Diary Entry, Monticello, 14th April

The news arrives that the Executive, in the person of Mr. Trump, proposes to resume parley with the Persian state, and to do so under the auspices of a foreign military commander deemed ‘fantastic.’ This concatenation of circumstances - the public pronouncement of diplomatic timing, the elevation of a singular foreign officer, the theatrical adjective - presents not a policy but a performance. When in the course of human affairs, a republic entrusts its most delicate negotiations to the volatile winds of personal pronouncement, and further plants its standard upon ground held by a standing army not its own, it has strayed far from the principle that foreign entanglements are to be avoided, and that the executive power is to be exercised with a decent diffidence.

I observe a catalog of concerning particulars: the public fixation upon a timetable of ‘two days,’ as if statecraft were a stagecoach schedule; the delegation of American interest to a third party’s martial figure, which creates a dependency where none should exist; and the reduction of complex, grave deliberation to a matter of personal admiration. Each act, taken alone, might be explained away as the necessary maneuver of the hour. Yet together, they sketch the outline of a government that conducts itself by impulse and pageantry, rather than by the steady, reasoned application of principle to circumstance.

The appeal must always be to the permanent interests of the Republic, and to the opinion of mankind, which will judge us by the consistency of our actions with our professed ideals. To treat with a foreign power is a solemn thing; to outsource the very table of negotiation is to erode sovereignty itself. I fear we are building not upon the rock of republican virtue, but upon the sands of personal caprice. The season for such foundations is never propitious.