A Republic, If You Can Keep It (Part 1)

When asked whether the Constitutional Convention had produced a monarchy or a republic, Ben Franklin famously replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.”

That America has done for nearly two-and-one-half centuries, notwithstanding existential challenges like the Civil War and recurring more limited ones like droughts, epidemics and recessions. But surely one key to our Republic’s remarkable longevity is that America has been invasion-free owing to the great Atlantic and Pacific ocean moats. For most of our history these blessings of Providence, in turn, precluded the need for a large standing military, heavy taxes, a powerful central government and, most especially, they obviated the need for entangling alliances with foreign nations.

In fact, an early treaty with France was canceled by Congress in 1797 and we were free of permanent alliances for the next 152 years. Even as late as 1919 Congress rejected the entanglements of the League of Nations Treaty after Woodrow Wilson’s foolish crusade not only failed to make the world safe for democracy but paved the way to the vast carnage of WWII. It was only thereafter that an inexorable slide toward Empire incepted in 1949 when the Senate ratified the NATO Treaty based on false lessons from the world wars and a misguided theory of collective international security.

This giant historical error of 1949, of course, caused America to stray from the Founders’ advice, which was best expressed by Thomas Jefferson when he wisely counseled,

Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.

Indeed, that phrase was the default position of American governance right up until the NATO Treaty as demonstrated by the radical demobilization of military forces even after America had elected to go to war in both 1917 and 1941. In both cases, the drastic rise and fall of military budgets left an unmistakable marker which reflected an underlying commitment to non-intervention abroad.

Thus, the US peacetime military budget on the eve of World War I was just $11 billion when expressed in present day dollars of purchasing power (2025) and amounted to a slim 0.9% of GDP. Even though by then Teddy Roosevelt had built-up the Navy modestly, America had no foreign allies to support and it was the ocean moats not a diminutive $11 billion military budget on which the nation’s homeland security safely rested.

After Wilson plunged American forces into the stalemated trenches on the Western Front, constant dollar military spending soared 18-fold to $194 billion by war’s end in 1919, again in present day dollars (2025) of purchasing power. That amounted to nearly 15% of GDP at the wartime peak, but shortly after the armistice a sweeping demobilization began.