by Daniel Fried

    The power of the American ideal comes not from Americans being a “particular people” with a common heritage—an ethnically-rooted nation like others—but from its being different.

    Nobody should accuse Vice President JD Vance of thinking small. In a July 5 speech to the Claremont Institute, Vance attacked his version of leftists, with New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani a featured target. That’s politics and no harm/no foul. But Vance went deeper. He defined America as a blood-and-soil nation, a nation not based on universal ideas but composed of a what he called “particular people” with “our shared qualities,” starting with heritage. That seemed the point of his speech. Vice President Vance seemed to be redefining America, defining it down and backwards. He would undo Abraham Lincoln’s profound achievement: not just winning the Civil War but reconstituting the nation, no longer as a White Man’s republic, but a “new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Vice President Vance’s argument would overthrow the meaning of the Gettysburg Address, the speech that restored America to its original principles from the Declaration of Independence after its bloodiest war. 

    Vice President Vance has made this case before. In his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in 2024, he asserted that “America was indeed founded on brilliant ideas…But America is not just an idea…It is a nation…People will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home.” In describing home, then candidate-Vance movingly depicted the cemetery in eastern Kentucky where generations of his family lie buried, calling those buried there “those people…that American nation that we all love.”

    Vance eloquently posits that the American nation is created through common blood, “heritage,” and not through abstract ideas. That’s an old idea of a nation and it stands in contrast to Lincoln’s definition of the United States as grounded in an “abstract truth [of the Declaration of Independence] applicable to all men and all times…a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.” Lincoln’s belief that his country’s foundational principle was human equality was derived from his conviction that slavery was morally wrong.

    Lincoln extended his argument about human equality beyond slavery. In a Chicago speech in 1858, Lincoln noted that immigrants, “perhaps half our people,” share no blood, no common heritage, with the Americans who preceded them. But, he continued, when they discover the Declaration of Independence’s principle that all are created equal, they find “that it is the father of all moral principle in them and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood and flesh of the men who wrote that declaration and so they are.” Lincoln defined Americans as a nation formed by belief, by faith, a credo nation and a new nation, truly “novo ordo seclorum.”

    Vance goes after Lincoln’s assertion that America is a nation underpinned by principles rather than blood. It cannot be a “creedal nation,” Vance argues. If it were, “it would include hundreds of millions, maybe billions of foreign citizens who agree with the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Must we admit all of them tomorrow?” That’s a mere rhetoric ploy, of course. Few if any would argue that America’s borders be open to any and all who share the American devotion to freedom. The United States can and should enforce rules on entry. But is really a bad thing that America’s founding principles enjoy the support of “maybe billions” around the world? The United States has been just that sort of nation for generations: the beacon of promise of the Statue of Liberty, the shining City on a Hill, the “last best hope of Earth.” And it has benefited from it. 

    The power of the American ideal, its ability to inspire people of all faiths and nationalities, comes not from Americans being a “particular people” with a common heritage—an ethnically-rooted nation like others—but from its being different, being based on something applicable to all people and all times. Becoming a US citizen can be an act of belief in the nation’s principles and promise. That sentiment was true of the immigrants I grew up around or met later in life – tempest-tossed refugees from Europe like Madeleine Albright or Zbigniew Brzezinski, or my Ukrainian village-born in-laws. Their patriotism burned bright, not least because they knew the difference between what America offered and what tyrants threatened.

    The United States failed almost at once to live up to its ideals, starting with the failure of Reconstruction and new repression of African Americans. But the American rebirth that Lincon led had its consequences. After the Civil War, a sense of US national identity derived through universal, abstract values informed how the United State brought its newfound power to the world. This sense animated Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, the first comprehensive expression of a values-based American grand strategy. It was the foundation of the Atlantic Charter of 1941 issued by Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill that called for a rules-based order rather than great power domination to come out of World War II. The core of that strategy was a positive-sum vision of increasing prosperity rather than the usual zero-sum, great power model. The United States fought and won the Cold War in the name of these values. It wasn’t a strategy of charity or empty idealism, but a canny understanding that US interests would advance best along with the interests of others.  

    As the United States, albeit inconsistently, with blunders, hypocrisy and inconsistency along the way, pursued this positive-sum strategy rooted in values, based on rules rather than just raw power, it could count on the support and admiration of “hundreds of millions, maybe billions” of foreigners. As my former colleague in government Kori Schake put it, “No dominant power has ever had so much assistance from others in maintaining its dominance.”

    Vice President Vance advocates a love of country that I share. But his vision of the country would make America smaller. It would throw away what truly makes America great.