It seems unlikely that we need the reminder, but also somehow doubtful that we don’t: power—including raw military might—remains the world’s lingua franca. For the appetitive nations, power is deployed in thrall to their hunger as they seek to dominate their neighbors. For other nations, not—or less—characterized by aggression yet also unwilling to be consumed by the rapacious, power is essential in defending against the predatory. One needn’t look far for recent proofs: there would be no Ukraine or Israel if they were unable—or unwilling—to gather and deploy power. That they wouldn’t need to deploy defensive power if aggressors like Putin or Hamas, Iran, or any of the other regional powers or terror proxies that want to drive the Jewish nation into the sea didn’t misuse power for unjust aims is beside the point. Any nation that desires to maintain the goods of order, justice, and peace needs power and the ability and will to deploy it in a degree greater than those who mean harm to them. For 250 years, the United States of America—and, by extension, the free world—has enjoyed the fruits of such power. If we aim to enjoy another quarter millennium of good health and free living, we’ll need to continue to cultivate power that is sufficient to that ambition.
But this is an old assertion.
On September 2, 1901, a fortnight before President William McKinley succumbed to wounds blown into him by an assassin’s bullets eight days before, Teddy Roosevelt delivered his iconic “speak softly and carry a big stick” speech at the Minnesota State Fair. The vice president laid out a vision for “Big Stick Diplomacy,” a foreign policy grounded in the practice of treating other nations with respect and engaging in moderate and stabilizing behavior while simultaneously possessing a formidable military—coupled with the believable willingness to deploy it—sufficient to threaten harsher tactics should good relations break down. It would become the defining character of his coming presidency. But it’s worth pausing on what he said—and didn’t say—because the aphorism alone has outrun its argument.
Teddy was not counseling menace. His “big stick” line mandates something more than merely assertive foreign policy or the ready threat of kinetic leverage. Officially titled, “National Duties,” Roosevelt’s fairground oration was really focused on a pair of responsibilities and the kind of character capable of meeting them. He asserted, first, that national strength is worthless, even dangerous, absent internal soundness. A nation’s first duty, then, is to its “own household;” to not merely talk about but also to act in favor of decency and order in domestic political, social, and civic life. Deeply virtue-centric, Roosevelt stressed character-as-prerequisite: no “prosperity and no glory can save a nation that is rotten at heart.” This is a duty of being, not merely of doing (Kant be damned!).
This leads to the second duty, downstream from the first. Lest we be inconsistent with our national character, with who we are, our foreign relations should manifest a desire to live in peace with all nations. But this is not “peace” at all costs. “Let us make it evident,” Roosevelt urges, “that we intend to do justice.” This ambition toward justice—to giving to each what they are owed—is central to Roosevelt. One consequence is that in addition to making plain our desire to do justice to other nations, Roosevelt wanted it equally evident “that we will not tolerate injustice being done to us in return.” A second consequence, more benign, is that he did not view foreign relations as a zero-sum enterprise. Indeed, for Roosevelt, an approach to international relations that displays concern only for our own well-being and not that of our international neighbors is likely to be counterproductive to our own well-being. This is because the defense and promotion of domestic flourishing depends, at least in part—and unless we mean to be tyrants—on giving our international neighbors reasons to feel friendly toward us rather than hostile. Roosevelt is stressing this rather common-sensical ethic: we ought to promote and defend abroad what we defend and promote at home.
Of course, lest we get carried away in a we-are-the-world fever-dream, we need to be mindful of a tension: the security of the United States is the primary purpose of American power. This fact must not be forgotten. In our predatory world, a nation that does not remain mindful of its interests will not remain a nation for long. But primary does not mean exclusive: our responsibility doesn’t end at our shores. Something like the Spider-Man ethic—with great power comes great responsibility—obtains. Roosevelt would approve of the superhero aphorism but would stress that the reverse is also true: with great responsibility comes the need to cultivate great power. He says as much in his 1904 Annual Message, writing that a nation “must have a force adequate for the work which it feels is allotted to it as part of the general world duty.” Back in Minnesota, he foreshadowed this sentiment:
Our country, as it strides forward with ever-increasing rapidity to a foremost place among the world powers, must necessarily find, more and more, that it has world duties also. There are excellent people who believe that we can shirk these duties and yet retain our self-respect; but these good people are in error.
Assigned a responsibility, Roosevelt unabashedly proclaims, America has an obligation to acquire the power adequate to discharge it, not just permissions to use power it already has. For 250 years, the United States has made good on these mandates—imperfectly and not always as quickly as it ought to have, but, on balance, with sufficient excellence that we are still rightly regarded by the free world as the indispensable nation—and, by extension, by the less-than-free world as the power to beat. Importantly, and following the Rooseveltian dictum, America is not the most powerful nation in history by accident. It has intentionally cultivated great power, not simply for our own security but for the global good. A secure, prosperous, and free world is better bolstered by a powerful America than a weak and effete one.
But nations do not become great on their own, because nations don’t exist on their own. They are made up of individual citizens and Roosevelt’s duty prescriptions presuppose a particular kind of citizen—a particular kind of human being—necessary to make a nation great. In Minnesota, he gestured to the early pioneers, from the first colonists to newly arrived settlers from the old world who pushed westward into the wilderness. “They were men of hope and expectation,” Roosevelt averred, of “daring, endurance, and far-sightedness, of eager desire for victory and stubborn refusal to accept defeat.” Such as these, he insisted, make up for the essential nature of “the American character.”
Daring, endurance, eager desire for victory, stubborn refusal to accept defeat—these are not free-floating adjectives. Roosevelt is standing in the stream of a long tradition and indirectly—and maybe unintentionally—gesturing toward a capacity that bears a name stretching far further back than that turn-of-the-century state fair. What Roosevelt calls the essential nature of the American character mirrors the kind of trained disposition the classical tradition would have seen as the product of what they called thumos—a concept representing “spiritedness,” the soul’s drive, or the fire in one’s belly. Thumos fuels courage, ambition, willpower, and the desire for recognition, honor, and achievement.
