Young Zeitlin doesn’t like Ron Paul’s remarks throwing the pejorative term isolationist back in the faces of those who use it all the time.  For the whippersnapper, it’s clunky and outdated international institutions or nothing at all.  Working through bilateral relations is apparently not supposed to be an option.  This objection got me to thinking about different foreign policy schools. 

The liberal internationalist seems to prefer a faculty meeting approach to international relations–hence the enthusiasm for international institutions.  International institutions really are surprisingly like faculty meetings: people who don’t like each other gather, get very little done and trade unpleasantries and thinly-veiled slights when any two of those in the room might come to some mutually beneficial collaborative arrangement on their own.   

The neoconservative and generic interventionists are very much opposed to their own “isolation,” preferring instead to isolate and occasionally strike others.  This is the international relations-as-prison facility approach.  Naturally, the interventionists have a condition for running things this way–they get to be the warden and the guards.  When the “prisoners” (i.e., other countries) react badly, they are in need of discipline and punishment, which the interventionist seems only too keen to mete out.

The non-interventionist has a radical and “kooky” notion that international relations ought to work much more like an engaging conversation for the purpose of mutual benefit.  Instead of sacrificing interests and sovereignty to generally useless, but sometimes actually dangerous, talking shops or trying to treat the rest of the world like the inhabitants of a jail, the non-interventionist imagines that America’s international relations might return to the way our government ran them for close to a century and a half.