The Great Depression then prompted a complete economic and geopolitical withdrawal. Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt went it alone on trade and finance, ending solidarity with fellow democracies and tanking the global economy. Some 1 million persons of Mexican heritage—many of them U. Roosevelt is remembered as a great wartime leader and the president who finally forged a sustainable brand of U. As fascism and militarism began to sweep Europe and Asia, he oversaw the tightening of neutrality laws that effectively severed commercial contact with belligerents in an attempt to cordon off the nation from any risk of war.
Even after he began to worry, in early , that the potential fall of Britain and Nazi control of Europe would enable the Axis powers to threaten the Western Hemisphere, he moved cautiously and incrementally. Following the German invasion of Poland in September of that year, FDR convinced Congress to permit the victims of Nazi aggression to purchase American weaponry, but only if they paid cash and transported the materiel on their own ships. German and Japanese expansion continued apace.
In , FDR stepped up assistance to countries resisting the Axis powers, but his exertions were in the service of defending hemispheric isolation, not joining the fight against fascism.
There is no intention by any member of your Government to send such a force. You can, therefore, nail any talk about sending armies to Europe as deliberate untruth. FDR kept his word until he had no choice but to join the fight; ultimately, Japan brought the war to the United States. Some 80 million people, including more than , Americans, perished in World War II, the deadliest war in history.
The conditions that led to this misguided run for cover are making a comeback. Even though the United States prevailed in the Spanish-American War and World War I, Americans recoiled from both conflicts, preferring to return to the strategic detachment that had preceded them. These conflicts have killed or wounded tens of thousands of U. Flanking oceans do not provide the natural security that they once did. But the United States is still far from Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, and the prospect of immunity from the dangers of foreign entanglement still has an intrinsic appeal.
The current political landscape looks much more like than As during the s, America is going it alone—imposing protective tariffs, pulling out of one pact after another, ignoring the concerns of its fellow democracies, and refusing to make common cause with like-minded nations.
Nothing of the sort has happened. Illiberalism is on the march worldwide, backed by a rising China and a pugnacious Russia. The recent targets of U. As a check on presidential power, the Constitution deliberately granted to Congress alone the power to declare war. So, too, have foreign entanglements given rise to domestic surveillance—wiretapping, financial monitoring, electronic data collection—that has encroached on the privacy and civil liberties of American citizens.
In the minds of many Americans, though, the economic costs of foreign entanglement have outstripped even the negative impact on liberty. Trump has explicitly linked globalization to the plight of American workers. Bad times for the working class have, in the meantime, revived pacifist inclinations among progressives. COVID, a disease that globalization helped rapidly spread across national boundaries, has furthered the urge to cordon the nation off from the outside world. The borders with Canada and Mexico are closed, and foreign travel has fallen off a cliff.
The pandemic has caused a severe economic downturn that rivals that of the s—the last time the United States made the mistake of beating a strategic retreat in the face of mounting trouble abroad. A recent poll by the Center for American Progress—a left-leaning think tank—revealed that liberal internationalists represent only 18 percent of the public, while a majority of the country favors either America First or global disengagement.
Younger voters are much less supportive of a traditional internationalist agenda than their elders, meaning that this inward turn is likely to deepen in the years ahead. Isolationism is making a comeback because U. The paramount question is whether that adjustment takes the form of a judicious pullback or a more dangerous retreat. Global interdependence makes it both unfeasible and unwise for the United States to return to being a North American or hemispheric redoubt.
With U. But that may be exactly what lies in store unless the United States gets ahead of the curve and crafts a strategy of judicious retrenchment by design. Isolationism is the default setting for the United States; the ambitious internationalism of the past eight decades is the exception.
A yearning for geopolitical detachment has from the outset imbued the American creed and been part and parcel of the American experience. The allure of nonentanglement reemerges even when the internationalists deem it to be extinguished for good. When the likes of McKinley, Mahan, and Roosevelt launched the Spanish-American War, they had no idea that their actions would trigger a potent backlash and a quick retreat to dollar diplomacy.
