Daniel Larison

Ayotte and the Hawkish Temptation to Disengage and Isolate

There Are No Isolationists

By Daniel Larison • March 15, 2013, 3:39 PM

John Allen Gay comments on a new article covering Republican divisions on foreign policy:

That’s why realists shouldn’t see the rise of the isolationists as a threat. They are creating intellectual breathing room within the Republican Party, breathing room that realists can exploit. Even better, the isolationists are adopting realist rhetoric and symbols. Rand Paul’s major foreign-policy address was essentially a paean to George Kennan and the Cold War containment doctrine. He expressly disavowed the isolationist label and called himself a realist.

This is an old hang-up of mine, but there are no isolationists in America today. Even advocates of non-intervention in foreign conflicts and disentangling the U.S. from most or all of its overseas commitments don’t favor cutting America off from the rest of the world. We are some of the loudest advocates for diplomatic engagement, and consistently try to distinguish international engagement from hyperactive interventionism. Isolationist an inevitably misleading label, and it doesn’t accurately describe anyone currently involved in American foreign policy debate. If no one identifies as an isolationist, and if no one argues that the U.S. should isolate itself from the rest of the world, how is it a useful or accurate description?

As I said two years ago:

As part of what Andrew Bacevich called the “ideology of national security” in The Limits of Power, the specter of isolationism is useful for “disciplining public opinion and maintaining deference to the executive branch in all matters pertaining to foreign relations.” Because of that, the isolationist label is always inaccurate and misleading, which is just the way that defenders of activist foreign policy want it.

Gay says later that realists and “isolationists” can cooperate. One of the reasons he gives is this: “Both would favor relatively more diplomacy and trade and relatively fewer wars.” If someone favors more diplomacy and trade, he isn’t an isolationist in any meaningful sense. Needless to say, describing Paul or anyone else on the contemporary right as isolationist is a good way to shrink the “breathing room” Gay mentions and to lend unnecessary aid to ideological enforcers in the party that would like nothing better than to argue against the straw man of “isolationism” or “neo-isolationism.”

Posted in foreign policy, politics. Tagged "isolationism", Andrew Bacevich, George Kennan, John Allen Gay, Rand Paul, The Limits of Power.

27 Responses to There Are No Isolationists

James Brennan says:

March 15, 2013 at 4:22 pm

“[T]here are no isolationists in America today. Even advocates of non-intervention in foreign conflicts and disentangling the U.S. from most or all of its overseas commitments don’t favor cutting America off from the rest of the world… Isolationist an inevitably misleading label, and it doesn’t accurately describe anyone currently involved in American foreign policy debate.”

That label–as Larison describes it–never DID acurately characterize non-interventionism in the US. As far back as Thomas Jefferson, non-interventionists have consistently pushed a policy of “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.” It has usually been the interventionists, imperialists and neo-cons who have advocated economic sanctions and withdrawal of diplomatic recognition from other countries.

Still, I have begun to think that maybe it would be a wiser strategy to co-opt the label ‘isolationist’ and try to subvert it, rather than to continue cowering away from it. This seems to have worked out nicely for the gay-rights movement. Afterall, ‘gay’ was once used as a slang term of derision for homosexuals, even though the word’s original meaning of ‘happy’ had little to do with homosexuality.
Matt says:

March 15, 2013 at 4:46 pm

I disagree, and this seems like a “socalism” or “pro-abortion” problem of terminology. Surely “isolationism” shouldn’t be taken to mean “wants literally no contact with the outside world ever”, because if so that is such an extreme position that I doubt an American could actually adhere to it. Even North Korea making a determined effort can’t quite pull it off. If we want our terms to be useful, they should describe at least some possible person.

I don’t see that most people making the “isolationist” charge are doing so because they think that the isolationists want total isolation, but rather because they think isolationists are predisposed to be critical of intervention in foreign affairs regardless of the “facts on the ground”. This, to me, describes many people pretty well, though whether any of them are “involved in American foreign policy debate” I can’t say, having no idea what that really means. If they aren’t involved, it means that they have already been policed out of the scene, not that they don’t exist.

