Dear CCI Followers,
Like many of you, I’ve been deeply conflicted regarding the role our nation has and is playing across the world. Our military combined with NATO has caused unimaginable devastation, death and suffering in one nation after another for decades.
For years the notion that we were ‘taking out dictators’ and creating the way for democracy, seemed to make us feel like we were forging a noble path. Ignoring the killing fields in Vietnam, we moved into the Middle East countries with a vengeance. Many of us have become deeply disturbed by the outcome of these wars.
Reading James Carden’s “Isolationism Revisited” below, I’m finding myself excited by Thomas Jefferson’s 1801 inaugural address saying “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none.” Any of the Middle East people today would be better off if we had stayed out of their countries.
I think I’ve just become a Jeffersonian Isolationist! If we go into another country to share food, water, sanitation and medical help, that’s wonderful. If not, we need to stay out and let them work out their own evolutions.
Sharon Tennison
Center for Citizen Initiatives
“Isolationism revisited.”
Let us not miss its merits.
April 23, 2021
By James W. Carden
Isolationism’s close association with interwar figures such as Charles Lindbergh and Joseph P. Kennedy has long given it a bad name—and not without reason. Yet, 80 years on from the founding of the America First Committee, it is time to reconsider the policy in light of our three decades (and counting) of failed foreign policy. From this perspective, the whole of the post–Cold War era must be counted an immense, lost opportunity.
For decades, neoconservatives and liberal interventionists have hurled charges of “isolationist” at any critic who dared question their preferred policy framework—liberal internationalism by name—which, in recent decades, has more often than not amounted to waging war for ostensibly humanitarian ends. Both neoconservatives and liberal interventionists, to borrow Charles Beard’s felicitous phrase, have sought to “wage perpetual war for perpetual peace.”
Leveling accusations of isolationism against critics has served their purposes well by short-circuiting debate on the actual merits of one or another policy. Then as now, this is the pernicious utility of labels in American discourse. Calling someone an isolationist has long been an unusually effective way of insinuating that the target of the charge also secretly held other sinister beliefs—such as anti–Semitism. That some high-profile isolationists, such as the late Gore Vidal, were often accused of harboring such views only added to the efficacy of the charge.