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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

The Red Herring of “Isolationism”

Most Americans aren't wrong in believing that most problems overseas are not our government's responsibility.

As usual, Michael Gerson misleads his readers:

In recent years, Americans have generally gotten what they wanted on foreign policy issues — and they now ruthlessly punish those who implemented their will.

Since this is the foundation for most of what Gerson has to say in the rest of his column, it is important to note that it’s almost completely false. Yes, most Americans wanted U.S. forces out of Iraq, and on that one issue they got the policy they preferred, as opposed to the policy that Gerson and many in the foreign policy establishment wanted to foist upon them. There are not many other foreign policy decisions over the last few years that have reflected what most Americans wanted. Maybe that’s as it should be, or maybe it isn’t, but before we can determine that we have to acknowledge what really happened. It isn’t useful for Gerson’s brief for interventionism to do that, so he makes something else up instead.

It’s also worth noting that a significant part of the public’s approval of a particular administration’s handling of foreign policy can be a reaction to the perceived incompetence of that administration. Whether the public wants an activist and aggressive foreign policy or not (and most evidence suggests that a majority doesn’t want either of these things), there is a majority that wants the president and the rest of his officials to know what they’re doing and to be successful at what they try to do. When there is good reason to doubt that the president or the people he has appointed know what they’re doing, the public is bound to lose confidence in them even when it agrees with what they were trying to do. Of course, on many issues over the last two years most Americans also don’t agree with the administration’s goals, not least because the administration is trying to manage and “fix” problems overseas that most Americans don’t consider to be important for the U.S. No matter how many times tiresome columnists berate them for their common sense, most Americans aren’t wrong in believing that most problems overseas are not our government’s responsibility.

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