Trump's Churchillian Foreign Policy |
Knowingly or not, President Donald Trump, in his decision to attack Iran, has embarked on a foreign policy that has been, on and off, both persistent and controversial in the great English-speaking nations. You can trace it back at least to the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89: the ouster of King James II of England and his replacement by his son-in-law and nephew William, Prince of Orange, and his daughter Mary, as William III and Mary II.
These events had wide-ranging consequences, even in England's North Atlantic seaboard colonies. They were commemorated in the founding of our second-oldest college, William and Mary, in 1694.
I was inspired to write a book about this episode, "Our First Revolution," published in 2007, because it seemed to me a breathtakingly unlikely series of events that turned out to be a giant step forward for guaranteed liberties, representative government, global capitalism and a foreign policy of opposition to tyrannical hegemonic powers.
The changes were immediate and lasting. William of Orange tolerated religious liberty in England, Scotland and Ireland, as he had as stadholder, or military leader, of the Dutch Republic. In contrast to James and his predecessor Charles II, who dissolved Parliament and aimed at absolutist rule, William agreed to Parliament's power of the purse. James had been abolishing the elected legislatures of the seaboard colonies; William restored them — the institutions in which Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson would receive their political education.
Louis XIV, who was also William's cousin, was the richest and most militarily aggressive monarch of his day. His armies swept into the Dutch........