“Truman did not have a diplomatic bone in his body. He just wanted to fight.” — Jackson Lears
Yesterday Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told us how America might bring order to global anarchy. Today’s guest thinks that Washington DC foreign policy insiders, with their imperial vision of an American brokered international order, are the problem.
The Rutgers historian Jackson Lears, who Susan Sontag said rivaled Tocqueville in his understanding of America, has an essay in this month’s Harper’s called “The Founders’ Nightmare.” Lears argues that anti-imperialism was the original American revolutionary dream, and that the United States has spent the last eighty years betraying this vision. He dates the nightmare back to 1947 — the year of the National Security Act, the Truman Doctrine, and Senator Arthur Vandenberg’s advice to Truman about using the Cold War to scare the hell out of the American people.
Lears argues that contemporary American foreign policy has been governed by the very things that George Washington warned against: passionate overseas attachments and habitual hatreds. Take, for example, he says, America’s historic attachment to Israel and its abiding hatred of Russia. He calls Gaza a genocide. He describes Putin as a serious man and a rational actor in Ukraine. He would dissolve NATO. He doesn’t think the CIA is above having killed JFK. And then there’s Iran….
So what to do? We must learn, Lears says, from the founders. Lafayette, he reminds us, was a master of the retreat. America should step back from both its passionate overseas attachments and its habitual hatreds. Given the anti-war sentiment of both left and right in the midterms, it would seem as if the vast majority of Americans agree with Lears rather than the DC foreign policy establishment.
ABOUT THE GUEST
Jackson Lears is Board of Governors Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at Rutgers, where he taught from 1986 to 2025, and editor-in-chief of Raritan. His books include No Place of Grace, Fables of Abundance (winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award in History), Something for Nothing, Rebirth of a Nation and Animal Spirits. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a frequent contributor to Harper’s and the London Review of Books.
ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States. New episodes every day.
CHAPTERS
00:00 — Intro
00:33 — A historian who thinks about America differently
03:10 — Anti-imperialism at the center of the founders’ thought
05:00 — Scarcity in the midst of plenty
05:35 — AK: doesn’t Jefferson and the Louisiana Purchase disprove it?
07:59 — The National Security Act of 1947
08:30 — Vandenberg: we’re gonna have to scare hell out of the American people
10:30 — AK: was the real tragedy the interwar period?
15:30 — Truman did not have a diplomatic bone in his body
18:50 — NATO expansion as a red line, from Kennan on down
19:45 — AK: your NATO argument is Mearsheimer’s
22:49 — AK: isn’t there something Trumpian in this?
24:36 — Permanent war is good for business
26:47 — Why Israel and Zionism are in the essay
29:54 — AK: are Russians to Americans what Palestinians are to Israelis?
32:43 — AK: so what should America do now?
37:26 — AK: do you think the CIA killed JFK?
44:26 — Lafayette, master of the retreat
45:27 — Closing