The Jay Treaty And It’s Lessons

46454542_10161226646240472_1401776745870262272_nOn this day in 1795, the United States and Great Britain signed the Jay Treaty, resolving lingering issues from the American Revolutionary War that almost escalated to another war.

Named after John Jay, who negotiated the treaty, it was drafted by Alexander Hamilton and supported by President George Washington, although Thomas Jefferson and many Americans bitterly opposed it. The Treaty achieved the withdrawal of British forces from parts of the Northwest Territory that were supposed to be relinquished to the U.S. under the 1783 peace treaty that ended the Revolutionary War; the British were retaliating against Americans for reneging on Articles 4 and 6 of that treaty, in which U.S. courts prevented the repayment of debts to British subjects and upheld the confiscation of Loyalist property.

Instead of continuing this unsustainable tit for tat, the parties agreed that disputes over wartime debts, as well as over the exact boundary between the U.S. and British Canada, were to be settled by arbitration (i.e. outside the courts but with legal binding). This was one of the first major uses of arbitration in modern diplomatic history, and set the precedent for other states to resolve disputes. Both countries granted one another “most favored nation” status and facilitate ten years of peaceful relations and commerce—an absolute shock to people on both sides of the Atlantic, whose wounds from the war were literally only a little over a decade old.

Indeed, the treaty was hotly contested by Jefferson and his supporters across every state, who failed to block its approval in the House, which ultimately failed; following one of the first constitutional debates in American history, it was decided that only a two thirds vote from the Senate was required to ratify a treaty. (Amusing to think that even while they were still alive, the Founders debated what the Constitution meant.)

The “Jeffersonians” feared that closer economic or political ties with Great Britain would strengthen promote aristocracy and undercut republicanism; they supported France in the Revolutionary Wars that were raging in Europe, and saw the French as their natural allies, not the monarchical British. Hamilton, Jay, and even Washington were denounced as monarchists who sold out American values; one rallying cry among protesters was “Damn John Jay! Damn everyone that won’t damn John Jay! Damn every one that won’t put lights in his window and sit up all night damning John Jay”. So much for the golden age of civility!

The controversy and subsequent polarization over the Jay Treaty crystallized an already emerging partisan division: despite disliking political parties, and designing the Constitution without them in mind, the Founders and their fellow Americans began to form two camps within the so called the “First Party System.” The pro-Jay Treaty Federalists, typified by Hamilton, favored closer ties with the British, as well as a strong central government; those against the treaty, called “Jeffersonian Republicans”, favored France and a weaker national government. As we now know, these proto-political parties would mark the beginning of an increasingly sophisticated and entrenched division between two major national parties—something largely unforeseen by the Founders.

In any event, the Jay Treaty went into effect in February 1796 and lasted for its entire ten year duration. When Jefferson became president in 1801, he did not initially repudiate the treaty he had so despised; in fact, he even retained the Federalist ambassador in London to settle some outstanding issues. Unfortunately, when 1806 rolled around and the Monroe–Pinkney Treaty was proposed as a replacement to the Jay Treaty, Jefferson rejected it due to its perceived failure to resolve certain pending matters. The subsequent tensions escalated toward the War of 1812—which likely would have started sooner but for the Jay Treaty. Continue reading

The Great American-Iranian Social Media War

What a time to be alive: the President of the United States and one of Iran’s top military leaders are taking jabs at each other with Game of Thrones-style social media posts. (And HBO weighed in by tweeting “what is trademark misuse in Dothraki?)

I look forward to all our foreign policy pronouncements being conveyed social media through pop culture references.

Of course, Russian state media is more than happy to report the absurdity of this.

America’s Role in the Migrant Crisis

As the Honduran migrant caravan makes its way through Mexico towards the United States–prompting widespread public acrimony and various threats by the administration–it is important to keep in mind the historical context fueling this seemingly sudden exodus. As Jericho explains: Continue reading

How Al Qaeda Reinvented Modern Terrorism

It’s easy to forget that until 1993, until the World Trade Center was a target [by Ramzi Yousef, terrorism and assassination and guerrilla warfare stood in direct antithesis to slaughter on an industrial scale. The specificity of the target had been at the heart of political murder for nearly a millennium. The original assassins were Ismaili Muslims, who killed rulers rather than armies. The capitalists and fascists and imperialists led subservient masses into meaningless death; the terrorists knew whom they killed. The essential nature of the propaganda of the deed was that it waged war against those responsible for the system rather than those who suffered under it. Russian anarchists believed that insurrectionary acts against the ruling classes would bring about revolution, but their targets were, as a rule, individuals. (There were exceptions, such as the bombing of the Liceu Theater in Barcelona in 1893, but they were rare.) Carlos the Jackal targeted OPEC leaders and the people who ran Zionist organizations. The forces of guerrilla warfare attached a strategic as well as a symbolic value to individual life. Their smaller numbers meant they could not waste themselves except at a high price.

