Thread: That Old Isolationist Tug

That Old Isolationist Tug

By Victor Davis Hanson Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Filed under: World Watch

Americans are growing world-weary. But they may regret isolationism and protectionism tomorrow.


The United States is experiencing one of its periodic fits of isolationism. In the age before missiles and satellites, we often felt that two oceans protected us from warring states in Asia and Europe. In addition, for over a century our own frontier kept us busy enough. Both the Founding Fathers and waves of immigrants warned us against getting too involved with the aristocratic prejudices and age-old feuds of the Old World.

After the Civil War, the federal government turned our army into a tiny constabulary. The nation industrialized, and didn’t much worry about the rising tensions between European colonial powers. We came late to the First World War. And we left abruptly upon its conclusion.
The Great Depression and our collective sense of “Here Europe goes again” convinced the United States to sit out the first two years of World War II until Pearl Harbor. Later, only the rise of Soviet and Chinese communism scared Americans enough to stay engaged abroad and not allow a World War III to nullify their victories against Germany and Japan. That postwar legacy of keeping the peace—given new life by the globalized spread of U.S.-inspired culture, technology, and communications—explains our present worldwide role.
But lately we are growing tired of it.

So once more there is the old isolationist tug. Americans are weary of Afghanistan and Iraq. We are the world’s largest debtor nation. The dollar has plummeted. And our leaders shrug that an ascendant China and Russia are carving out significant spheres of influence.
Internationalism, whether economic or political, always rested on an odd, tenuous alliance of Americans. East Coast elites of both parties made the argument that our own self-interest demanded integration with like-minded democracies around the world.

That pragmatism was also bolstered by sudden fits of public idealism. Americans were occasionally whipped up by clergymen, reporters, and diplomats to stop ignoring challenges abroad—whether that meant a canal needed building in Panama, the British were being bombed in London, or Asians were being overrun by communists. We felt we had the power to address these dangers and opportunities—and to make ourselves more secure and even prosperous in the bargain.

But there was always a loose coalition of Americans who just wanted to stay home. Conservatives distrusted big government—engagement abroad usually meant more taxes, an expensive military apparatus, and the risk of surrendering sovereignty to multinational institutions. Isolationists accepted that, in theory, we might make things better abroad, but they still felt that the long-term political and financial costs would hardly be worth the effort.

Meanwhile, by the 20th century the American left increasingly bought into isolationism—but for quite different reasons. They made the argument, especially after Vietnam, that the United States was hardly a moral state, and thus had no business spreading its pathologies abroad. Moreover, government could do better by diverting its military expenditures to entitlements and social programs here at home. No wonder a Noam Chomsky now often sounds like a Ron Paul or The Nation sometimes apes The American Conservative.

Since World War II, mainstream Democrats and Republicans have resisted these fringes and insisted on engagement abroad—at first to repair the devastation of the war and to combat global communism, and later to bring states in Asia, Latin America, and Africa into the Western sphere of consumer capitalism and consensual government.

But there are new dangers to this internationalism, and they don’t just come from the far left and right. The mainstream of the Democratic Party sees political advantage in damning George W. Bush for his post-9/11 commitment to spreading democracy. Republican realists agree, and want to deal with the world as it is, rather than what it might become.

There is also another new isolationist impulse—growing American anger at Europe. The European Union’s economy, population, and territory are getting larger than our own. Yet the EU spends little on its self-defense, preferring instead to invest billions in entitlements and in protecting European agriculture.

In the heart of the most ardent internationalist there now grows the feeling that it might just be good for Europe or South Korea to defend itself—and for once take the flak that concrete action, not armchair moralizing, invites. Americans of every persuasion are beginning to think that a reduction in our global profile might be both profitable for ourselves and also good medicine for our friends—like when 30-something-year-old children are finally asked to move out of the house and make their own car payments.
Still, the new isolationists and protectionists do not answer how the Westernized world would deal with China without American leadership and power. Who would contain lunatic regimes rising in South America, or Islamic terrorism, or petro-rich Middle Eastern autocracies seeking the bomb? What would be the global consequences of curtailing the lucrative, wide-open American market for India, China, and other emerging powers?

But then isolationism and protectionism never do evoke such long-term worries. They have always followed short-term outbursts of emotion that may feel good in the here and now but are sorely regretted later.

