When the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft launched in 2019, its founders chose a name that would connect the group to a primordial era of U.S. foreign policy. Although John Quincy Adams was hardly an isolationist—he pursued territorial expansion and argued for America’s direct interests in Latin America as secretary of state and later as president—his 1821 formulation that the United States “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy” has become a catchphrase for those who believe Washington has lost all sense of proportion and reality in its dealings with the rest of the world.
