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By Paul Starobin, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, March 31, 2006

America, you may have heard, is at risk of withdrawing to that beguiling yet perilous place of political hibernation known as "isolationism." President Bush warned of this "false comfort" no fewer than four times in his State of the Union address in January. "The road of isolationism," he declared at the top of the speech, "may seem broad and inviting, yet it ends in danger and decline." Later in the address, he added, "Our enemies and our friends can be certain: The United States will not retreat from the world."

At first blush, the threat of a "new isolationism" may seem real. Public disillusionment with Bush's Iraq intervention is certainly widespread, and opinion polls show that today, compared with a few decades ago, a greater share of Americans (42 percent in a recent survey of the Pew Global Attitudes Project) say the U.S. "should mind its own business internationally." The visceral public backlash against leasing U.S. seaport terminals to a company owned by the Arab sheikhdom of Dubai suggests, if not exactly isolationism, elements of a kindred sentiment, xenophobia. Bush is not the only one sounding the alarm -- The Washington Post editorial page called the president's warning "the most important foreign-policy theme" in his State of the Union and added, "We strongly agree" that America "cannot find security by abandoning our commitments."

But if you wind the clock back 50 years or so, you will find that these admonitions -- the dark foretelling of a "new isolationism" -- regularly occur. And yet the worrisome prospect -- America's "abandoning" of its global commitments -- never actually happens. The wolf's baying is heard, but the wolf never shows up. The reason is, that the wolf doesn't exist anymore. No vibrant strain of isolationism exists in America's political culture. Isolationism, as a mainstream political movement and as a credible philosophical position or guide to American foreign policy, last flourished in the 1930s. Isolationism died with America's entrance into World War II and has never been revived. Only the echo remains.

The most striking example of this transformation is in the American heartland. A pillar of isolationism in the 1930s, this region is now one of the great propellers of America's engagement in the world. The main engine is religious faith -- a missionary desire to spread what are viewed as timeless, universal values, already implanted in American soil, to places like Africa and the Middle East. "Man is given liberty by God," and "that is entitled to everyone" all "around the world," says Sam Brownback, the conservative Republican senator from Kansas who has led values-driven efforts such as a crackdown against the global sex-trafficking industry. Now gearing up for a 2008 presidential bid, Brownback often works with liberal Democrats including Richard Durbin, his colleague from Illinois, on international human-rights issues.

Indeed, it is because isolationism was long ago discredited as a sensible foreign-policy stance that periodic warnings like Bush's have a certain political utility. Nobody wants to be labeled an isolationist. "Isolationism is something that everyone raises as a stick against people who oppose whatever policy they favor," the historian Manfred Jonas noted in a recent interview. Jonas's perceptive book Isolationism in America: 1935-41 was published 40 years ago but has stood up exceedingly well. The pre-World War II years "were the years of its swan song," Jonas concluded in the very last sentence. The historian Walter A. McDougall has likewise called isolationism "a dirty word" that "interventionists, especially since Pearl Harbor, hurl at anyone who questions their policies."

The subtext to today's accusations of isolationism is the Iraq war, the nation's most divisive policy matter. Bush and other war defenders are implicitly saying that opposition to America's continued involvement in the war is of a piece with isolationism. But to be against the war, even to advocate a withdrawal of U.S. forces, is not, ipso facto, an isolationist position.

To see why, one must first understand how and why genuine isolationism withered and died, only to become a resonant "dirty word." The disintegration of isolationism was a transforming event. But in death comes life: The collapse of the movement spawned a new dynamic in American foreign policy that, in turn, contained the seeds of powerful tensions. It is the failure to reconcile these tensions, not the threatened return of a nonexistent beast, that bedevils so much of American foreign-policy-making these days. And therein lies an interesting tale.

Isolationism: The Real Thing
In our selective memory, the isolationism of the 1930s is often recalled as a version of the anti-intellectual "Know-Nothing" strain of American politics. Remembered is the grainy newsreel footage recording the pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic-tinged rhetoric of Charles Lindbergh, the celebrity aviator who became America's smarmiest isolationist.

In fact, prewar isolationism was a wide blanket covering nearly every point on the political and cultural spectrum. The isolationists included bigwig capitalists, devoted socialists, and university presidents. Isolationism found favor in, yes, Chicago, but also in New York City, where it shaped the editorial currents of The New Republic and The Nation. In Washington, isolationism prevailed on Capitol Hill. Religious traditionalists and secular modernists could chime isolationist chords in harmony.