Read: How the Great War shaped the world. Isolationist pressures are again building—and will only strengthen as the pandemic continues to wreak havoc on the global economy. Trump has been channeling those pressures, but without competence.
He is right to head for the exits in Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, but he has done so without a coherent strategy, leaving behind chaos and ceding ground to adversaries.
His recent decision to downsize the U. This is exactly how pullback should not happen. Instead, the winner of the November election needs to launch the nation on a searching debate about how to craft a grand strategy that aims to do less while still doing enough. Rather than taking cheap shots at each other, the die-hard internationalists and the Come Home crowd should be discussing what a responsible and well-paced retrenchment should look like.
The starting point for this debate should be recognition that isolationism, no less than internationalism, has both strategic upsides and strategic downsides. A judicious retrenchment should entail shedding U. Not all countries have had the luxury of choosing.
If you are Poland, surrounded by potentially hostile powers, or Canada or Mexico , with a superpower on your border, there are geopolitical realities that prevent you from isolating yourself from the rest of the world. Geography has played a large part in fostering American isolationism.
Ever since the 19th century, when the United States pushed its borders out to the Pacific and down into Mexico, the country has been buffered from the outside world by its sheer landmass. Canada, originally a set of small weak colonies, and Mexico, torn with internal dissent, have never been threats. Geography smiled further on the United States.
Its rich resources and ever-increasing internal market have historically limited its economic dependence on the rest of the world. Even after , when the U. And when you add to that two vast oceans on either side, America, unlike most other countries in the world, has had little to fear from foreign invaders for much of its history.
That has not prevented sudden panics from seizing Americans. In the Cold War after , the prospect of nuclear weapons delivered by long-range bombers or rockets finally brought an acute sense of vulnerability to Americans. A Federal Civil Defense Administration poster. History, too, played its part in shaping U. On the isolationist side of the scales, the very act of rebellion by the 13 colonies was a turning away from the old, corrupt European powers. Our detached and distant situation invited and enables us to pursue a different course.
In the early days of the Republic, the Redcoats fought to quell its rebellious colony. During the Civil War and again in the s there was talk of war between the United States and Britain.
A century later, as the Cold War raged, you could substitute Communists for Catholics: The fear was much the same, and helped to fuel isolationism. Yet the United States has never been able to insulate itself completely against the rest of the world—and there were many Americans who did not want to do that. Among the founding fathers, even George Washington admitted that his country might occasionally need temporary military alliances.
American leaders were also obliged to pay some attention to their own neighborhood—if only to keep others out. When President Theodore Roosevelt issued his corollary in , it became the justification for a series of military interventions in and around the Caribbean to protect American interests.
In , the opening of the Panama Canal served to intensify American interest in the whole region just south of its borders. Other forces impelled the U. When Roosevelt succeeded to the presidency after McKinley's assassination in , he pursued a muscular foreign policy — his credo was "Speak softly and carry a big stick. Though sometimes bellicose, says historian Richard Abrams, T.
What revived isolationism? Chiefly, it was a horrified response to World War I. The U. But the sickening carnage in Europe — 17 million dead and another 20 million wounded — sparked a long period of isolationism.
Americans withdrew into the pursuit of money and fun during the prosperous s, and in the Depression-ravaged '30s worried more about putting food on the table than about the rise of militaristic dictatorships in Europe and Japan. President Franklin D. Roosevelt recognized the threat, but could not "control the isolationist Congress," said the late historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
When war finally broke out in , it "did not destroy isolationism," Schlesinger said. What did that group believe? The group demanded U. What happened to the AFC? It disbanded days after Pearl Harbor. World War II began decades of international engagement, with the U. In the Cold War that followed, isolationism receded, though its seeds were preserved by libertarians.
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