In the sixth symposium of the “We Hold These Truths: America at 250” initiative held at the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon, historians and international relations scholars examined how the United States defined its place among the community of nations in the early republic. Opening the first panel, the George Washington Presidential Library’s Lindsay M. Chervinsky emphasized that the Revolutionary war was not just a conflict in America, for America; it was a war with global reach. Arizona State University’s William Anthony Hay discussed how the founders drew on European independence movements to make sense of their own struggle, while the University of New Hampshire’s Eliga Gould explored the difficult dynamics of peacemaking as the war drew to a close. In the second panel, AEI’s Gary J. Schmitt examined the complex strategic environment the young republic faced and George Mason University’s Jeremy A. Rabkin surveyed the founders’ deep engagement with international law and its role in establishing US credibility abroad. The Hudson Institute’s Walter Russell Mead traced enduring foreign policy dilemmas to the founding era, concluding that “[t]here is a lot of continuity in the way Americans think and argue about our foreign policy.”
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