George Washington could have run for a third term in 1796 and almost certainly won it. That he chose not to is itself one of the most consequential decisions in American political history, setting an unwritten two-term precedent that held for a century and a half until Franklin Roosevelt broke it. But Washington's farewell wasn't just about stepping aside gracefully. It was also his final, deliberate attempt to set the young republic's foreign policy on a footing he believed would let it survive its own fragility. The $.A.F.E. mnemonic captures how carefully calibrated that vision actually was: not isolation for its own sake, but a pragmatic, almost businesslike caution about what a weak new nation could and couldn't afford.
Washington's foreign policy instincts had already been tested three years earlier, in his 1793 Proclamation of Neutrality, when he declared that the United States would stay out of the escalating war between France and Britain despite treaty obligations to France dating back to the Revolution. This was a controversial call at the time. Plenty of Americans, especially Jeffersonian Republicans, felt real loyalty to revolutionary France and wanted the U.S. to honor its alliance. But Washington judged, correctly, that the United States in the 1790s simply lacked the military and economic strength to survive entanglement in a European war. Neutrality wasn't principled pacifism; it was survival math.
That same survival math shaped the Farewell Address itself in 1796, where Washington warned explicitly against permanent political alliances with any foreign power. His argument wasn't that the United States should refuse all contact with the rest of the world (he explicitly encouraged commercial relationships and trade), but that binding treaty commitments could drag the young nation into conflicts that had nothing to do with its own interests and everything to do with the ambitions of more powerful states. Given how narrowly the United States had escaped disaster just by staying neutral in the France-Britain conflict, this wasn't abstract caution. It was a lesson learned in real time, delivered as a warning to whoever came next.
None of this meant retreating from diplomacy altogether, and this is the part of Washington's foreign policy that students most often miss when they hear "avoid entangling alliances" and assume it means total isolation. The Jay Treaty of 1794 with Britain and the Pinckney Treaty of 1795 with Spain both resolved serious territorial and trade disputes through negotiation rather than confrontation, securing American interests without dragging the country into anyone else's war. Pragmatic engagement, in other words, sat right alongside neutrality and caution as a working strategy, not a contradiction of it.
When you teach this to students, the richest discussion question isn't whether Washington's advice was wise for 1796 (it obviously was, given how weak the United States actually was). It's tracing where later American leaders followed that advice and where they abandoned it, and asking what changed. The Monroe Doctrine, the Spanish-American War, the World Wars, the Cold War alliance system built through NATO: each one is, in a real sense, a departure from Washington's original caution, made by leaders governing a nation that had grown powerful enough to no longer need the same fragile-nation math Washington was doing in 1796. That HTS bridge, tracking when and why the U.S. departed from Washington's advice, gives students a throughline they can return to across the entire span of the course.