The abiding defect of US foreign policy? It's isolationism, my friend. Purporting to steer clear of war, isolationism fosters it. Isolationism impedes the spread of democracy. It inhibits trade and therefore prosperity. It allows evildoers to get away with murder. Isolationists prevent the United States from accomplishing its providentially assigned global mission. Wean the American people from their persistent inclination to look inward and who knows what wonders our leaders will accomplish.
The United States has been at war for well over a decade now, with US attacks and excursions in distant lands having become as commonplace as floods and forest fires. Yet during the recent debate over Syria, the absence of popular enthusiasm for opening up another active front evoked expressions of concern in Washington that Americans were once more turning their backs on the world.
As he was proclaiming the imperative of punishing the government of Bashar al-Assad, Secretary of State John Kerry also chided skeptical members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that "this is not the time for armchair isolationism." Commentators keen to have a go at the Syrian autocrat wasted little time in expanding on Kerry's theme.
Reflecting on "where isolationism leads," Jennifer Rubin, the reliably bellicose Washington Post columnist, was quick to chime in, denouncing those hesitant to initiate another war as "infantile." American isolationists, she insisted, were giving a green light to aggression. Any nation that counted on the United States for protection had now become a "sitting duck," with "Eastern Europe [and] neighbors of Venezuela and Israel" among those left exposed and vulnerable. News reports of Venezuelan troop movements threatening Brazil, Colombia, or Guyana were notably absent from the Post or any other media outlet, but no matter-you get the idea.
Military analyst Frederick Kagan was equally troubled. Also writing in the Post, he worried that "the isolationist narrative is rapidly becoming dominant." His preferred narrative emphasized the need for ever greater military exertions, with Syria just the place to launch a new campaign. For Bret Stephens, a columnist with the Wall Street Journal, the problem was the Republican Party. Where had the hawks gone? The Syria debate, he lamented, was "exposing the isolationist worm eating its way through the GOP apple."
The Journal's op-ed page also gave the redoubtable Norman Podhoretz, not only still alive but vigorously kicking, a chance to vent. Unmasking President Obama as "a left-wing radical" intent on "reduc[ing] the country's power and influence," the unrepentant neoconservative accused the president of exploiting the "war-weariness of the American people and the rise of isolationist sentiment... on the left and right" to bring about "a greater diminution of American power than he probably envisaged even in his wildest radical dreams."
Obama escalated the war in Afghanistan, "got" Osama bin Laden, toppled one Arab dictator in Libya, and bashed and bombed targets in Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, and elsewhere. Even so, it turns out he is actually part of the isolationist conspiracy to destroy America!
Over at the New York Times, similar concerns, even if less hysterically expressed, prevailed. According to Times columnist Roger Cohen, President Obama's reluctance to pull the trigger showed that he had "deferred to a growing isolationism." Bill Keller concurred. "America is again in a deep isolationist mood." In a column entitled, "Our New Isolationism," he decried "the fears and defeatist slogans of knee-jerk isolationism" that were impeding military action. (For Keller, the proper antidote to isolationism is amnesia. As he put it, "Getting Syria right starts with getting over Iraq.")
For his part, Times staff writer Sam Tanenhaus contributed a bizarre two-minute exercise in video agitprop-complete with faked scenes of the Japanese attacking Pearl Harbor-that slapped the isolationist label on anyone opposing entry into any war whatsoever, or tiring of a war gone awry, or proposing that America go it alone.
When the "New Isolationism" Was New
Most of this, of course, qualifies as overheated malarkey. As a characterization of US policy at any time in memory, isolationism is a fiction. Never really a tendency, it qualifies at most as a moment, referring to that period in the 1930s when large numbers of Americans balked at the prospect of entering another European war, the previous one having fallen well short of its "War To End All Wars" advance billing.
In fact, from the day of its founding down to the present, the United States has never turned its back on the world. Isolationism owes its storied history to its value as a rhetorical device, deployed to discredit anyone opposing an action or commitment (usually involving military forces) that others happen to favor. If I, a grandson of Lithuanian immigrants, favor deploying US forces to Lithuania to keep that NATO ally out of Vladimir Putin's clutches and you oppose that proposition, then you, sir or madam, are an "isolationist." Presumably, Jennifer Rubin will see things my way and lend her support to shoring up Lithuania's vulnerable frontiers.
For this very reason, the term isolationism is not likely to disappear from American political discourse anytime soon. It's too useful. Indeed, employ this verbal cudgel to castigate your opponents and your chances of gaining entrée to the nation's most prestigious publications improve appreciably. Warn about the revival of isolationism and your prospects of making the grade as a pundit or candidate for high office suddenly brighten. This is the great thing about using isolationists as punching bags: it makes actual thought unnecessary. All that's required to posture as a font of wisdom is the brainless recycling of clichés, half-truths, and bromides.
No publication is more likely to welcome those clichés, half-truths, and bromides than the New York Times. There, isolationism always looms remarkably large and is just around the corner.
In July 1942, the New York Times Magazine opened its pages to Vice President Henry A. Wallace, who sounded the alarm about the looming threat of what he styled a "new isolationism." This was in the midst of World War II, mind you.
After the previous world war, the vice president wrote, the United States had turned inward. As summer follows spring, "the choice led up to this present war." Repeat the error, Wallace warned, and "the price will be more terrible and will be paid much sooner." The world was changing and it was long past time for Americans to get with the program. "The airplane, the radio, and modern technology have bound the planet so closely together that what happens anywhere on the planet has a direct effect everywhere else." In a world that had "suddenly become so small," he continued, "we cannot afford to resume the role of hermit."
The implications for policy were self-evident:
"This time, then, we have only one real choice. We must play a responsible part in the world-leading the way in world progress, fostering a healthy world trade, helping to protect the world's peace."
One month later, it was Archibald MacLeish's turn. On August 16, 1942, the Times magazine published a long essay of his under the title of-wouldn't you know it-"The New Isolationism." For readers in need of coaching, Times editors inserted this seal of approval before the text: "There is great pertinence in the following article."