IMO, I don’t see any reason why isolationists shouldn’t be involved in the debate. Why would this bother anyone? On the other hand, “realist” is the least useful descriptor ever and is the one that should truly be abandoned.
Daniel Larison says:

March 15, 2013 at 4:56 pm

“If we want our terms to be useful, they should describe at least some possible person.”

Yes, exactly, which is why we should never use isolationist. It doesn’t refer to a position that anyone holds or likely ever would hold. It is applied as a term of abuse to attack anyone even mildly skeptical of frequent wars and over-extension abroad. Isolationist is an even less useful descriptor than realist. If that’s worth getting rid of, isolationist can be scrapped even more easily.
Cfountain72 says:

March 15, 2013 at 4:56 pm

I don’t think it can be accentuated enough: there ARE isolationists among us, but they certainly aren’t the non-interventionists. Ron Paul, the gold standard (no pun intended) of non-interventionism, constantly argued in favor of free trade, diplomacy, and cultural exchange. Only in bizarro world would these be the facets of an isolationist.

By contrast, it is those who are constantly looking for new nations to bomb, sanction, demonize, and ostracize who are guilty of true isolationism. And it is well past time for them to be called out on it.

Peace be with you.
Matt says:

March 15, 2013 at 5:02 pm

“Yes, exactly, which is why we should never use isolationist. It doesn’t refer to a position that anyone holds or likely ever would hold.”

Well that’s my point, “isolationist” isn’t used in that manner anyway.

Granted that it is often (always?) a term of abuse, which explains why no one would want to own the term. And granted also that it is often misapplied. But that doesn’t mean there is no such thing.
Daniel Larison says:

March 15, 2013 at 5:08 pm

In contemporary America, there is no such thing as an isolationist. There are obviously antiwar people, there may be a few advocates for complete neutrality, and there are even self-identified anti-imperialists, but none of them advocates international isolation in any meaningful sense.
Myron Hudson says:

March 15, 2013 at 6:00 pm

The reference to the straw man in the last paragraph is entirely to the point. Most of us paleocons want to revert to the internationalism of Nixon, Reagan, and Bush I.

“Isolationism” is the straw man being erected by the neocons and their shills so that they may present us with a false choice between their blundering nationalist hyper-interventionism or the straw man.

It is important to them that they erect and tear down this straw man so as to distract us from the real alternative choice – the internationalism of days not far gone – even as they wrap themselves in the mantle of Reagan.

It is important that we do not allow ourselves to be conflated with their imaginary figure. We need to keep the real alternative in the middle of the debate, in clear terms. Adopting or even tolerating the name of the straw man gives the neocons’ deception more power than it should have.
Myron Hudson says:

March 15, 2013 at 6:03 pm

I may be speaking to freely about what ‘most of us paleocons” want. For that I apolgize. And those guys weren’t perfect but they were at least pragmatic, which is really what I want.
William Dalton says:

March 15, 2013 at 6:25 pm

The problem is that those who use the term “isolationist” use it to demean those who believe that the United States should not get involved MILITARILY in the problems of other nations which do not directly threaten the United States. They believe that the failure to use all the resources available to us, including the use of force, to protect and extend the reach of American power in other countries is “isolationism”. We need not to quarrel with what they call us (even “gays” now own the term “queer”). We need to call them out on what they mean.
Gordon Hanson says:

March 15, 2013 at 6:31 pm

Daniel Larison is eminently sensible here, the term “isolationist” should be retired. But it won’t be, because it is much too useful to the hawks. It is a term of opprobrium and a scare term and if the hawks can mischaracterize their foreign policy opponents, then they can dispose of their opponents more easily, or so they think.
EngineerScotty says:

March 15, 2013 at 7:43 pm

If you replace “isolationist” with “communist” or other bugbears (and foreign policy with domestic), the article is nearly as true. There are few card-carrying communists in American public life, and utterly zero that matter. Yet the term is routinely applied to liberals of all stripes (including more than a few Republicans over the years), as a means of policing the left boundary of acceptable economic thought.
spite says:

March 15, 2013 at 9:04 pm

Call it what you want, if the foreign policy is closer to how Switzerland does it than what British Empire practiced, then that is what I will support.
Clint says:

March 15, 2013 at 9:35 pm

“Nonintervention is distinct from, and often confused with isolationism, the latter featuring economic nationalism (protectionism) and restrictive immigration. Proponents of non-interventionism distinguish their policies from isolationism through their advocacy of more open national relations, to include diplomacy and free trade. “
SteveM says:

March 16, 2013 at 8:53 am

Re: William Dalton above.

