American Isolationism

8 Key excerpts on "American Isolationism"

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  The American Approach to Foreign Affairs

  An Uncertain Tradition

  • Roger S. Whitcomb(Author)
  • 2001(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  Today, of course, the world is not as far away as it once was; The Isolationist-Interventionist Impulse 85 still, the immediacy of international affairs is rarely as great for most Americans as that of local, state, or national ones—except, that is, in moments of perceived crisis. 5 Another component of the isolationist credo was an insistence upon America's non-involvement in foreign wars. America's eagerness to avoid such conflicts was no mere abstraction emanating from the mouths of the country's Founding Fathers. It was a resolve that developed from the American people's experience during the colonial period and the early years under the Constitution. Between 1689 and 1815 England and France went to war seven times, fighting each other for almost half of that 126 year period. Americans were involved in some fashion or other in every one of these conflict situations, regardless of their own desires in the matter. Is it any wonder that in the years leading up to the American Revolution the benefits to be had from non involvement in Europe's wars were seen as one of the main benefits of "separation" from England. 6 The fear of unwanted involvement in foreign wars not of our own making was the major contributing factor to perhaps the most widely recognized definition of isolationism in American history: the idea of diplomatic and military non-entanglement. From the Washington administration down to the Second World War, the view that America, for security purposes, must remain free from complicating commitments to the Old World was a hallowed viewpoint for most Americans. The injunction against entangling alliances came over time to be universalized and sanctified into a kind of rule. It is also in this particular guise that the isolationist impulse should be seen as an attempt to preserve the national sovereignty of America, including its independence in policy-making.

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  No Higher Law

  American Foreign Policy and the Western Hemisphere since 1776

  • Brian Loveman(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • The University of North Carolina Press

    (Publisher)

  It is not merely a curiosity or a semantic dispute over how best to characterize the United States’ foreign policy. Professional historians, political scientists, policy analysts, and popular writers insist on the reality of America’s isolationist past despite significant revisionist scholarship since at least the 1950s. Thus, historian Dexter Perkins, who spent much of his life writing about American policy toward Latin America, told readers in 1962 that during the first period of American foreign policy, before 1898, the country evolved “an isolationist viewpoint regarding Europe.” 5 In 1966, political scientist Leroy Rieselbach wrote in a study on Congress and foreign policy that “isolationism has been a force in American politics since the founding of the nation.” 6 Historian Howard Jones’s widely used textbook on American foreign relations notes in passing that “the war with Spain [in 1898] also furthered the decline of American Isolationism.” In 2006, the author of a major study of American foreign policy and strategy declared that “when, toward the end of the nineteenth century, a united Germany proved to be too powerful to be restrained by its European neighbors without American help, America’s first strategy of isolationism became obsolete.” 7 And a well-known policy analyst reminded readers in 2007: “Isolationism, recall, was America’s response to the wrangling world and remained so throughout much of the nation’s history …. The isolationist instinct lives in America.” 8 The persistence of the idea that America had a tradition of isolationism reflects crucial aspects of American national identity. Americans have been taught to think, and like to think, that the country did not meddle in the affairs of other nations, that in its dealings with other peoples the United States has been magnanimous, that, unlike other great powers, the United States has usually followed the moral high ground and resorted to force only in self-defense

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  A Grand Strategy for America

  • Robert J. Art(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Cornell University Press

    (Publisher)

  To the question of how the United States should utilize its military power, isolationism responds that the United States should undertake no binding peacetime commitments to come to the assistance of another nation with military aid, that it should use force only to protect the nation’s vital interests, and that it should adhere to a very narrow definition of what interests are “vital.” A pure isolationist strategy, consequently, would prescribe that the United States should discard all standing political commitments to use military power; avoid peacetime military alliances; disband all overseas bases; bring all the troops stationed abroad home; preserve complete freedom of action to determine when, where, how, in concert with whom, and against whom the United States will use its military power; reject all ambitious attempts to shape the larger international environment through the peacetime time use of military power; and go to war only for the most compelling reasons, which essentially means only to defend the nation and its citizens from attack. The heart of isolationism was well captured in 1952 by Senator Robert A. Taft, one of America’s most influential isolationists, who continued to espouse isolationism well after the United States had adopted containment:

  From the days of George Washington…[neutrality and non-interference have] been the policy of the United States. It has…always avoided alliances and interference in foreign quarrels as a preventive against possible war, and it has always opposed any commitment by the United States, in advance, to take any military action outside of our territory. It would leave us free to interfere or not interfere according to whether we consider the case of sufficiently vital interest to the liberty of this country. It was the policy of the

  free hand.5

  In sum, isolationism is unilateral in deciding when to use force and is very sparing in its use.6

  Today’s rationale for an isolationist posture rests on three assumptions. The first is that the United States is physically secure from attack by another state because its nuclear forces provide a robust deterrent against state-sponsored conventional, nuclear, biological, or chemical attacks against the homeland.7 America’s “strategic immunity,” to use Eric Nordlinger’s phrase, is likely to continue for the indefinite future. As for terrorism, an isolationist would agree that going after terrorists in the short term is militarily necessary if they attack Americans at home or abroad, but would also argue that America’s overseas presence, particularly its military meddling in other people’s affairs, is the root cause of such terrorist attacks against Americans abroad or at home.8