How could isolationism appeal to such a diverse crew? The driver of isolationist sentiment was widespread disgust with the results of World War I: massive human carnage; the wrecking of some empires but the survival of others; the appalling failure of Old World Europe, even after the bloodletting, to repair its endless feuds. The United States, having reluctantly gotten involved in the conflict, now turned away from "over there." Like Greta Garbo in the 1932 best-picture classic, Grand Hotel, America declared, "I want to be left alone."

Isolationism was, in part, a mood. But it was also an idea, containing a prescription. The prescription had a flaw that today seems blindingly obvious but didn't to many back then. The isolationists believed America could and should remain at a distance from foreign lands because they believed that America, as a continental, hemispheric power, was impregnable. The notion that "we are insulated by water against effective attack," as Phillips Bradley wrote in 1937, was an article of faith among many military experts, including Hanson Baldwin of The New York Times.

Baldwin voiced his beliefs in Foreign Affairs, the bible of the East Coast foreign-policy establishment. And in American Mercury, the influential if crotchety magazine begun by H.L. Mencken, Baldwin wrote, "By frittering away our great strength in foreign theaters, we may well destroy that impregnability which today means certain security for the American castle." A great many intelligent people believed this -- and, in fact, even in supposedly smart sets, arguing otherwise took some gumption.

Baldwin's article, "Impregnable America," appeared in the July 1939 issue of American Mercury, two and a half years before Pearl Harbor.

Isolationism As A Cudgel
Prewar isolationism, Lindbergh's rants aside, seems mostly forgivable. Who could have anticipated an atomic age in which oceans no longer mattered? Even more than Pearl Harbor, it was Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- and the realization that enemies would endeavor to develop the same kind of weaponry -- that obliterated the isolationist argument.

The once-fashionable isolationism was now an acute embarrassment -- the fur coat in the closet that would never be worn again. Embarrassment can be an effective political cudgel, especially as a weapon of rhetoric. And thus was erected on the landscape of American politics a convenient target of abuse -- the "new isolationist."

As historian McDougall noted in his 1997 book, Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter With the World Since 1776, the post-World War II interventionists were not the first to wield "isolationist" as a club. In the 1890s, when America first spread its imperial wings, McDougall wrote, "what brought 'isolation' to the consciousness of the American public was the propaganda of navalists like Capt. A.T. Mahan, who sought to pin on their anti-imperialist critics a tag that implied they were old-fashioned curmudgeons."

But it wasn't until after World War II, and the onset of the Cold War, that the isolationist label became a staple of political invective. In the deft hands of historian and liberal internationalist Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., "The New Isolationism," the title of his essay in the May 1952 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, became a device for ensnaring conservatives of a sharply different mind on both foreign and domestic policies.

Schlesinger's chief target was Republican Sen. Robert A. Taft of Ohio, whom Schlesinger (also at that time the national vice chairman of the liberal Americans for Democratic Action) tied to "the queer complex of feeling, fear, and prejudice" that made up "the emotional core" of traditional isolationism. After citing such traits of the isolationist mind-set as "the agoraphobic fear of a larger world," Schlesinger went on to indict Taft and company for an insufficient appreciation of the Soviet threat, a disregard for the virtues of foreign aid, and an obsession with limited government spending.

Schlesinger was not above the cheap shot. He asked, "How are the New Isolationists to get around the fact that their proposals are greeted with loud cheers in the Kremlin?" (Substitute "circles of Islamo-fascist terrorists" for "Kremlin," and the cruder contours of post-9/11 debate come to mind.) But he was too fair-minded to take the "new isolationism" thesis too far. He quoted Taft as saying, "Nobody is an isolationist today.... I would say that anybody is an idiot who calls anybody else an isolationist." And Schlesinger concluded the essay with an admission, damaging to his own thesis, that the "new isolationism" did not fire the same kind of bullets that the real McCoy did.

"The consolation is that this is probably a last convulsive outbreak of an old nostalgia," Schlesinger wrote. "Once we have exorcised this latest version of isolationism, we may at last begin to live in the 20th century."

But the "convulsive outbreaks" were to continue for many more years, at least in the diagnostic judgment of certain political observers. Spin the wheel forward to 1985 and find in the pages of The New Republic (which had by then become a beacon of interventionist thinking) the essay "Isolationism, Left and Right," by Charles Krauthammer. "An old tradition finds new voices," TNR warned in the subhead.

