BACK IN ISOLATION, UNTIL IT’S TOO LATE

In a continental country with great oceans on both sides, it may be natural to be isolationist. It certainly is easy. Let’s pull back from the world and be done with it. Like Randy Newman said: “We give them money, but are they grateful? No, they’re spiteful and they’re hateful … .”

Gallup has been asking this question of Americans since that fateful day in 2001 when the world came to us. Consistently, right around 70% of Americans have said they want the United States to take a “leading” or “major” role in world affairs.

This year, that number dropped to 65%. That’s about as low as it’s ever been, just a tick higher than the record low in 2011.

“In addition to the current 65% who want the U.S. to take a substantial role in world affairs, 27% prefer a minor role and 7% want it to have no role at all,” Gallup reports. “This is only the second time, along with 2011, when more than 30% wanted the U.S. to take a limited role, if any, in trying to solve international problems.”

The problem with wanting to pull back from the world, or one of the problems, is this: The world might not want to pull back from us. This isn’t a decision that only Americans get to make.

In the Republican Party, the isolationists dominated the debate among their own for years until Pearl Harbor was attacked. Then an overwhelming (and reasonable) detestation of the Soviet Union and its communist/Stalinist leanings pushed the isolationists to the back for a generation or two. But the late and unlamented USSR is no longer around to bother the world. And those who’d promote Fortress America again are beginning to gain in the polls.

Why get involved? they ask. As if we Americans could not be. Isolationism might have worked — might have — when it took a month to sail from one hemisphere to the other. When the War of 1812 could be ended before its biggest battle was fought. But these days it takes but a few hours to go from continent to continent. And evil can cross international borders as easy as COVID.

It’s an American tradition by now, waiting till the last minute to discern a danger. “I sometimes wonder,” American diplomat George F. Kennan once told an audience, “whether in this respect a democracy is not uncomfortably similar to one of those prehistoric monsters with a body as long as this room and a brain the size of a pin: He lies there in his comfortable primeval mud and pays little attention to his environment; he is slow to wrath — in fact, you practically have to whack his tail off to make him aware that his interests are being disturbed.

“But once he grasps this, he lays about him with such blind determination that he not only destroys his adversary but largely wrecks his native habitat.

You wonder whether it would not have been wiser for him to have taken a little more interest in what was going on at an earlier date and to have seen whether he could not have prevented some of these situations from arising … .”

The late great Dr. Charles Krauthammer once noted the sharpest snag in the isolationist theory: It assumes that open sea lanes, free commerce and international peace come naturally, like the air we breathe. “If only that were true,” he said. “Unfortunately, stability is not a matter of grace. It comes about only by Great Power exertion.”

Isolationism is as American as apple pie and baseball. So it’s no surprise to see it mounting a comeback.

Until the next Pearl Harbor or 9/11 or some other time when the world decides to ignore the isolationists on these shores. And when that happens, there’s nothing Americans can do but wade back into international waters again. However suspicious and skeptical.