Pennings, A.J. (2026, Sep 13) AI4D and Four Schools of American Foreign Policy. apennings.com https://apennings.com/democratic-political-economies/ai4d-and-the-four-schools-of-american-foreign-policy/

Introduction

In Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World (2001), Walter Russell Mead argued that the enduring power and adaptability of American statecraft stems not from a single, static grand strategy, but from the dynamic tensions among four deeply rooted US political traditions based on previous US leaders. He referred to them as the Hamiltonian, Jeffersonian, Wilsonian, and Jacksonian “schools.”

Hamiltonians emphasize commerce and economic power; Wilsonians emphasize democracy, human rights, and international institutions; Jeffersonians prioritize liberty and restraint at home; and Jacksonians emphasize national sovereignty, security, and power. Mead’s central insight is that American foreign-policy success has come less from the triumph of one tradition than from their continuing interaction. AI creates a new arena for this interaction.

The question is not simply whether the United States should promote artificial intelligence overseas. AI is becoming embedded in telecommunications, cloud computing, data centers, energy systems, financial networks, education, health care, agriculture, manufacturing, logistics, and government. AI is therefore becoming part of the infrastructure of international development. This makes artificial intelligence for development (AI4D) a foreign-policy issue.

Artificial intelligence is reshaping energy grids, trade settlement, automated governance, and industrial development. This has collided with the global development agenda. In the international policy arena, this intersection is captured by AI4D and its sibling, AI for Good.

Yet, Washington’s posture toward international digital development is far from unified. If we interrogate the future of AI in international development through Mead’s four archetypes, we can argue that the United States does not have one AI4D policy, but four competing doctrines vying to define the terms of the algorithmic era.

The Hamiltonian Imperative for Compute Merchantilism and Digital Dollarization

The Hamiltonian tradition views foreign policy through the prism of commercial enterprise, state-backed industrial strength, and maritime trade security. Historically, Hamiltonians allied a powerful federal state with private capital to dominate global finance, protect patent rights, and secure open sea lanes. In the arena of AI4D, Hamiltonians treat artificial intelligence as the ultimate frontier of commercial power and geoeconomic leverage.

The Hamiltonian strategy aims to integrate the developing world into the American computational orbit by securing foreign adoption of US cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud), proprietary foundation models, and US-designed semiconductor architectures.

Hamiltonians would champion tokenized US liquidity, such as Treasury-backed stablecoins operating over automated machine-payment standards like x402, to serve as the settlement rail for global AI commerce. By enabling developers in Lagos or Jakarta to pay for compute directly in digital dollars, the Hamiltonian impulse leapfrogs domestic currency frictions while entrenching the dollar’s exorbitant privilege in machine-to-machine transactions.

For Hamiltonians, “development” is achieved when emerging economies become viable, integrated nodes within the global capitalist market, operating on Western technological primitives and respecting intellectual property regimes.[1]

The Wilsonian Mission for Moral Universalism, Human Rights, and the Multilateral Stack

The Wilsonian school contends that American security and legitimacy are inseparable from the global expansion of democratic values, the rule of law, and international covenants. Wilsonians see foreign aid and technology transfer as moral obligations that must be channeled through multilateral institutions.

In the AI4D landscape, Wilsonians dominate the multilateral forums convened by the United Nations, the ITU, and global development donors. Wilsonians frame AI as an indispensable catalyst for the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), deploying predictive diagnostics for rural health clinics (SDG 3), satellite telemetry for precision agriculture (SDG 2), and algorithmic dispatch for distributed renewable microgrids (SDG 7).

Wilsonians emphasize democratic values, bias mitigation, and human rights in AI deployment. They push for global ethical charters, algorithmic auditing, and multilateral frameworks that prevent authoritarian surveillance from taking root in the Global South.

Championing the formal AI4D ethos cultivated by institutions like Canada’s IDRC and the UK’s FCDO, Wilsonians emphasize building multidisciplinary local research labs, training South engineers, and ensuring marginalized populations share in the developmental dividends of advanced technology.

The Jeffersonian Caution: Democratic Integrity and the Perils of Algorithmic Empire

The Jeffersonian impulse has always feared imperial overreach. Jeffersonians argue that expansive foreign crusades inevitably distort the domestic republic, empower unaccountable corporate monopolies, and create entangling foreign liabilities. They believe the United States should safeguard its own liberties and inspire the world by domestic example, not by imposing its systems abroad. Applied to AI4D, the Jeffersonian perspective sounds an urgent, skeptical alarm.

Jeffersonians would critique AI4D when it functions as an arm of “techno-feudalism” or platform imperialism, extracting raw training data and poorly paid labeling labor from the Global South while corporate monopolies in Silicon Valley capture the intellectual property and capital rents.

Jeffersonians caution against locking developing nations into brittle, capital-intensive Western software dependencies. They argue that pushing high-energy compute infrastructures and centralized foundation models onto low-resource societies undermines local self-reliance and sovereignty.

A true Jeffersonian development agenda prioritizes local data sovereignty, open-source weights, decentralized compute architectures, and small, specialized models that can run locally on modest hardware without constant surveillance or foreign subscription tolls.