Totally agree. Witness the recent contretemps between China and Japan regarding some desolate islands.

The immediate discussion space on this side of the Pacific was not, “let China and Japan sort it out.” or even how to diplomatically intervene.

Rather it was in what ways the U.S. Navy could possibly be inserted into a minor Asian mess that has nothing to do with United States national security.

The problem for non-inteventionists is that you give an Imperial President a Leviathan War Machine hammer, and everything else is a nail.

P.S. and a feckless President using the Empire hammer is liberally enabled by a compliant Mainstream Media that consistently touts the Myth of Military Exceptionalism. I.e., Start another war? What could go wrong?
beejeez says:

March 16, 2013 at 8:57 am

Oooh, we’re being all precise with political terms now? On behalf of us socialist, anti-American hippie “takers,” thanks so much!
Matt says:

March 16, 2013 at 11:04 am

“If you replace “isolationist” with “communist”…”

Try replacing it with “interventionist” instead. According to the post logic, “interventionist” means “wants to intervene everywhere and anywhere” which describes exactly no one. I remember back during the Iraq War run-up when supporters were criticized for not being this way; i.e. they wanted to depose Saddam Hussein but not all other dictators in all other countries. It was a reductio type criticism, true, but it was right–the interventionists weren’t even interventionists.

Also, interventionism is used as a term of abuse just as much as isolationist, which is why everyone instead applies the banal term “realist” to themselves.
Daniel Larison says:

March 16, 2013 at 11:17 am

“interventionism is used as a term of abuse just as much as isolationist”

That’s not true. It accurately describes the policy views of the person it is applied to. It doesn’t mean that a person wants to intervene in every conflict. Someone can be an interventionist on Libya, but not on Syria, and so on, but when he is advocating for military intervention it is perfectly appropriate to call him this. The point is that no one really advocates for isolating the U.S. Labeling someone an isolationist tells us virtually nothing about what the person thinks about foreign policy, except that he holds a view unconventional enough to merit being marginalized in this way.

Imperialist is a more loaded and contentious term, but even in that case there are contemporary supporters of foreign wars that have openly embraced the imperialist or neo-imperialist label. I normally use hegemonist as a more neutral way to describe proponents for continued U.S. hegemony, but it would be fair to describe Niall Ferguson or Max Boot as neo-imperialists. That is how they have wanted to be known. If you can find me anyone alive today who thinks the isolationist label is an accurate description of his views, I’ll qualify my argument.
Jim Dooley says:

March 16, 2013 at 11:21 am

Soundbite Nation. Brand it; own it; dispose of it as your own.
Whatever banner our legions marched behind when they invaded Iraq, to those with eyes to see it is looking pretty tattered now.
Reagan chose not make a bad situation worse in Lebanon; Bush I chose not to go “on to Baghdad.” Whatever worldview it was that was feeding those judgements is what the country, not just the political parties, needs more of. Whatever worldview John McCain and Lindsey Graham have been feeding on needs to go out in the trash.
Joseph R. Stromberg says:

March 16, 2013 at 11:34 am

Anyway, ‘imperialist’ has more bite and is generally closer to the truth where our interventionists are concerned. The late William F. Marina (historian) used to say that America needs an anti-empire movement, not a mere anti-war movement, since the empire gets us most of our wars and is in the end, the larger problem.
William Dalton says:

March 16, 2013 at 3:55 pm

“If you can find me anyone alive today who thinks the isolationist label is an accurate description of his views, I’ll qualify my argument.”

Daniel, if I am not mistaken, the first use of the term “isolationist” arose in U.S. politics was at the commencement of war in Europe in 1939, when the America First Committee arose to keep the U.S. out of that war. They were called “isolationists” by those who wanted Roosevelt to mobilize and prepare to enter the war. The America Firsters were not opposed to the United States acting as an honest broker to mediate a peace between the countries at war, neither were they unconcerned for the consequences to the United States, the threat to commerce and to our nationals abroad. They simply believed the United States had more to lose than to gain by becoming one of the belligerents.

