By Gary J. Schmitt
July 3, 2015 | 7:00pm
July 4 is celebrated as Independence Day — the day the 13 colonies formally declared their independence from Great Britain.
In truth, that decision was made on July 2, 1776, in a vote by the Continental Congress. July 4 is the day the Congress issued the Declaration of Independence — a document justifying that break with an eye toward “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.”
In that respect, the Declaration was as much a foreign-policy document as a simple statement of the governing principles by which both our break from London and our future government was to be judged: A government’s failure to take account of the fact that “all men are created equal” and a failure to secure men’s individual rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” means that a people, any people, has justifiable grounds for “abolishing” its ties, its allegiance, to that government.
As was obvious to both the Founders who drafted and approved the Declaration, and the monarchies and despotisms that ruled the vast majority of the rest of mankind, the American declaration of these principles was a revolutionary moment not only for a sliver of the North American continent but, potentially, for the rest of the world.
The United States, initially weak relative to the other great powers in the world and, as such, disinclined to involve itself in the their conflicts, set itself inevitably on a course that is aptly captured in the title of Robert Kagan’s history of early American statecraft, “Dangerous Nation.”
