#1688 Ten Things About Foreign Policy in the Age of Jefferson

Listening to America

Society & Culture, History

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 26 January 2026

⏱️ 57 minutes

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Summary

Clay's favorite guest, Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky, makes her first 2026 appearance to discuss foreign policy in the administrations of George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. America's recent incursion into the sovereign nation of Venezuela raises questions about the war powers in America. The Founding Fathers were adamant that Congress (not the executive) must initiate wars, and vote funds to pay for them, too. We discuss the crisis of the French Revolution in America, Washington's famous Farewell Address in 1796, the Quasi-War with France during the John Adams administration, and Adams' heroic decision to seek peace rather than war with the French Republic. We explore Jefferson's idealism as voiced in a letter he wrote in 1799 and his famous First Inaugural Address in 1801. Jefferson believed it was too late in the world's history to solve our disputes through bloodshed, and yet he sent marines and a naval squadron to North Africa to bloody the nose of the Pasha of Tripoli. This episode was recorded on January 5, 2026.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, everyone, and welcome to this introduction to this week's podcast, Dr. Lindsay
0:06.3	Chervinsky.
0:07.9	You know, it's always great to have her.
0:10.2	I really admire her.
0:11.6	We've become really close friends.
0:13.3	We talk before and after the recording about everything about our historian friends,
0:18.5	about things we both want to read, things we want to investigate.
0:22.7	I ask her questions.
0:24.5	She asks me questions.
0:26.1	We actually agree about almost everything, but we play bitter enemies on TV.
0:32.8	She's great, and I love having her, and you all love her.
0:36.1	She's a terrific young scholar and
0:38.3	she's so funny, whimsical and playful and uses language that no proper historian would
0:43.3	ever use, etc., etc., etc. So I really like her a lot and we become really close over the years.
0:50.3	So all that. Now, we talked today about foreign policy of the founders. And the reason
0:56.2	we did that, of course, is because the United States has snatched the president of Venezuela and his
1:03.2	wife and brought them to New York and arraigned them. Think of what the founding fathers would
1:07.0	think about that. Are sending a military sortie into the capital of another sovereign
1:14.0	nation without congressional consultation of any sort and without congressional authorization
1:22.3	when the Constitution very, very, very, very clearly says that all wars must begin in the House of Representatives,
1:30.3	that the House must pay for it, that the President does not have any independent authority
1:35.9	unless we are under attack. And surely no one can really argue that we were under attack
	...

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