Now I’m not saying men like Lindbergh and Fish and Borah liked being called “isolationists” or didn’t protest it. Those of us who favored President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative didn’t approve the opposition’s use of the term “Stars Wars” to describe it, but when they used the term, we all knew we were talking about the same thing. My point is that the whole country knew in 1940 what the term “isolationist” meant. There was no mistaken belief that “isolationists” (including, at that time, America’s Communists) opposed anything except the U.S. entering into the war in Europe. My point is that when “interventionists” speak of their opponents as “isolationists” today, the whole country knows they mean the same thing – that we who oppose them oppose only the United States entering militarily, becoming a belligerent, in other countries’ wars, especially internal “civil” wars, not that we want the U.S. to cut itself off from all commerce with the rest of the world, nor even cease from trying to bring countries at war to terms of peace.

The problem we have is that the country has internalized the “lesson” of the Second World War that “isolationism” at that time, the failure of the United States to enter the war against Nazi Germany, would have been disastrous for the United States and for the world. Having accepted that lesson most Americans are predisposed to believe that “isolationism”, the refusal to join in the fight in any other country’s war, particularly a country (or country’s oppressed people) whose adversary can be likened to Hitler, would be just as foolhardy. Now, we can try to make the argument that we are not THAT kind of “isolationist”, that facing what the United States faced in 1940, we would have approved the machinations of FDR that made our going to war with Japan and Germany inevitable, as necessary for the welfare of the United States and the world, but that we don’t believe the wars existing in the Middle East or elsewhere in the world’s confrontation with militant Islam poses that same threat to our physical integrity or, more broadly, to our national security. So, don’t call us “isolationists”, but “non-interventionists”, who would go to war with Hitler’s Germany, but not with Saddam’s Iraq, Khaddaffi’s Libya, Assad’s Syria, or Islamic Iran.

But I would propose the correct course is to embrace the counter-lesson taught by Pat Buchanan – that the U.S. entry (in fact, even the U.K.’s entry) into the war against Hitler was unnecessary to our national security, and, in fact, only led to the inevitable consequence that the American Republic would turn into an Empire, with the responsibility of overseeing the peace and security of all those lands which had been, but would no longer be, parts of the European Empires, the French, the British and the Dutch, who had conquered and ruled them. For over forty years, the United States enjoyed the fruits, commercial and in prestige, which flowed from being in command of this Empire. We enjoyed a standard of living unmatched anywhere in the world as a result, even while holding off the competing claims of the “Evil Empire”, the Soviet Union. But today we are coming to realize the benefits of holding that empire are now exceeded by the costs, not the least of which has been to America’s self-understanding of the nature of our government – its purposes and the limits we place upon it. It is time to “unlearn” the lesson of World War II, and remind ourselves that, as beneficial as our victory in that conflict (our last clear-cut military victory of any consequence) may have been to our material sustenance, it may have cost us our national soul. It is time not only to appropriate the arguments of the American First Committee, but to make the case that they were right from the start, and that the United States, in principle, should avoid military intervention into the affairs of other states, and not just avoid doing so when the immediate costs appear to outweigh the benefits – the “realist” position. Call us “isolationists” or “non-interventionists” (a rose by any other name …), just “don’t call us late for supper”. The country, the world, will understand what our position is and why we hold it, and we must insist we are included in the debate, not shunted aside as holding “unacceptable” opinions.
Neildsmith says:

March 16, 2013 at 5:46 pm

Labels and ideology aside… the point is that it isn’t worth it.

“He had a knack for soothing soldiers who’d just seen their buddies killed by bombs. He knew how to comfort medics sickened by the smell of blood and troops haunted by the screams of horribly burned Iraqi children.

Capt. Peter Linnerooth was an Army psychologist. He counseled soldiers during some of the fiercest fighting in Iraq. Hundreds upon hundreds sought his help. For nightmares and insomnia. For shock and grief. And for reaching that point where they just wanted to end it all.

Linnerooth did such a good job his Army comrades dubbed him The Wizard. His “magic” was deceptively simple: an instant rapport with soldiers, an empathetic manner, a big heart.”

