American isolationism
Donald Trump’s call to put “America first” and cease its foreign adventures has a well-established pedigree in US history
Who else has shared Trump’s view?
The Founding Fathers, for a start. They saw America’s geographical separation from Europe as an ideal opportunity to cultivate the new nation in solitude. “Our detached and distant situation invites and enables us to pursue a different course,” George Washington said in his 1796 farewell address. Thomas Jefferson, too, warned against “entangling alliances”, though he did wage war when North Africa’s Barbary pirates began seizing American merchant ships. Then, as now, isolationism did not imply a total retreat from the world stage, rather a policy of avoiding foreign alliances and conflicts, and waging war only if attacked.
How long did that mindset prevail?
For most of the next century. The tension between a desire to withdraw from messy foreign problems and a belief that America should serve as the dominant force in world affairs has long been a feature of US politics, but until the 20th century it was the isolationist instinct that predominated. That is the reverse of what we’ve grown accustomed to in “the American Century”, the term coined by Henry Luce, publisher of Time magazine, to describe a world that he felt could and should be dominated by the US culturally, politically and economically. The almost missionary zeal of the US in its new role as a superpower “making the world safe for democracy” – “the indispensable nation”, as former secretary of state Madeleine Albright put it – is the antithesis of isolationism. Trump’s promise to put “America first” is thus a reversion to the 19th century.
To what extent was 19th century America isolationist?
With the notable exception of the successful 1846–1848 Mexican War, which expanded US borders to include California and much of the west, the young nation disdained military adventures in other parts of the world. America does not go “abroad in search of monsters to destroy”, secretary of state John Quincy Adams declared in 1821, while President James Monroe declared that the US would not interfere in Europe’s wars or internal affairs.
What brought about a change?
A turning point was Cuba’s revolt against Spain in 1898. To protect US interests, President William Mckinley had sent out the battleship Maine: but it exploded in Havana harbour, killing 260 US sailors. It’s now thought an internal explosion caused the blast, but at the time Americans, egged on by a jingoistic press, blamed Spain, and the US declared war. After four months, Spain surrendered, ceding Guam, Puerto Rico and the Philippines to the US. The conflict made a national hero of Theodore Roosevelt, the charismatic leader of the volunteer Rough Riders regiment, and when he became president after Mckinley’s assassination in 1901, he pursued a muscular foreign policy, ordering the construction of the Panama Canal and negotiating an end to the Russo-japanese war. “Speak softly and carry a big stick,” was his credo, and he convinced many Americans that the US should use its power for good internationally.
Did that put an end to isolationism?
Only until WWI. The entry of the US into the “war to end all wars” in 1917 unleashed a burst of flag-waving fervour. But after the sickening carnage in Europe, Americans in the prosperous 1920s withdrew into the pursuit of money and fun, and in the Depression-ravaged 1930s worried more about putting food on the table than the rise of dictatorships in Europe and Japan. President Franklin D. Roosevelt did recognise the threat but, as the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. put it, could not “control the isolationist Congress”. Nor was isolationist sentiment dimmed when war did break out in 1939. On the contrary, it gave rise to the furiously isolationist America First Committee.
What did the America First Committee (AFC) believe?
Founded at Yale Law School in 1940, it held that the US should not sacrifice the lives of young men to solve European problems. Its ranks swelled to 800,000, including future President Gerald Ford, Walt Disney, architect Frank Lloyd Wright, and the hero aviator Charles Lindbergh – an anti-semite and admirer of German efficiency, who believed that “we must turn our eyes and our faith back to our own country”. The group demanded US neutrality in Germany’s war with Britain, advocated a negotiated peace with Hitler, and strenuously opposed FDR’S Lend-lease Act, which sent arms and aircraft to Britain. The peacetime draft, instituted in 1940 to ensure readiness, drove them to further protest. The AFC descended on Capitol Hill, accompanied by women’s anti-war groups known as the “mothers’ movement”. Dressed in black, with veils covering their faces, the women spat and screamed at members of Congress who were not isolationist. Days after Pearl Harbor, however, the AFC disbanded.
How has isolationism fared since 1941?
WWII began decades of international engagement, with the US cementing its superpower status through its leading role in multilateral institutions such as the United Nations. In the Cold War that followed, isolationism receded: when senator Robert Taft of Ohio called for America to scale down its foreign interventions, President Eisenhower called the Cold War a battle “for the soul of man himself”. But since then, each costly foreign war (most recently those in Iraq and Afghanistan), and the insecurity bred by the recession of 2008, has seen a resurgence. In a 2013 Pew poll, 52% of Americans agreed the country “should mind its own business internationally”. (Only 20% agreed with that statement in 1962.) “What we’re seeing today is something like isolationism, but not to the extent of the 1920s and 30s,” says political scientist James Meernik. The internet, an ever more globalised economy, and the international reach of terrorism make it a much harder sell: “we can no longer just close up shop and forget the world”.