President George Washington reviews US troops mobilized to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania on October 16, 1794. Two years later, in his farewell address, President Washington counseled American non-attachment to the affairs of foreign countries. (Shutterstock/Everett Collection)

George Washington’s Case for Interest Over Sentiment on Israel

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The first president advised against “habitual hatred” and “habitual fondness” in assessing US allies and adversaries.

Two hundred and fifty years into the American experiment, the question of what the United States owes its allies has rarely felt more urgent. Few foreign policy questions have attracted more public scrutiny in recent years than the terms of the US-Israel relationship. For guidance, Americans would do well to return to George Washington’s Farewell Address, written in 1796, when the young republic faced a strikingly similar debate over how far loyalty to a favored ally should go.

France, an indispensable ally during the Revolutionary War, was by then fighting its own Revolutionary Wars in Europe, and much of the American public felt an obligation to take its side. Washington had declared the US neutral in 1793, but France, aware of the emotional attachment many Americans felt toward the French, continued to meddle in US politics to build support for its wars.

Frustrated with the ongoing French meddling and the Francophilic tendencies of much of the American public, Washington included in his address a warning: attachment to a favored nation, he wrote, facilitates “the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists,” betraying the attached nation “into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification.” His conclusion was blunt: “The nation which indulges toward another an habitual hatred or an habitual fondness is in some degree a........

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