America Was Never Isolationist

Recurring fears of isolationism are a fixture of American politics. Such anxieties bubble to the surface once a generation as an American electorate challenges the inherited wisdom of a postwar status quo. Whether it be the late 1950s, early 1970s, early 1990s, or the present, American “isolationism” always seems to be on the rise, and thus, establishment media commentators and politicos feel obliged to fight back against it. In the current war against the “i-word,” Fareed Zakaria recently devoted a 45-minute CNN special to the subject of American “isolationism,” its history, and its implications on the forthcoming 2024 presidential race. 

The documentary has three significant problems. First, it is primarily based on an inaccurate accounting of the past, one which holds that the United States was a disinterested geopolitical actor before the horrors of the Second World War. Second, Zakaria often downplays the costs of the American global order and seeks to assure the viewer that they were—and are—worth the price, suggesting that American prosperity relies on global leadership. Finally, he warns of the dangers of returning to a mythical “isolationist” past compared to the destructive interventionism he terms “internationalist.” 

First, the history. In his retelling of the run-up to the Second World War, Zakaria portrays the United States as a geopolitically disinterested power. He does not mention the U.S. government’s imperial footprint in the Pacific. Zakaria breezes through the mechanics of America’s incremental entry into the First World War, presenting the United States as a reluctant belligerent in Europe’s total war. In truth, by 1916, the United States, while officially neutral, was supporting the Allies with both financial and material aid. When, as Zakaria tells it, “Germany ramped up its aggression with an all-out attack on American ships,” those ships were carrying American arms and ammunition to Germany’s enemies.  

Thus, American involvement in the war and the imperial competition that preceded it remains largely underexamined, with critical questions remaining unasked, such as whether it was in America’s best interest to enter the war at all. 

Zakaria similarly implies that the American ostrich act of the interwar period was responsible for the rise of the Axis, particularly Nazi military aggression. Echoing a common but regularly debunked claim, Zakaria charges that, after the Great War, “the United States had returned to its isolationist roots with a vengeance.” While the U.S. maintained protective tariffs, U.S. exports actually expanded in the 1920s. Geopolitically, the U.S. remained an imperial power in the Pacific as well as Latin America, participated in arms-control agreements, and organized assistance to feed the starving people of a war-torn Europe. As the late political scientist Bear F. Braumoeller noted, “the characterization of America as isolationist in the interwar period is simply wrong.” 

One is treated to a similarly simplistic interpretation of the immediate origins of the Second World War and America’s entry into it. Throughout his treatment of the late interwar period, Zakaria places fault for German expansionism at the feet of a reluctant United States, asserting that “Hitler knew America would do nothing to stop the great German war machine.” Absent from his account are structural forces like the Great Depression, the complicated relationship between Stalin and Hitler (which helped usher in the war), and the lack of decisive action on the part of France and Great Britain, two powers that arguably possessed the means but lacked the will to enforce peace in Europe. Zakaria’s account is not unusual, but rather a standard hawkish narrative that the rise of Hitler and the horrors that ensued were America’s fault.  

Zakaria’s cartoonish history persists into his narrative of the early Cold War. During that era, Zakaria’s villain is the arch-isolationist Senator Robert A. Taft (R-OH), who fought against the political outsider, Second World War hero, and committed internationalist General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Yet Taft was no “isolationist.” As a young lawyer and senator, Taft believed in the utility of international law, so long as it was enforced by a responsible Congress that looked after American sovereignty. And, while Taft largely toed the noninterventionist line on the eve of America’s entry into the Second World War, he was less rigid in his foreign policy views by the late 1940s. During the early Cold War, Taft supported some activist foreign policy measures but opposed others, a direction that sought to maintain American freedom of maneuver, one that prioritized strategic aims in East Asia over those in Western Europe while building a military capable of hemispheric deterrence.  

The real political divide between Taft and Eisenhower was concerned not with isolation versus engagement but with the contours of a postwar world, an order about which Eisenhower himself displayed great concern at home and abroad. In his coverage of this moment, much like his account of the present, Zakaria presents us with a false choice between a relapse into a mythic and benighted “isolationist” past or a vaguely defined “internationalist” future. 

In arguing that the mantle of leadership comes cheaply, Zakaria rightly notes that the toll of the “brushfire wars” of the Cold War and the post–Cold War era was an order of magnitude smaller than the catastrophes of the World Wars. Yet the costs of such wars were hidden by radical advances in military medicine, which increased the ratio of wounded to killed in action, and by the luxury of owning the world’s reserve currency. Activist foreign policies are lubricated when the government can pay the cost in treasure by putting it on the credit card and pay the toll in blood by squeezing it out of increasingly small pockets of an all-volunteer and largely generational martial caste. 

What is most striking is that Zakaria largely misses the cause of the resurgence of an “America First” ideology: a recognition of the costs of empire. While some members of the America First movement of the 1930s and its later iterations were motivated by bigotry, most were animated by a desire to preserve liberal domestic order and freedom of maneuver on the global stage. 

On the domestic front, the America Firsters, informed by the antecedents of the 19th-century populist movements, believed that dramatic increases in military spending benefited the few at the expense of the many. They similarly recognized, informed by their experience during the Great War, that global power came at the cost of civil liberties in the form of the Sedition Act, increased policing power, and violent private mobs. Lastly, they believed that entry into the Great War and the potential signing of the Versailles Treaty hooked their country to the imperial desires of the Old World. The total costs were just too much to bear for a country that saw itself as a republican nation set apart from the bickering powers of Europe. 

None of these issues have been or can be resolved, as they are persistent tradeoffs at the core of the country’s activist foreign policy. “Isolationism” is ever-present because U.S. foreign policy relies on the resources of the American people, through the shedding of their blood and the expropriation of their treasure. As in the past, their reluctance provides policymakers feedback on their assessment whether the game is worth the candle, and whether they are willing to pay the costs. 

If the United States is to maneuver through this period of global turmoil with its institutions intact and some measure of global influence, its leadership class needs to adapt the nation’s foreign policy aims in light of domestic constraints and recognize the limits of its own power. Zakaria uses a simplistic model of the past as an instrument to guide the future. In doing so, he does violence both to history and to the future.

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