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  In Defense of the Bush Doctrine

  • Robert G. Kaufman(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • The University Press of Kentucky

    (Publisher)

  As the dominant maritime and commercial power of the day, Britain preferred an independent Latin America open to trade rather than a Spanish empire that restricted it. Hence, Great Britain warned France and other members The Imprudence of Isolationism 11 of the Holy Roman Alliance against interference with the independence of the former Spanish colonies. 14 With the exception of Thomas Jefferson, who obtusely dismissed the grave danger Napoleon would pose to the United States if France con- quered all of continental Europe and Great Britain, virtually all the Found- ers dreaded the prospect of a single power achieving such dominance, with good reason: the preservation of the European balance of power was vital to the United States as well as to Great Britain. Even Jefferson acknowl- edged that “it cannot be in our interest that all Europe should be reduced to a single monarchy.” He wished for and expected “a salutary balance [that] may be ever maintained among nations.” 15 The American interest in preventing any single hostile hegemon from dominating any of the world’s major power centers thus has remained con- stant since the founding. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth cen- turies, the United States had neither the need nor the capacity to maintain a balance of power in Europe; a felicitous combination of technology, prevail- ing political conditions on the European continent, and foresight of British statesmanship produced an equilibrium among the major powers of Europe that was favorable to American interests. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the prodigious expansion of the American republic coincided with a period of remarkable stability in Europe, and Americans were inclined to take this European equilibrium for granted. 16 Isolationism’s Peril and the Two World Wars By the beginning of the twentieth century, a convergence of political and technological developments had rendered the strategy of isolationism per- ilously obsolete.

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  Safeguarding Democratic Capitalism

  U.S. Foreign Policy and National Security, 1920-2015

  • Melvyn P. Leffler(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  VI. Conclusion

  Ironically, American efforts to participate constructively in the struggle for European stability came to an end when that struggle had greater ramifications for American security than ever before. But the purpose of this essay has not been to review Republican foreign policies in order to compare them favorably with Democratic policies in the 1930s. Rather, the intent has been to shed some light on two related questions: To what extent did American policy toward Western Europe constitute political isolationism, economic expansionism, or diplomatic realism in the context of the 1920s and early 1930s? To what extent did the desire to restore Germany, to stabilize Europe, and to effect disarmament through the application of financial power and the revision of American neutrality practices constitute a shrewd effort to expand the American empire or a naive attempt to escape the realities of international politics?

  There can be little doubt that William A. Williams’s incisive and suggestive article on the legend of isolationism in the 1920s opened up an important area of research and correctly emphasized certain salient aspects of American diplomacy during the era of the Republican ascendancy.129 It is important, however, not to draw erroneous conclusions from that essay. The growth of American industry and commerce did foster an appreciation of the importance of the international economy to American well-being. Likewise, the expansion of overseas investments and foreign loans did generate a desire to create a community of economic interests among the industrialized powers. But these trends did not generate a consensus of business opinion regarding the necessity of foreign markets for the viability of the American capitalist system. Indeed, even Hoover occasionally cautioned against overestimating the extent to which the American economy was dependent upon the international economy. The related beliefs that the United States could survive, if not prosper, in relative economic self-containment and that the United States could recover independently from any economic setback were deeply embedded in the American business community and in policymaking circles.130

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  American Empire in the Pacific

  From Trade to Strategic Balance, 1700-1922

  • Arthur Power Dudden(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  1

  The English Background of American Isolationism in the Eighteenth Century

  Felix Gilbert

  When the colonists began their opposition to the encroachments of the British government, the legal justification of their resistance was their conception of the rights of Englishmen. Before the War of Independence Americans had lived in the intellectual and cultural atmosphere of England; they were the proud heirs of the great English tradition of freedom, handed on in an unbroken succession from the days of Magna Carta; they had taken from English political experience the principle of “no taxation without representation”. When drafting their new Constitution, they intended merely to improve the old English version by divesting it of those features which had made possible the lapse of the British government into despotism.

  This English tradition formed no contrast to the spirit of Enlightenment philosophy which dominated all Europe and also the minds of the colonists in the eighteenth century. Europe’s enlightened “philosophes” took Montesquieu and Blackstone as their teachers and thereby accepted the British constitution as the ideal constitution per se or they admitted at least that it contained the basic principles of an ideal political organization. The English tradition could easily be fused, therefore, with those general ideas about the nature of man and about the “Rights of Man” which eighteenth century philosophy had developed. Beneath the philosophical and generalizing language of the Enlightenment in which the constitutions of the new world were couched the English tradition remained clearly perceptible.

