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 Republic in 1672 and seemed poised to absorb it before the 21-year-old William flooded the dikes and stopped the French advance. William looked askance as the Catholic James moved toward an alliance with Louis in the 1680s.
But William’s major purpose was to stymie James’s alliance with the great military hegemon of the day, especially after James’s second Catholic wife gave birth to a son in June 1688. The infant would replace Mary, her sister Anne, and William in line for the throne, threatening an extended Catholic dynasty for majority-Protestant England. The child’s longest-surviving son lived until 1807.
To forestall this threat, William secretly flooded English coffeehouses with propaganda pamphlets, organized a 25,000-man army, shipped it across the English Channel in November — not the best season for a voyage — and landed in England. Hundreds of things could have gone wrong. But as the troops marched toward London, James fled to France, and Parliament proclaimed William and Mary king and queen.
William’s purpose, or so my book argues, was to get England, Scotland, and Ireland to join the Dutch Republic’s war against Louis XIV. That war was led for 20 years by William and, after his death, by a courtier of James who rode to William’s side in 1688: John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough.
This Orangist-Churchillian foreign policy, leading from offshore the fight against Europe’s leading tyrants, has been followed off and on ever since. It was carried on into the 19th century by William Pitt the Younger and his acolytes against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France. It was carried on as Britain sought to preserve a balance of power on the continent while, ruling the seas, it patrolled to foster free commerce and stamp out the slave trade.
It was carried on in 1940 and 1941, after Adolf Hitler conquered France and, with his then-ally Josef Stalin, threatened to control most of the landmass of Eurasia. Marlborough’s descendant Winston Churchill took up the cause, with crucial aid from a descendant of Hudson River Dutch patroons, Franklin Roosevelt. And it was carried on, with the lead passing to the United States, in the Cold War against the Soviet Union, with British and European support, by U.S. presidents from Harry Truman through George H. W. Bush.
Wars cause mass death and terrible damage, and it is not surprising that English-speaking peoples and politicians have, from time to time, wearied of what might be called a Churchillian or Orangist foreign policy. Marlborough’s successor, Robert Walpole, avoided conflict through much of the 18th century. After Britain entered what was then called the Great War in 1914, followed by the U.S. in 1917, the horrors of trench warfare and seemingly pointless carnage left Europe and America largely unprepared for the aggressions of the Nazi and Communist movements that the Great War had spawned — until their leaders and publics rallied to the Churchillian tradition in 1940-41.
Weariness with war swept public opinion and many policymakers in the 1970s and the 2000s amid disappointments with military interventions that cost 58,000 American lives in Vietnam and 7,000 American lives in Iraq and Afghanistan. Democrats, after the failure of their strategy in Vietnam in the 1960s, have been skeptical of Churchillian policies, and Donald Trump has turned Republicans toward that view in recent years.
But in Iran, he seems to have taken another course. Perhaps this reflects long-held convictions. Just as he became enamored of tariffs in the 1980s, the Iranian regime’s attacks on the U.S., starting with its 444-day violation in 1979 to 1981 of diplomatic immunity, the first precept of international law, seem to have prompted Trump to make moves that could promote inflation and, at least in the short term, imperil him and his party.
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Trump apparently hoped for rebellion against the mullahs in Iran, but the timing of regime change is hard to predict, as it was in England in 1688 and at the Berlin Wall in 1989. Perhaps his move was overdetermined. Such as Britain in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the U.S. in the late 20th and now the 21st century has interests that span the globe and a residual loathing for tyranny and intolerance.
The popular mood of U.S. voters over the last 20 years has been anything but eager for the responsibilities and perils of a Churchillian foreign policy. But the logic of keeping nuclear weapons out of the hands of a regime bent on wreaking a second Holocaust seems to have been moving a reluctant American president in that direction.