Krauthammer started out by acknowledging that isolationism was "an epithet." But the standard denial by "any serious political actor" of being isolationist, he continued, was not to be taken at face value. "A new isolationism has clearly emerged, picking up the strands of a tradition 200 years old."

Writing from his accustomed neoconservative perspective, Krauthammer took aim at "Left Isolationism," which "has become the ideology of the Democratic Party," and "Right Isolationism," which "has yet to capture a party" but whose proponents "are growing in strength and confidence."

His complaint was that post-Vietnam liberals and "Fortress America" conservatives each quailed, for different reasons, at committing American power to necessary interventions abroad. Post-World War II "internationalism" is thus "faced with a continuing, two-front isolationist challenge."

But the "challenge" proved more theoretical than real. Three years later, Americans installed in the White House George H.W. Bush, a committed internationalist, whose artful diplomacy paved the way for the peaceful reunification of Germany and for the United Nations-approved global military coalition that expelled Saddam Hussein's Iraqi forces from Kuwait. After Bush 41 came the eight-year reign of a Democrat, Bill Clinton, a free-trader who mobilized NATO to thwart Slobodan Milosevic in the Balkans. The only national political figure during this period with any plausible likeness to the old isolationist tradition -- conservative paleolith Patrick J. Buchanan -- proved a wet firecracker: All sizzle, no bang.

Where Some Isolationists Went: Multilateralism
So, where did the energy of 1930s isolationism go after the movement's collapse? Broadly speaking, the answer is, two places: the multilateral approach to securing America's global safety and prosperity, and the unilateral approach. These bents are quite different, but in sharp contrast with genuine isolationism, they both accept interventionism as part of modern America's engagement with the world.

Post-World War II multilateralism took its cue from Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who went to his deathbed believing that new global structures like a United Nations offered the best recipe for U.S. and global security. Like moles that disappear down one hole and pop up out of another, some of the '30s isolationists simply remerged from the conflict in a wholly new spot, right by FDR's side.

Before Pearl Harbor, Sen. Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, a Republican presidential contender, was a leading "strict neutrality" advocate. But on January 10, 1945, with the Axis powers well on their way to defeat, Vandenberg recanted. "I have always been, frankly, one of those who has believed in our own self-reliance," he said in a speech on the Senate floor. But "our oceans have ceased to be moats which automatically protect our ramparts," and because of this reality, "I want a new dignity and a new authority for international law," he declared.

"I think American self-interest requires it," Vandenberg added, thus putting his weight behind FDR's cherished proposal for a United Nations. A grateful Roosevelt made Vandenberg a delegate to the April "conference on international organization," meeting in San Francisco in April, which set up the U.N.; and with Vandenberg's crucial support, the Senate in July approved the new U.N. charter by an 89-2 vote.

That vote, arguably, was the high-water mark for post-World War II multilateralism. Nevertheless, the multilateral approach, as imperfect as it is, has in important ways shaped U.S. foreign policy over the last half-century and continues to do so. The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, enacted in the 1960s with Washington's leadership and signed by more than 180 nations, remains a force in international politics.

In the arena of partisan politics, the Democratic Party has been a fairly consistent voice for multilateralism. In the 2004 presidential campaign, John Kerry repeatedly faulted George W. Bush for failing to put together an authentic international alliance to confront Saddam. And in a remark that gave Bush a club against him, Kerry said that any pre-emptive military strike by the U.S. must pass "the global test" in which "you can prove to the world that you did it for legitimate reasons."

But the GOP has its multilateralists, too, even in the Bush administration. Scratch Condoleezza Rice and you'll find a fairly conventional multilateral operator who has nudged American foreign policy in that direction since taking over as secretary of State a year ago. This push can be seen, for example, in her patient work with the Russians and with the International Atomic Energy Agency to stymie Iran's apparent aim to develop nuclear weapons. Rice's tack is classic multilateralism -- the idea that American "self-interest," as Vandenberg said, resides in joint action.

Outside of Washington, in the wider circles of politics and society, a number of multilateral offshoots, perhaps most importantly the nongovernmental organizations -- the NGOs, such as Amnesty International -- now exert their weight on the world stage. In a provocative 2004 book, A New World Order, Anne-Marie Slaughter, dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of International Affairs at Princeton University, argued that the seeds of a new world government were being sown organically by an interdependent global network of regulatory and law enforcement officials. "Just when we thought America's postwar multilateralism had run out of steam," Thomas M. Frank of New York University School of Law commented, Slaughter's book depicts "the new ties that bind us to the world."