National Sovereignty, Strategic Deterrence, and Disdain for Altruism

The Jacksonian tradition embodies a populist, nationalist worldview deeply skeptical of cosmopolitan elites, international bureaucracies, and foreign aid programs. Jacksonians do not seek to police the world or export democracy. However, they possess a fierce commitment to national sovereignty and an uncompromising willingness to use overwhelming power if the nation’s security is threatened.
In the context of AI and foreign affairs, the Jacksonian posture redefines the developmental debate entirely.

Jacksonians reject the premise of spending American taxpayer dollars to build tech ecosystems in foreign nations under vague humanitarian banners. They view global governance summits and UN AI treaties as bureaucratic traps designed to constrain American technological agility.

To the Jacksonian mind, AI is not a cooperative tool for planetary sustainable development; it is a critical instrument of strategic deterrence, principally against China. The priority is not assisting foreign development, but maintaining absolute technological superiority through strict export controls on cutting-edge GPUs, semiconductor fabrication tools, and algorithmic intellectual property.

Foreign tech engagement is viewed through a lens of defensive realism. Tech transfer is sanctioned only when it directly bolsters US homeland defense or ties into immediate bilateral security alliances, with minimal regard for abstract multilateral consensus.

Navigating the Contradictions

The fundamental tension within American AI foreign policy is that these four schools are pulling in radically different directions simultaneously.

The Hamiltonians build the global digital dollar rails (stablecoins, x402) and push hyperscale cloud platforms into frontier markets to capture the commercial architecture of machine commerce. The Wilsonians deploy developmental grants and moral appeals at Geneva summits to ensure these platforms advance equitable healthcare, climate adaptation, and poverty alleviation. The Jeffersonians warn that this computational expansion creates algorithmic colonization, urging emerging nations to defend their digital borders and cultivate autonomous, open-source alternatives. The Jacksonians intervene with sweeping export controls, decoupling supply chains, and prioritizing sovereign compute defense, viewing developmental tech transfers with deep suspicion.

For leaders, technologists, and educators working in Technological Systems Management (TSM) and ICT4D, understanding this four-part dynamic is critical to understand the US’ foreign policy. Sustainable digital development cannot be achieved through naive technical optimism or abstract ethical declarations alone.

Whether American AI engagement in the Global South manifests as a predatory platform fiefdom, a genuine vehicle for human capability, a battleground for export controls, or an architecture for decentralized empowerment will depend directly on which of these four traditions captures the levers of statecraft in the decades ahead.

References

Mead, W. R. (2001). Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World. Alfred A. Knopf.
Birhane, A. (2020). Algorithmic Colonization of Africa. SCRIPTed: A Journal of Law, Technology and Society, 17(2), 389–409.
Heeks, R. (2017). Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICT4D). Routledge.
Jasanoff, S., & Kim, S.-H. (Eds.). (2015). Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power. University of Chicago Press.
Kettani, D., & Moulin, B. (2025). Rethinking the role of technology for development in the AI era: From AI4D to Smart ICT4D. International Journal of Engineering Trends and Technology, 73(5), 124–136.
Pennings, A. J. (2026). Combining AI with Technological Systems Management (TSM) to create integrated BS, MS, and PhD degrees. apennings.com.
Sachs, J. D. (n.d.). ICT and SDGs: How Information and Communications Technology Can Accelerate Action on the Sustainable Development Goals. SDSN & Ericsson.
Toupin, S., & Siad, R. (2025). Artificial intelligence for development (AI4D): A contested notion. Big Data & Society, 12(2), 1–5.
Varoufakis, Y. (2023). Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. Bodley Head.

Notes

[1] Core technological primitives include boolean logic, 1/0 logical operations (AND, OR, NOT), the Turing Machine / Von Neumann architecture featuring a processing unit, memory, and sequential instruction execution. The transistor semiconductor building block used to amplify and switch electrical signals and power modern microchips. TCP/IP and packet switching as the foundational networking primitive that breaks data into small packets to route across decentralized systems, the basis of the Internet. Alphabetic writing mechanical primitives for mass data storage, replication, and transmission of Western thought.
[2]
AI Prompt(s) OK let’s apply the perspective in Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World (2001), where Walter Russell Mead argues that America’s remarkable historical success in foreign policy stems from the dynamic, competing interaction of four distinct political traditions rather than a single consistent grand strategy. Write a blog post called AI4D and the Four Schools of American Foreign Policy. This would mean evaluating the future of AI, supported by Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in the foreign policy of international development (mainly in the Global South) and sustainable development (which applies to all countries).

© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Not to be considered financial advice. AI is often used, and results are thoroughly interrogated. Links are used for some citations. Views are my own and do not express the stances of my employers, past or present.

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Anthony J. Pennings, PhD is a Professor at the Department of Technology and Society, State University of New York, Korea and a Research Professor for Stony Brook University. He teaches AI and broadband policy. From 2002-2012 he taught digital economics and information systems management at New York University. He also taught in the Digital Media MBA at St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas, where he lives when not in Korea.

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Category: artificial intelligence, blockchain, cryptocurrencies, data analytics and meaning, democratic political economies
Tags: Hamiltonians > Jacksonian > Jeffersonians > Walter Russell Mead > Wilsonians

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