“As the new year dawned, Pete Linnerooth, Bronze Star recipient, admired Army captain, devoted father, turned his gun on himself. He was 42.”

http://news.yahoo.com/vet-saved-many-iraq-couldnt-escape-demons-190136480.html
EngineerScotty says:

March 16, 2013 at 10:33 pm

Be wary of labels which are seldom used in self-description. Sometimes it’s an accurate characterization, but more often than not it’s just a term of abuse.
Rambler88 says:

March 17, 2013 at 6:29 am

It’s worth noting that it’s not only Americans who bandy the term “isolationism”. For a hundred years, Europe has screamed it too, whenever there’s talk in the U.S. of letting Europe stand on its own feet as regards geopolitics. That’s had a lot of influence on discourse here over the years.
Uncle Vanya says:

March 17, 2013 at 2:31 pm

This is an old hang-up of mine, but there are no isolationists in America today.

“Isolationist” is now a term only used to stifle honest debate. George Orwell would be proud. Just as their Trotskyite daddies and granddaddies did in the USSR, the neocons now do today in the US.
AZS says:

March 17, 2013 at 5:16 pm

Like the use of “fascism” as an umbrella term (which smears almost all critics of both liberal democracy and communism, as well as smearing Mussolini with a genocide he wanted no part of, and only ever participated in under terrorist duress), the word “isolationist” is a propaganda term. The Monroe Doctrine is not isolationist in the sense that pre-19th Century Japan was. It belongs to the traditional idea of spheres of influence, rather than effectively labeling the entire world as America’s sphere of influence.
William Dalton says:

March 18, 2013 at 11:53 am

” …smearing Mussolini with a genocide he wanted no part of, and only ever participated in under terrorist duress)”

It is worth remembering that America’s war against Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy had nothing to do with issues of genocide. They made themselves the enemies of the West by their wars of aggression against neighboring countries. Even before Germany and the Soviet Union fought their proxy war of contending ideologies in Spain, in which the aerial bombardment of defenseless civilians was memorialized in Picasso’s “Guernica”, the world was appalled at the images of the carnage wrought by Mussolini in his invasion of Ethiopia. The West never went to war with Franco’s Spain precisely because he kept his fascism within his own borders (and, like other fascist dictators, became the West’s ally in the subsequent “Cold War”).

Growing up in the 60′s, I never heard used the terms “genocide” or “the Holocaust”. We learned of the horrors of Nazi concentration camps and read Anne Franck’s Diary, but the West, particularly the United States, in which the merits of racial segregation were still being publicly debated, and in the 1940′s was an intrinsic part of our social order, was in no position to stand in judgment upon another’s country’s oppression and sequestering of suspect minorities.

The tribal slaughter of the 1990′s known as the Rwandan “genocide” was the kind of event which was commonplace in pre-colonial Africa, and had anyone suggested in the 1940′s that the United States send troops to Africa to stop such an atrocity he would have been looked at as if he were crazy. Even the most liberal American would have said, “That is why we have the Statue of Liberty – to declare our openness to receiving and offering refuge to the World’s oppressed (even while we were turning away shiploads of Jewish refugees). It is not our business to go abroad to fight wars to end racial and religious oppression.” It was well understood in the 1940′s that the term “isolationist” applied to those in the United States who did not want to intervene in wars abroad being fought BETWEEN other countries. All were agreed we would not intervene in any country’s internal affairs, no matter how dreadful.
Dave Nelson says:

March 20, 2013 at 12:27 pm

IMO you have confused the policies with the label. Policies are nothing more than how to enact a world view and that world view is simply a moral judgment that some state actors are so bad they isn’t any good way to interact with them. The moral judgement comes first… the policies follow.

If you look at traditional American Isolationism, the moral judgement was that Imperial Europe was fundamentally corrupt and so there were no good ways to interact with them.

Modern American Isolationists — yes, they exist and in large numbers — have also formed a moral judgment only this time it is leveled against the U.S. WE are too corrupt for the world and so the U.S. must self-isolate to protect them until such time we are reformed.

It is the left, not the right, who holds these views. Blame America First is the judgment, reduce military spending, oppose free trade, oppose any leading-role military intervention (except to stop rape) are the policies that follow. To move forward one must put one’s energy into “reforming” the U.S.; Maybe someday our First Lady will be able to say someday “This is only the second time I’ve been proud of my country”.

FWIW, I am in the Neo-con camp.