Multilateralism undoubtedly finds its greatest favor among political and business elites. But the idea that ordinary Americans are either deeply resentful of "the new ties that bind" or in large majorities opposed to multilateral undertakings is wrong. As historian Jonas observed in his book on 1930s isolationism, the movement was starting to crumble even before Pearl Harbor, because a growing segment of the public no longer shared the faith of "experts" in an "impregnable America."

And as current opinion surveys show, although the public has mostly unfavorable views of some countries, such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, it harbors nothing like a broad-based xenophobia -- that is, a general suspicion of "the foreigner." Eighty-one percent of Americans have a "very favorable" or "mostly favorable" view of Japan, 79 percent take that view of Germany, 66 percent of India, 64 percent of Mexico, and 54 of France, according to a Gallup Poll taken in February.

These numbers, circa the Dubai ports uproar, suggest merely a reasonable anxiety about where threats to America's security may dwell. The numbers indicate, furthermore, that many Americans may welcome searching for solutions to national security problems in concert with favorably regarded nations. And despite some analysts' predictions that the scuttling of the Dubai deal would spook global investors worried about a new Fortress America, financial markets in New York, London, and Tokyo all rallied on March 10, the day after the ports deal unwound.

Unilateralism Turned Outward
How some isolationists became multilateralists is easy enough to relate. How other isolationists evolved into a new species of unilateralist is a more complicated tale.

Unilateralism was in fact a core element of old, 1930s-style isolationism. All isolationists, by definition, believed that America, going it alone, could be safe in the world. But this was a traditional, inward-focused unilateralism -- the thinking was that the world outside really didn't matter to America's security.

Inward-focused unilateralism expired after Pearl Harbor. But the unilateral urge, in some quarters, persisted. Except it was focused outward -- on America acting independently in the world to tackle threats. Outward unilateralists, unlike multilateralists, tended to think that America played a fool's game by trusting in organizations like the U.N.

In the early phase of the Cold War, this kind of unilateral impulse could be seen in the threat of "massive retaliation," made by John Foster Dulles, Dwight Eisenhower's secretary of State, to stop Soviet expansionism. In the time of the Vietnam conflict, Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay, then head of the Strategic Air Command, suggested that America could bomb North Vietnam "back to the Stone Age." The George W. Bush "shock-and-awe" campaign attempted against Saddam's Iraq in 2003 was in keeping with the outward unilateralist ethos.

But it would be a mistake to associate this mind-set solely with the trait of military hawkishness. The most intriguing manifestation of outward unilateralism actually has to do with remaking global hearts -- or souls -- in the American image.

In his 2004 book, Freeing God's Children, Allen D. Hertzke, a political scientist at the University of Oklahoma, tells the fascinating story of how American "theologically conservative evangelicals" took on the "great commission" to " 'make disciples of all nations.' " In the 1970s, the leaders of "mainline" Protestant dominations, including Episcopalians and Lutherans, took a liberal theological turn away from traditional missionary work. The field was thus left to such conservative church networks as the Southern Baptist Convention, which turned its gaze to impoverished patches of Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

At first, these missionaries concentrated on defending oppressed indigenous Christian communities. But as their overseas ties deepened, the evangelicals became drawn into broader human-rights causes, such as the protection of women forced by gangsters to toil as slave prostitutes in the international sex industry. And as the focus of their efforts widened, the activists mobilized to demand political fixes from Washington.

As Hertzke noted in a recent interview, the political efforts of the conservative "faith-based" movement had a distinct unilateral cast, born of suspicion of international organizations and secularized European activist groups. The push was for America, a traditional Judeo-Christian society, to show the way. Thus the anti-sex-trafficking legislation enacted in 2000 embraced a unilateral remedy whereby the U.S. government would independently rank countries according to their efforts to crack down on trafficking mafias and would cut off nonhumanitarian aid to the worst offenders.

Brownback has built his political career on the back of faith-based causes in America and abroad. He grew up on a farm in eastern Kansas and learned to pay attention to international politics for its impact on global grain and soybean prices. But he credits the evolution of his religious faith -- raised as a Protestant, Brownback is an adult convert to Catholicism -- for his involvement in global human-rights efforts.

