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Buchanan cannot win this historical argument on his own but the value of his contribution is that it helps balance the scales that in the public sphere are overwhelmingly tipped towards the pro-interventionist side of the scale, the net result of which we can see in the liberal bloodbaths of Korea and Vietnam and the neocon bloodbath of Iraq

My guess is that a century from now when all this is ancient history, Churchill will be seen as a great war leader but a lousy statesman. FDR will be seen as a vain but imaginative politician who gave the American people ‘hope’ in the midst of the Great Depression (when they really wanted jobs) and ‘leadership’ in war (when they really wanted peace).

We can still hope to make a more balanced judgement, even if, in the overall scheme of things, we believe America and FDR’s intervention against the vile Hitler and his regime was all told “a good thing” for mankind. We still can kick the idols of their pedestals, even as we note that intervention wasn’t quite based on the 100% pure motives as FDR lionisers constantly recycle. A balanced history would note that in real world history venality, vice and virtue can all come wrapped in the same package. It’s not “either / or”. Same with the Churchill idol.

A balanced conclusion does not vindicate FDR nor does it mean the isolationists were ‘wrong’ or FDR was somehow unusually farsighted. Certainly any “farsight” FDR may have had about Hitler was strangely blind to Stalin, and there is evidence that FDR may have thought his ‘real enemies’ were, as in WW1, “Prussian militarists” rather than nazis. Hence his failure to support the planned Wehrmacht generals’ coup against Hitler. An incredible folly by the allied leadership.

The isolationists claimed (like Beard and Flynn) that FDR’s opportunistic militarism followed from the economic failures of the New Deal, especially after 1937 and on from the “Roosevelt Depression”. Other isolationists, (like Wheeler) , themselves often former Progressives, often with better Progressive credentials than FDR himself, noted that FDR’s push for an unprecedented third term and court packing were a threat to America’s traditional constitutional republic. To them the war drive was seen as more of the same.

None of these charges are nutty or extreme or somehow or other repudiated by subsequent history. A good test is to imagine the reaction were George W Bush to discover yet another foreign threat, perhaps soon after a deep economic downturn. Imagine if Bush claimed that “the war on terrorism” or the dollar crisis required that he stay on for a couple more terms. Imagine if he instituted unprecedented Congressional changes and stacked the Supreme Court to ensure his longer reign. I don’t think modern liberals would hold back for a minute in calling him a potential tyrannt. Many modern liberals deny FDR’s contemporaneous critics from making a comparable claims that they would certainly make in a heartbeat.

Other isolationists believed that the ultimate geopolitical winner of any intervention would be the USSR. It is hard for any impartial observer to disagree that that is what actually happened. Still the isolationists may have been wrong in opposing war with Hitler, or in under-estimating the depravity of the Hitler regime, just as the left to this day has continued to understate the depravity of the communist regimes. Getting your analysis of politics in foreign nations right is difficult. These isolationists did however do quite well in their analysis of domestic politics. Their expose of the process used to take America into the so called “Good War” was certainly more right than wrong. If FDR lied his way into a good war, to be retrospectively absolved by history, why can’t Bush? Or why not any man on a white horse? Democracy is the loser here.

Many of the Old Right, for example Senator Nye, had previously witnessed how the process of Presidential war making had taken America into WW1, an intervention that certainly had disastrous results. So they naturally opposed one of Wilson’s under-studies (FDR had been Assistant Secretary of Navy under Wilson) repetition of the act. And one of the things they did predict was that a long term consequence of the intervention would be an erosion of the republic. Many Old Righters expected the erosion to proceed more quickly and radically than it did in fact proceed, but few unbiased observers could claim their fears for the republic were unfounded, or disproved by subsequent history. A hundred years from now we will know for sure whether the American republic will outlive the quest for world power, or what a simpler less complicated age called Empire. With habeas corpus surviving by one vote, I wouldn’t be betting the house on the republic.

The isolationists’ constitutional pessimism may not have been wholly misplaced, even in the short run. The Nazi-Soviet split, which would ultimately cost the USSR twenty million deaths, only emerged six months before Pearl Harbor. Had America intervened earlier and had Hitler managed to shelve or perhaps delay his bloody Eastern Front war, it is not clear that American victory could have been obtained without a substantially higher human and economic price tag. The later could have easily meant that American troops returning from WW2 may have faced a renewed economic depression not a post-war boom. The most pessimistic of the isolationists predictions were more of a “near miss” than a failure. Indeed the isolationists’ most pessimistic predictions were more realistic than the most pessimistic predictions of the interventionists, who entertained nightmares of Japs marching down mainstreet USA.

Those who believe the intervention was proven “justified” retrospectively by history, and by the later discovered gargantuan crimes of Hitler, should know that even noble victories come at a price. Unfortunately part of that price has been massive damage to the machinery of the American republic. There is no need for modern paleoconservatives to refight the lost campaign against intervention in WW2. Or even to claim that the America First Committee was right all along. The Old Right should be honoured for the things they got right, not buried because of what they got wrong.

And, of course, they were right that in the long run. In most cases, if not all, the case for non-intervention is still, the wisest and safest course for the American republic. WW2 was no ‘watershed of history’. Just because the campaign against the real Hitler was “good for mankind” does not mean that that a perpetual round of intervention everywhere forever against real and imagined new Hitlers is required. Nor does it mean that the insights and recommendations of the Framers, reiterated by the Old Right, need to be consigned to the trash bin.

Friends of the principles of the American republic, can rejoice at the victory for humanity in the defeat of Hitler, whilst acknowledging the cost. The appropriate and balanced next step should be to acknowledge the harm done and attempt to limit it’s long run cost, not interpret the cost as a benefit and thus find in it justification for perpetual war.

http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2008/05/war-baker-churchill-british