  Similarly, the roots of the guiding principles of early American foreign policy exhibit the English influence. A public discussion of foreign affairs formed an intrinsic element of English political life in the eighteenth century. Certainly England was not ruled by the will of the people or by public opinion in the eighteenth century; political power rested solidly in the hands of a small clique of Whig aristocrats. But whereas on the European continent absolutism stifled public political discussion, and foreign affairs especially were considered as an arcanum—managed and understood by the monarch and a few nobles alone; in England the Whigs, as the heirs and beneficiaries of the “Glorious Revolution” and bound to its traditions, had an interest in airing political issues in Parliament and in gaining the support of public opinion. Debates in Parliament were secret then; but speeches of parliamentary leaders were frequently published anonymously, and all political problems of significance were extensively discussed in numerous pamphlets. Thus throughout the years from the Peace of Utrecht to the American Revolution a steady trickle of pamphlets concerned with the issues of British foreign policy appeared and developed into a spate in times of war and political crisis.

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  The United States and NATO

  The Formative Years

  • Lawrence S. Kaplan(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • The University Press of Kentucky

    (Publisher)

  3. Isolationism, the United Nations, and the Cold War, 1947–1949

  The experience of World War II taught Americans that the price the nation had paid for its isolationism in the 1930s was too high. They learned that war might have been avoided had the United States been able to accept the principles of collective security. But even as this knowledge impressed itself upon policymakers, the Roosevelt and Truman administrations recognized the difficulty of uprooting an entrenched idea. Political abstention from the Old World meant American freedom from the evils of spheres of influence, alliances, and balance-of-power struggles. The fate of Woodrow Wilson’s attempt to bring the United States into the League of Nations was instructive to the makers of foreign policy during the war and postwar years. If America should break with the traditions of Washington or Monroe, the break would have to be in consonance with the spirit of the past, so that identification with Europe would not be identical with the immoral European system of international relations.

  It was for this reason that the United Nations became such an important part of American policy in the 1940s. It would be America’s chance to redeem the error of 1919 and to do so on its own terms. That is, the United Nations, under American auspices, would not only make another world war impossible but would guarantee security by means of America’s traditional practices, or at least what it liked to consider to be its true approach to international affairs—conciliation, mediation, and use of international law. It was not important that the new league was in fact less powerful than the old on paper. It was important simply that America had embraced the world without embracing the destructive power politics of the past. To President Roosevelt and his advisers, the successful making of a world organization was second in priority only to the winning of the war.

  Their plans succeeded magnificently. Senate Republicans as well as Democrats were intimately involved in the deliberations on American membership in the new organization, which was to have its headquarters in New York, and the United States would be one of the “Four Policemen” on the Security Council guaranteeing peace for all nations. While lively suspicions of the allies persisted—of the British as well as the Russians—they were submerged in the expectation that the operations of the United Nations would undermine British and Russian spheres of influence in Asia and Eastern Europe, respectively.

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  Sands of Empire

  Missionary Zeal, American Foreign Policy, and the Hazards of Global Ambition

  • Robert W. Merry(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Simon & Schuster

    (Publisher)

  Notwithstanding his strong language, there is evidence that Lodge was willing to compromise on the issue. But Wilson, true to his temperament of sanctimony, was not. And so Lodge carried the day, sending Wilson’s liberal interventionism into political eclipse. But Lodge’s own brand of unilateral interventionism went into eclipse as well, forced there by a growing national weariness with misbegotten international adventures. And thus emerged the powerful new wave of conservative isolationism. It began with the simple aim of getting the country back to “normalcy” after Wilson’s foreign policy idealism had dissolved into disillusionment. But it grew in intensity and force, reaching such a pitch by 1935 that Congress passed the Neutrality Act of Senator Gerald Nye of North Dakota, a rustic progressive and fiery opponent of U.S. arms manufacturers, or “merchants of death,” as he called them.

  Nye’s legislation sought to place America on the sidelines of any international conflicts, and to that end it required the president to maintain a list of all foreign wars and prohibited American vessels from carrying arms to or for belligerents in those wars. Nye had plenty of allies in Congress, including crusty William Borah of Idaho, the fiery populist Hiram Johnson of California, the colorful Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, and Montana’s Burton K. Wheeler. A few years later they were joined by a rising star from Ohio named Robert A. Taft, who ultimately emerged as the preeminent conservative isolationist of his day.

  Taft viewed American democracy as a delicately balanced system inherently threatened by the kind of internationalist adventurism personified by Wilson. America is a pristine experiment in self-government, he believed, operating in an evil world of power struggles and treachery. The best protection against contamination was to keep it removed from the evil world. “We should be prepared to defend our own shores,” declared Taft, “but we should not undertake to defend the ideals of democracy in foreign countries.” Besides, internationalism would only lead to militarism, which would then lead to more foreign entanglements, which would in turn lead to further erosion of the American system. “War is a vain policy, except a war fought at home to establish or preserve the freedom of a nation,” Taft declared in the fall of 1940, as Britain faced the threat of a German invasion. “If the English Channel is our frontier, and this is our war,” he argued, prophetically, “then we will have to defend it for years to come.” By then, tumultuous new forces had swept across Europe and the Far East, and they threatened to draw America into the vortex of World War II. But the American people were not interested; conservative isolationism still carried the day.

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