Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson. Empire of Liberty: The Statecraft of Thomas Jefferson. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
As the third President, Thomas Jefferson achieved the greatest diplomatic triumph of early U.S. history the Louisiana Purchase, which for a modest price gave the United States title to the entire Mississippi Valley, and thus essentially ensured that it would expand to the Pacific Ocean and become a continental state. As President, Jefferson also laid the groundwork for the greatest diplomatic failure of early U.S. history the policy of "embargo" against trade with Great Britain, combined with a failure to make military (and especially naval) preparations that would have made war against Britain sustainable, or the threat of war a credible deterrent. Jefferson thus laid the groundwork for the disaster of the War of 1812. Tucker and Hendrickson are following fully in the general interpretation of Jefferson's policy in saying that:
Taken to escape the alternatives of national
humiliation or of war, it led first to humiliation
(p. 233)
The combination of success and failure in Jefferson's foreign policy is of interest in part for what it tells us of Jefferson's own philosophy and view of the world, and in part because the Louisiana Purchase and the War of 1812 were important formative experiences in the early history of the constitutional Republic. But they are also, perhaps, of the greatest interest to us because they express ideas and conflicts between ideas that have continued to shape American foreign policy to the present day. In the debate in the second half of 1990 over the Persian Gulf intervention, and its conflicting visions of the U.S. leading an international coalition to enforce principles of law upon Saddam Hussein's Iraq, on the one hand, or the alternative of pursuing
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