America's Rise and Fall among Nations: Lessons in Statecraft from John Quincy Adams

Drawing on the model of John Quincy Adams's career as statesman, Angelo Codevilla explores the foundations of America's foreign policy, identifies where it went disastrously wrong in the last century, and asks what a truly 'America First' approach to statecraft would look like today.

"In his final work, Codevilla has left us a chilling analysis of how the radically egalitarian impulse of the elite does not just erode human freedom at home, but when nation building abroad ensures tragedies for almost everyone involved" -Victor Davis Hanson

Minding our own business, while leaving other peoples to mind theirs, was the basis of the United States' successful foreign policy from 1815 to 1910. Best described in the works of John Quincy Adams and carried out by his successors throughout the nineteenth century, this is the foreign policy by which America grew prosperous and in peace. This policy also remains the commonsense philosophy of most Americans today.

America's Rise and Fall among Nations contrasts this original "America First" foreign policy with the principles and results of the following hundred years of "progressive" foreign policy which suddenly arrived with the election of Woodrow Wilson as president in 1912. The author explains why the many fruitless American wars--large and small--that followed Wilson's handling of World War I resulted in not only a failed peace, but also more conflicts abroad and at home.

Finally, America's Rise and Fall among Nations examines how John Quincy Adams's insights are applicable to our current domestic and international environments and exemplify what "America First" can mean in our time. They chart a clear path to escape America's previous eleven disastrous decades of so-called "progressive" international relations.

Angelo Maria Codevilla was professor emeritus of international relations at Boston University. He also taught at Georgetown University and Princeton University. Born in Italy in 1943, he became a U.S. citizen in 1962, married Ann Blaesser in 1966, and had five children. He served as a U.S. Navy officer, Foreign Service Officer, professional staff member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, as well as on President Reagan's transition teams for the State Department and Intelligence. Formerly a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, he was more recently a member of its working group on military history. He ran a vineyard in Plymouth, California.

Among Codevilla's books are War Ends and Means (with Paul Seabury, 1989); Informing Statecraft (1992); The Prince (Rethinking the Western Tradition) (1997); The Character of Nations, 2nd ed. (1997); Advice to War Presidents (2009); A Student's Guide to International Relations (2010); and To Make and Keep Peace (2014).