He has been visiting Sudan, including the war-torn region of Darfur, since 1999; and in 2004 and again last year, he visited sub-Saharan Africa to learn more about HIV, malaria, and the plight of orphans. He's active in Middle East affairs, too. Secretary Rice recently proposed spending $85 million to build democracy in Iran; Brownback would like to up that number to $100 million.

"This is the greatest nation on the face of this earth, and to whom much is given, much is required," Brownback said in an interview in his Capitol Hill office. It was Ash Wednesday, and he was sitting in a rocking chair, suit jacket off, a gray smudge on his forehead.

Brownback readily concedes a public weariness with the Iraq conflict. But overall, he detects in the public mood not a swing back to "isolationism" but an enthusiasm about tackling specific, solvable problems, such as disease in Africa. "I go on the offense about it," he said, and "I get an excellent reception."

The conversion of the American heartland from isolationism to a missionary-style unilateralism is not as surprising as it may sound. The Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary was founded nearly a century ago in Waco, Texas, "to provide trained ministers of the Gospel for America's Western frontiers." Now the seminary, based in Fort Worth, is focused on the frontiers of America's global empire. Its Web site links to a "Map of Lostness" displaying black-colored regions of the world "where there are few if any believers in Christ."

Early in 2001, the seminary created an Islamic Studies program to teach would-be missionaries the skills, including Arab-language fluency, "for reaching and making Christian disciples of people with an Islamic background." In 2004, a seminary graduate was gunned down in Mosul, in northern Iraq, while on an evangelizing mission. "This is a very precarious situation," Samuel Shahid, the founder and director of the Islamic studies program, noted in a telephone interview, "but at the same time, we know that as Christians we have to be ready to sacrifice."

The son of a Christian pastor in the Arab Middle East, Shahid immigrated to America in the late 1970s. In today's age of globalization, he noted, Muslims are coming to America to evangelize here. He's proud of the overseas work of American Christian missionaries. He says, "I think there is no country that is as interested in what is happening in the world as the United States."

Discordant Strains
Isolationism was a disaster and is now dead; FDR-like multilateralism is alive, but political will is lacking for a full-fledged conversion to this approach; and a tooth-and-claw unilateralism, as attempted in Iraq, is failing to deliver on its promise of making America more secure. Meanwhile, secular-minded NGO activists and Christian evangelicals join hands on occasion but are mostly occupied with their own global values quests. An orchestra of many players is still in search of a coherent theme.

Whether the Bush administration can achieve a reconciliation is in doubt. The administration seems to want to play foreign policy in both major and minor keys. In a March 7 speech addressing Iran's nuclear ambitions, Vice President Cheney said, "The Iranian regime needs to know that if it stays on the present course, the international community is prepared to impose meaningful consequences." That's foreign policy in the key of multilateralism. But Cheney's next sentence was, "For our part, the United States is keeping all options on the table in addressing the irresponsible conduct of the regime." That's foreign policy in the key of unilateralism -- the key that Cheney, who has never made a secret of his lack of regard for the U.N., probably favors. For the leaders of Iran, the signals may well be confusing: Why should they negotiate with "the international community" if the U.S. reserves the right to act on its own?

If a new synthesis does emerge, it is likely to come from the political center. From the Republican camp, it could come from the likes of Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, the internationally minded Vietnam War veteran, a frequent critic of Bush's Iraq war effort, and a 2008 presidential prospect. Another GOP presidential hopeful, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, has strong foreign-policy credentials but is more of a unilateralist.

From the Democratic camp, perhaps a figure such as John Edwards, the former senator from North Carolina, Kerry's 2004 running mate and also a 2008 hopeful, will be the one to try to marry the unilateralist and multilateralist chords. Edwards has been spending time in Moscow as part of a Council on Foreign Relations project to recast Western policy toward Russia, which the council accuses of heading in the "wrong direction," away from democracy. "The whole issue of moral leadership abroad ought to be the mantle of our party," Edwards, in a recent interview, said of Democrats. As the party casts about for a new foreign-policy vision, candidate Kerry's ill-advised phrase, "the global test," is presumably inoperative.

As for the president's use of the "I" word, a certain irony is apparent. Genuine isolationism is dead, but the go-it-alone impulse that underlay it is not. It survives, not least in the administration he heads.

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