Already Adams had won a strategic advantage over Canning, for in the previous year, 1822, the United States had recognized the new South American republics.
Great as were the dangers involved in cooperation with England, however, they seemed to many persons of little moment compared with the menace of absolutist armies and navies in the New World or of, perhaps, a French Cuba and a Russian Mexico.

The only effective obstacle to such foreign intervention was the British Navy.

Both President Monroe and Thomas Jefferson, who in his retirement was still consulted on all matters of high moment, therefore favored the acceptance of Canning's proposal as a means of detaching England from the rest of Europe.

Adams argued, however, that England was already detached; that, for England's purposes, the British Navy would still stand between Europe and America, whatever the attitude of the United States; that compromise or concession was unnecessary; and that the country could as safely take its stand toward the whole outside world as toward continental Europe alone.

To reject the offer of a country whose assistance was absolutely necessary to the safety of the United States, and to declare the American case against her as well as against the more menacing forces whose attack she alone could prevent, required a nerve and poise which could come only from ignorant foolhardiness or from absolute knowledge of the facts.