Victor Davis Hanson is a recipient of the 2007 National Humanities Medal.
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Pretty good article I think.

I agree with the basic premise of this article, though what has allowed isolationism to survive as an infrequent ideology is the fact that isolationism does address real problems with globalism. Isolationism may not be a rational alternative, or even feasible, but it we must always be on guard against the innate dangerous of globalism without the checks and balances of nationalism.

Originally Posted by Burning Giraffe

I agree with the basic premise of this article, though what has allowed isolationism to survive as an infrequent ideology is the fact that isolationism does address real problems with globalism. Isolationism may not be a rational alternative, or even feasible, but it we must always be on guard against the innate dangerous of globalism without the checks and balances of nationalism.

Can you define "globalism"? I've heard the term thrown around a lot in these parts but I have no idea what it actually means.

hostile regiemes are formed through binary opposition to some threat.
Tone down the threat, and you tone down the hostile regieme.

Originally Posted by The_Bear

hostile regiemes are formed through binary opposition to some threat.
Tone down the threat, and you tone down the hostile regieme.

That's not the universal case. It is unreasonable to suggest that the sole cause of the formation of totalitarian, ethnocentric, ideological and/or expansionary states is a reaction to an engaged hegemonic global power.

Despotism, expansionism and failed states have been the standard in many parts of the world far before the United States took an active interest. Further even within the last 60 years of a foreign policy minded United States, many undesirable and threatening regimes have sprung up despite the fact that no foreign power posed a direct threat to their countries.

Noted examples in recent memory include Slobodan Milosevic's Serbia, Mobutu Sese Seko's Zaire, Idi Amin's Uganda, Pol Pot's Cambodia and Mao Zedong in China.

A great article with good balance - thanks for posting it.

hostile regiemes are formed through binary opposition to some threat.
Tone down the threat, and you tone down the hostile regieme.

But Bear deserves to take the author's National Humanities Medal for himself after this gem. This one sentence should be the defining philosophy of every modern nation state's foreign policy.

Originally Posted by Colin

That's not the universal case. It is unreasonable to suggest that the sole cause of the formation of totalitarian, ethnocentric, ideological and/or expansionary states is a reaction to an engaged hegemonic global power.

Despotism, expansionism and failed states have been the standard in many parts of the world far before the United States took an active interest. Further even within the last 60 years of a foreign policy minded United States, many undesirable and threatening regimes have sprung up despite the fact that no foreign power posed a direct threat to their state.

Noted examples in recent memory include Slobodan Milosevic's Serbia, Mobutu Sese Seko's Zaire, Idi Amin's Uganda, Pol Pot's Cambodia and Mao Zedong in China.

right, but that doesn't make them a threat to us.
In each region, a regieme comes to power due to the fact that it is able to marshall the forces of that region towards a particular goal. If its able to do marshall them for another reason than the United States, that leaves the United States in the clear and out of any of these stupid wars.

History has also shown that when governments are established or supported through a vanguard, or without the general actions of the people, that the governments fail to be a stable government because there will always be the spectre of the 'other' imposing law and order on the people.
In each of those cases that you mentioned, Slobodan's Serbia, Mobuto's Zaire, Idi's Uganda, Mao's China, its because some powerful foreign government tried to impose a particular style of government upon the people of that area, which was destroyed the pre-existing power structures.

Yes, 99% of the hostile regiemes in this world can trace their legacies back to the abuses of European Colonialism. On that part, i totally agree. However, the government of these states that has emerged in the post - colony is not a state that promotes honest work for its citizens; it continues governing the people in the same manner that the colonial power governed in, or it maintains stability through giving people food.
That's not indicative of a strong state, where the base of the state is those that it feeds through its own dispensations. That's indicative of a failed state, and thus is a state that we should not be dealing with, because such dealings will implicitly promote its stability.
That is, if we really do want peace and stability around the world.

You want to make the entire world peaceful? Convince them that peace is a good thing, and give them the means to achieve it on their own. Otherwise, you don't have real peace; you have peace that is achieved through fear.

There's something wrong with isolationism?

It's the flip side of the federalism coin. Going on the theory that local governments and local citizens can best address local problems, the damn Europeans should be better able to deal with Kosovo and the Balkans than the US.

That theory doesn't take into account the basic incompetence of Europeans, obviously.