“Our Hands Are Dirty”: Jeffrey Wernick on America’s Founding Principles, Foreign Entanglements and the Moral Cost of Empire

Invoking George Washington, John Quincy Adams and the American abolitionist tradition, Jeffrey Wernick argues that permanent foreign attachments and endless war have pushed the United States far from the values it claims to defend.

XCNEERPOST, May 28, 2026, Joshua Scheer

Jeffrey Wernick delivers a sweeping and deeply provocative meditation on American foreign policy, arguing that the United States has abandoned the very principles its founders warned were essential to preserving the republic. Drawing on George Washington’s farewell address and John Quincy Adams’ warning that America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy,” Wernick contends that modern U.S. policy has become defined by permanent alliances, military entanglements and moral contradictions that the founders would have viewed as dangerous to both liberty and republican government.

At the center of the speech is a sharp critique of America’s relationship with Israel and the broader logic of interventionist foreign policy. Wernick argues that U.S. support for occupation, military domination and endless regional conflict cannot be reconciled with the founding ideals of consent of the governed and universal human equality. At the same time, he rejects the cynical argument that America’s own historical crimes somehow excuse present injustices. Instead, he insists that the nation’s history of slavery, colonialism and war should deepen the obligation to resist repeating those patterns — not normalize them.

Moving between constitutional argument, moral philosophy and historical reflection, Wernick frames the current moment as a crisis of American identity itself: whether the country will continue down a path of empire and permanent war, or recover what he describes as the original American tradition of diplomacy without domination, commerce without conquest and principles applied universally rather than selectively.

Transcript

Our Hands Are Dirty: A Question of American Values

Jeffrey Wernick

In 1796, George Washington gave a farewell address to the American people. In it, he gave one specific warning: avoid permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.

He didn’t say avoid trade.
He didn’t say avoid diplomacy.

He said avoid the permanent attachments — the standing commitments that would entangle America in disputes that weren’t its own, generate domestic factions whose loyalties divided, and corrupt republican judgment with what he called:

“Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists.”

That sentence was written 230 years ago. Read it again. It describes our present moment with uncomfortable precision.

Twenty-five years after Washington’s address, John Quincy Adams stood as Secretary of State and faced calls for America to intervene on behalf of the Greek War of Independence against the Ottoman Empire. The Greeks were a sympathetic cause. They were fighting for freedom. They wanted American support.

Adams refused.

And the words he used to refuse have come down through American history:

“She goes not 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.”

He went further. If America went abroad in search of monsters, he warned:

“She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.”

This was the American foreign policy tradition at its founding.

Not isolationism.

Commerce with all nations.
Diplomacy with all nations.
Temporary cooperation when American interests required it.

But no permanent attachments.
No going abroad to fight other people’s wars.
No identification of American interests with the interests of any particular foreign country.

That tradition has been almost entirely abandoned in modern American foreign policy.

And it wasn’t abandoned through democratic deliberation. It was set aside quietly through executive arrangements and political pressure until departing from it required explanation, while maintaining it became invisible.

When we accept the modern framework as the natural baseline, certain questions become almost impossible to ask — the very questions Washington and Adams considered foundational.

Should the United States maintain treaty-equivalent commitments to foreign countries without ratified treaties?

Under the founders’ framework, the answer is obviously no. The Treaty Clause exists precisely to prevent permanent attachments from forming without Senate deliberation.

When such attachments form anyway through executive agreements, lobbying pressure and political momentum, they bypass the constitutional architecture designed to prevent them.

Should American military resources be expended defending another nation’s territory when that nation has chosen not to enter a treaty that would create reciprocal obligations?

Again, under the founders’ framework, no……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

American forces have expended more strategic missile defense ordnance defending Israel than Israel itself has expended defending itself.

This is in service of a war Israeli leadership reportedly pushed the United States to join.

Iran is not invading the United States.
Iran has no capability to invade the United States.

Iran signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1968 and accepted the most intrusive nuclear inspections regime ever applied to any country under the JCPOA.

Israel has not signed the NPT, has no IAEA inspections, and maintains an undeclared nuclear arsenal.

The state that accepted inspections is treated as the proliferation threat.
The state that refused inspections is treated as the legitimate party demanding constraints on the inspected one……………………………………………………………………………………..

Permanent military rule over millions of people who have no voting rights in the government controlling their lives, no freedom of movement, no citizenship and no realistic political path to acquiring any of these — that is government without consent of the governed.

Exactly the kind of illegitimate rule the founders identified when they applied the analysis to themselves………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

So let me ask the question plainly:

Is it an American value to conquer, occupy and permanently subjugate another people?

Is it an American value to treat some human beings as less than fully human?

No…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

https://scheerpost.com/2026/05/28/our-hands-are-dirty-jeffrey-wernick-on-americas-founding-principles-foreign-entanglements-and-the-moral-cost-of-empire/