#1644 Thomas Jefferson and American Diplomacy and Trade

Listening to America

History, Politics, Unitedstates, Society & Culture, American

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 24 March 2025

⏱️ 75 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Guest host David Horton interviews Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States, about his life as a diplomat. Jefferson served for five years as the American minister to the court of Louis XVI just before the French Revolution. Then, he served three years as America’s first Secretary of State — trying to keep the United States from being drawn into the chaos of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. As president, Jefferson “solved” the problem of the Mississippi River by buying the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon in 1803, which doubled the size of the United States. Jefferson then sent his protégé Meriwether Lewis to inventory that vast territory. Jefferson was an admirer of Adam Smith. He believed that the less governments intruded into the free flow of goods and services in the world, the more efficient economies would be, and more prosperity would result. In the third segment of the program, Clay and David talked carefully about the trade, tariff, and foreign policy situation that has unfolded in the first months of the second Trump term. This interview was recorded on March 12, 2025.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone, it's Clay Jenkinson. This is my introduction to this week's podcast. This is a conversation between Thomas Jefferson and David Horton, David Horton of Radford University in Virginia, my dear friend, he often guest hosts the program. He does a great job. We talked about Mr. Jefferson in diplomacy.
0:21.9	So diplomacy, Jefferson as president, Jefferson as Secretary of State, Jefferson as the American minister to France, the Louisiana purchase, Jefferson in Cuba, Jefferson in tariffs, Jefferson and trade policy, all topical issues, but we stayed completely
0:40.7	within Jefferson's time and character on that.
0:44.4	The American people knew who Donald Trump was when he stood for re-election in 2024, and he was
0:51.2	handily re-elected, both in the electoral college and the popular vote. That matters.
0:56.0	There's no way to avoid that. And he's entitled by that victory to attempt within our
1:04.6	constitutional system of checks and balances to pursue his policies, his vision, if you can call it that, his purposes in the world.
1:14.3	He has every right to do what he wants to do if it's not checked under our system by the Congress
1:21.2	or by the courts or by the demands of the American people.
1:26.3	State governments, of course, will play a role in that, too.
1:28.4	That was what Jefferson believed when he wrote the Kentucky Resolutions in 1798, that in certain
1:34.4	moments the states have to stand up to the federal government, if the federal government
1:38.0	refuses to follow the rule of the Constitution. For anyone offended by that, I apologize, but I just ask that you hear, that you hear and heard me.
1:48.5	And I repeatedly said, look, you know, we probably needed a shake-up.
1:52.2	Some of the grievances are grounded in reality.
1:56.4	Tough love may be necessary.
1:58.8	That doesn't condone the crudeness of the hate and the aggression and the
2:05.4	vindictiveness. I think that's never okay. I do think that we all must realize that we had every
2:13.2	right to refuse to re-elect him in 2024, but he was re-elected, and that matters.
2:20.3	I also promote several times in the course of this podcast, Robert Kagan's book, The Jungle
2:27.0	Grows Back. It's a really important book, but what it basically says is that the peaceful post-World War II world
2:38.3	order of prosperity and relative harmony in Europe is an amazing achievement brought on by
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