilson Center, and the History and Democracy Project.
We can't do much better than reclaiming the Declaration of Independence as a fundamental foreign policy document in American history. We have a tendency to read it in a simplistic way, and to think of it only as a sort of airy declaration of what were then human rights,… more