In Plato—it’s all in Plato!—the soul is divided into three parts: reason, which is ordered—or aimed—at the pursuit of truth; the appetite, aimed at desires, pleasures, and material wants and needs; and thumos, which serves as a kind of bridge between the two. Plato argued that a heathy individual—and a health society—requires reason and the appetite to be in proper balance—and thumos is the thing gets these things in right alignment. One ought to think here of Lewis’ Abolition of Man, in which he equates reason, thumos, and the appetites with the head, belly, and stomach respectively:
As the king governs by his executive, so Reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the ‘spirited element’. The head rules the belly through the chest—the seat…of Magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments.
Lewis saw thumos as the indispensable liaison officer “between cerebral man and visceral man.” It’s the thing that protects humanity from being mere spirit—ruled by reason alone—or mere animal—ruled by appetite alone. Thumos supports reason in moderating physical desires and emotions while also safeguarding reason from going cold, untethered to the emotional drive. Thumos gives reason legs. Lewis understood this is critical. He feared that “no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous.” Reason might alert me to an injustice, but without accompanying indignation—rage—at the injustice I might not be spurred into remedial action. But unless the emotions are trained, then the rage may be not just implacable but disproportionate and indiscriminate as well. Thumos—providing the spark of disciplined emotion—is what allows reason both to act as well as to act within limits.
Importantly, Roosevelt’s description of the manly pioneer was not generated from a list separate from martial virtues. It’s martial virtue’s vocabulary applied to farmers, huntsmen, settlers, and the like. What makes for domestic soundness of character is the same basic set of ingredients necessary for martial resolve: courage, endurance, resilience. Thumos doesn’t distinguish between virtues useful in the cornfield versus the battlefield. It’s one trained disposition toward resolute, proportionate, discriminate response to difficulty, expressed differently according to the challenge at hand. Those virtues cultivated in civilian life are the virtues available for martial use when required.
For 250 years, the vitality of the American character relied on this spirited liaison between reason and emotion. The tragedy, of course, is that this spiritedness is increasingly decried, especially when spotted in young men. What is crucified as “toxic masculinity” is sometimes the very faculty that enabled a nation of pioneers to take a national creed about the created equality of all men and, over time, progressively perfect it from a mere ambition—if also an obvious hypocrisy—to a ruling sentiment and reasonable descriptor of national ethos. Thumos—the forward-leaning, biased-for-action governing—and governed—passion is what has allowed America to grow from a backwater colony to the city on a hill and the indispensable nation. As Lewis saw in his own age, we are killing thumos at our peril:
Such is the tragi-comedy of our situation…We continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more ‘drive’, or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or ‘creativity’. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We take men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.
The good news, the birthday gift if you will, is that try as detractors might, this spiritedness still animates the best of us. I have the enormous privilege of teaching ethics at one US Service Academy and regularly engage with other elements of our military profession. Passions under the control of the rational will—manifest as a disposition of service before self, death before dishonor, and a willingess to fight and win America’s wars—without giving up on ethics—is evident in the vast majority these men and women willing to stand on freedom’s wall between the rest of us and the wolves. The same thumos is seen in those countless others who serve the nation in a thousand myriad ways: from government work, to public and private education, to managing the household, to industry, public service, and beyond.
There are still animating forces all around us. If it’s true that individuals make nations it’s also true that, once made, the nation, too, becomes a generative instrument: America makes Americans. The moral narratives—the amalgam of national myths, creeds, theological norms, and much else—that describe for a people the nature of reality, our place within that reality, and the things that people find important transmit nationhood to the peoples of that nation. A nation becomes a live tradition of national character.
There is still an animating idea that is America. It is manifest, partly, in our willed acquisition of unmatched hard and soft power resources—military, diplomatic, economic, commercial, cultural, and charitable—deployed in service not simply to our own national interests but to the interests of the international common good. In particular, our extended nuclear deterrent has guaranteed the security of dozens of allies and partners, maintaining relative—but real—degrees of stability, justice, and peace throughout the globe. To preserve these goods, the free world must remain confident in American power and resolve to use that power when necessary. Teddy was right: we must speak softly and carry that big stick. This is not without costs. But, at our best, America has, for the last quarter of a millennium, understood that peace—and the power to live in it—does not come easily or cheaply. But we have also understood that the price of survival is usually worth paying.
Just as importantly, we have understood that American greatness will be insufficient if uncoupled from goodness. Theologians distinguish between both values when reflecting on the divine attributes. God’s greatness points to those attributes that most clearly reveal His majesty and glory: His power, immutability, sovereignty, and so on. His holiness, love, mercy, and fidelity express His goodness. But, of course, God’s greatness and goodness are not separable. They couple with—but do not qualify or limit—one another. It is because God in His goodness loves justice and mercy that His power is sometimes manifest in wrath. He is infinitely just and infinitely loving. Always. Nations are not gods, but no nation—certainly not one characterized by the American character—should ever seek never to decouple greatness and goodness. Each will lost—or meaningless—without the other.
On any objective measure, it has to be said that it has gone generally well for us, if imperfectly, these 250 years—and, by extension, well for our friends and allies as well. But there is little chance that we or they will enjoy another 250 years if we allow our general comfort to fool us into believing that the freedoms and ease with which we enjoy the good life in greater proportion than most is the norm. It is not. But, as the Gipper warned, it is always but a single generation away from being lost forever. It can happen here. Even here. But it needn’t. And it certainly needn’t happen on our watch.
Happy Birthday America…and many more.
