Can America be America absent Wilsonian ideals? Perhaps not. But an America intoxicated with its self-assigned mission of salvation while disregarding prudential considerations will court exhaustion, both moral and material. Our present circumstances may not dictate a full retreat. But they do require a revived appreciation of what we can and cannot do. Contriving phony charges of isolationism to dodge tough, practical questions is not only dishonest, it is reckless and irresponsible. ~Andrew Bacevich, The Los Angeles Times

I gave Prof. Bacevich a hard time for saying some nice things about FDR and WWII (really, it was the FDR part that had me going) a few months ago, and my response to this article is much the same. On the plus side, I appreciate that Prof. Bacevich is debunking Mr. Bush’s nonsense with his usual clarity and vim, but I don’t much care for the implication that if there were real “isolationists” in control of some important media outlets or political forces they would deserve to be dismissed and ridiculed. Why the ambiguity over Wilsonian ideals? What good thing can be said of them?

Invoking George Washington is all very well, but the “isolationists” smeared in the 1930s and 1940s are right with Washington’s view of no permanent alliances, modified by the “no entangling alliances” position of Jefferson. What would have made Prof. Bacevich’s article even better was to reject the label categorically. As long as proponents of U.S. neutrality and nonintervention are around, they will be smeared by the interested parties as “isolationists” partly because there never seem to be enough neutralists and noninterventionists willing to recognise the much-maligned “isolationists” of the 1930s and ’40s as holding exactly the same views thay they do today. As long as noninterventionists and realists are embarrassed by our own predecessors, the power of the label “isolationist” will continue to intimidate and control debate.

For 60-odd years we have allowed our opponents to define all the terms and set all the rules of debate. Little wonder that we have always lost. Playing their game, they always have the benefit of the doubt, and we are always deemed vaguely fascist, even though they are the ones who bomb civilians and invade countries without cause. (Quiz: How many countries have noninterventionists ever invaded?) But it is little wonder that they keep winning–they take and keep the initiative.

Properly speaking, “isolationists” have never existed–they have always been imagined by paranoid and dishonest internationalists since the question was first framed this way in the 1930s. Thus we have such memorably bad lines from Casablanca as: “My dear Rick, when will you realize that in this world, today, isolationism is no longer a practical policy?” To accept the legitimacy of “isolationist” as a pejorative label is to accept, at some level, this question and everything it implies about foreign policy.