The Imaginary Specter of Isolationism

At The National Journal, Peter Beinart has a good

riposte to those pols and pundits who raise the specter of
isolationism whenever someone wants the U.S. to reduce its burdens
around the world. Not only are today’s “isolationists” not actually
isolationists, Beinart writes, but neither were many of the alleged
isolationists of yore:

[I]solationism—as commonly
understood—not only doesn’t fit American foreign policy today, it
doesn’t even fit American foreign policy in the 1920s and 1930s.
There are plenty of valid critiques of how the United States
comported itself on the world stage between World War I and World
War II. But the claim that America detached itself from other
countries is simply not true. In 1921, for instance, President
Harding summoned the world’s powers to the Washington Naval
Conference and pushed through what some have called the first
disarmament treaty in history. In 1924, after Germany’s failure to
pay its war reparations led French and Belgian troops to occupy the
Ruhr Valley, the Coolidge administration ended the crisis by
appointing banker Charles Dawes to design a new
reparations-payments system, which Washington muscled the European
powers into accepting. American pressure helped to produce the 1925
Treaty of Locarno, which guaranteed the borders between Germany and
the countries to its west (though not, fatefully, to its east). In
1930, President Hoover played a key role in the London Naval
Conference, which placed further limits on naval construction.

Again and again during the interwar
years, the U.S. deployed its newfound economic power to shape
politics in Europe. And this overseas engagement wasn’t limited to
America’s government alone. Although the United States severely
limited European immigration in the 1920s, Americans built the
avowedly internationalist institutions that would help guide the
country’s foreign policy after World War II. The Council on Foreign
Relations was born in 1921. The University of Chicago created
America’s first graduate program in international affairs in 1928.
And during the interwar years, American travel to Europe expanded
dramatically. To be sure, the U.S. in the interwar years was more
comfortable intervening economically and diplomatically than
militarily. But despite the Neutrality Acts meant to keep the U.S.
out of another European war, the Roosevelt administration began
sending warplanes and warships to Britain two years before Pearl
Harbor. By early 1941, long before America officially entered the
war, its ships were already hunting German vessels across the
Atlantic.

The only sense in which the United States in the interwar years
truly remained apart from other nations lay in its refusal to make
binding military commitments, either via the League of Nations or
through alliances with particular nations. America wielded power
economically, diplomatically, and even militarily, but it jealously
guarded its sovereignty. That’s why one influential history of the
era
dubs U.S. foreign policy between the wars “independent
internationalism.”….The popular “characterization of America as
isolationist in the interwar period,” argues Ohio State
University’s Bear Braumoeller in a useful
review of the academic literature on the period, “is simply
wrong.”

All true, though at a time when you can hear a prominent pundit
call the ’90s a “decade
of not policing the world,” anyone who wants to correct the
record on the ’20s and ’30s will be fighting a rough battle.

Moving to the present, Beinart analyzes Rand Paul’s foreign
policy positions, noting that they were not isolationist even when
Paul first joined the Senate and have moved even further from the
isolationist pole since then. I don’t agree with everything Beinart
says—not surprisingly, since my basic orientation is more
anti-interventionist than his—but his central argument strikes me
as both clearly true and widely underappreciated. You should read
the whole
piece.