Yousef saw that the World Trade Center’s brute scale, its sheer bulk, expressed better than any other building the banal dominance of modernity. His letter to the New York Times after the 1993 bombing explicitly described it as an attack from “the fifth battalion in the Liberation Army,” and the political movement to which he was an inheritor belonged to the Russian anarchists, Lawrence of Arabia, Mao Zedong, Che Guevara, the June 2 movement in Germany, and Carlos the Jackal. It is essential to understand the necessary framework for guerrilla informational war: To wage diathetics, you have to belong to the culture you hope to distort, and you have to hate that culture at the same time. Diathetics can only be waged both inside and outside a culture; to know what effects a spectacle will have, you have to comprehend the context into which it will be received. Lawrence was a prime example of an inside-outside man and so was Yousef. Yousef was not a good Muslim: He drank, womanized, never prayed, and never fasted. Almost everyone involved in the 9/11 conspiracy was stuck between the West and Islam. On Sept. 10, 2001, Mohammad Atta checked out of his hotel in Boston, rented a car, and drove with one of his co-conspirators, Abdul Aziz al-Omari, to Portland, Maine, where they shopped at Walmart and ate at Pizza Hut. No one knows why. Like salesmen in town on business, the Saudis left in Boston tried to call for prostitutes but didn’t end up hiring any because the prices were too high. Al Qaeda’s ideology was Islamist, but its techniques and ideas were Western.

After the 1993 attack, the symbolism of the World Trade Center took on a significance far beyond itself. Various dreams of its explosion scattered like a billion dark seeds over the global soil. “Time to get paid, blow up like the World Trade,” Biggie Smalls rapped. Because it had survived, the center became a point of pride for U.S. counterterrorism officials. After his capture, when Yousef was transferred on an FBI helicopter to the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Lower Manhattan for trial, the SWAT team took off his blindfold as they were flying down the Hudson River. “You see, it’s still standing,” one SWAT member said, indicating the World Trade Center.

“It wouldn’t be if we had had more money,” Yousef answered, shrugging.

— Stephen Marche, Al Qaeda Won, Foreign Policy Magazine

The Countries That Give (And Receive) the Most Government Aid

In a world with vast disparities between rich and poor, tens of billions of dollars worth of aid is exchanged between nations. Citing 2014 data from the OECD, an international organization comprised mostly of wealthy countries, The Economist provides an interactive map showing which governments are donating to the most countries and how much they give to each recipient.


Among the 41 donor countries that provided data in 2014 to the OECD, Japan leads as the broadest provider of support, sending development aid to 141 countries and territories. The U.S. is second, with 132 beneficiaries, though it donated the most overall (given that it is the richest country by a wide margin). Continue reading

America’s Novice Approach to World Affairs

Although the United States remains the world’s sole superpower, this preeminent status is beginning to count for a lot less than it used to, as other nations — rivals and allies alike — begin to quickly catch up.

Our recent (though far from unprecedented) embrace of nationalism and populism is only hastening this relative decline, as Mark R. Kennedy argues in Foreign Policy. In a globalized world, even the greatest powers still need friends and allies, and our increasingly blustering attitude towards the rest of the world risks weakening the foreign ties on which we depend for economic and national security. Continue reading

The 100th Anniversary of the U.S. Invasion of Haiti

History has not been kind to Haiti. As the world’s first black republic, and the only nation founded by a successful slave revolt, it was regarded with contempt by world powers from the very beginning. From France’s onerous debts, to the U.S.’ repeated interference in domestic affairs, this poor yet proud nation has endured countless threats to sovereignty and prosperity — and little recognition of it.

It would likely surprise most Americans to know that their small Caribbean neighbor, rarely more than a footnote in public consciousness let alone government policy, has been repeatedly invaded, occupied, or otherwise meddled with by the U.S. since the early 20th century. In fact, as the Washington Post reminds us, it was 100 years ago today that President Woodrow Wilson — who had then-recently championed liberal, democratic values, such as self-determination, in Europe initiated an almost two-decade-long occupation of Haiti.

Perhaps to its credit, the U.S. State Department’s Office of the Historian is pretty candid about America’s longstanding interests in the country, and the true motivations of its intervention. Continue reading

The Enduring Lies About The Iraq War

I began systematically to investigate the answers to those and other related questions, enlisting the help of a team of reporters, researchers and other contributors that ultimately included 25 people. Nearly three years later, the Center for Public Integrity published Iraq: The War Card, a 380,000-word report with an online searchable database. [4] It was released on the eve of the five-year anniversary of the invasion of Iraq and was covered extensively by the national and international news media.

Our report found that in the two years after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush and seven of his administration’s top officials made at least 935 false statements about the national security threat posed by Iraq. The carefully orchestrated campaign of untruths about Iraq’s alleged threat to US national security from its WMDs or links to al Qaeda (also specious) galvanized public opinion and led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses. Perhaps most revealing: the number of false statements made by top Bush administration officials dramatically increased from August 2002 to the time of the critical October 2002 congressional approval of the war resolution and spiked even higher between January and March 2003, between Secretary of State Colin Powell’s address before the United Nations General Assembly and the fateful March 19, 2003, invasion.

— Charles Lewis, in an excerpt of 935 Lies available at




Finally, the order established after the First World War replaced the Ottoman Empire, which for 400 years dominated the region based in Turkey. And Iraq at that time … for 400 years was three administrative districts operated separately by the Ottomans. The notion and nation of Iraq is a recent construct. It’s less than 100 years old, and it’s undergoing great strain now which it may not be able to survive.

George Mitchell, quoted in Taking the Long View on the Middle Eastby Uri Friedman of The Atlantic.

In the United S…









Don’t Call The Iraq War A Mistake