Isolationist Trend Imperils Activist U.S. Foreign Policy

The strongest currents of isolationist sentiment in half a century are washing across the country and the Congress, and they are threatening to sweep away a 50-year tradition of activist U.S. foreign policy.

President Clinton’s inability to win congressional support for his first package of emergency aid to Mexico alarmed both the Administration and foreign governments. It underscored the growing public mood that the United States should go it alone, avoiding ambitious diplomatic, military and economic involvement overseas.

The Mexico episode dashed earlier hopes within the Administration and overseas that the new congressional leadership, and particularly House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), would be able to steer the Republican rank and file away from efforts to limit the United States’ role in the world.

Instead, spurning Gingrich’s original support for Clinton’s Mexico package, the new Republican representatives reflected the populist sentiments back home. Their guiding spirit seemed to be not Gingrich but conservative Patrick J. Buchanan, who led the drive against the Mexico aid plan.

“My mother taught me to dance with the one that brung you, and the voters brung us here,” said Rep. Steve Stockman (R-Tex.), one of the new freshmen who strongly opposed the Mexico aid. Stockman, who unseated longtime House Judiciary Chairman Jack Brooks in November, warned against “sending out signals to the rest of the world that we’re going to be the banker.”

The new mood in Congress could affect a wave of other U.S. foreign policy issues, such as foreign aid and support for the United Nations, the World Bank and other international institutions. The next congressional test could come within days; a bill to restrict U.S. support for U.N. peacekeeping operations may come to a vote on the House floor this week.

“The United States is now rethinking our relationship with the United Nations, and we don’t want to be the patsy of the world anymore,” Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach) said as the House International Relations Committee was drafting the peacekeeping bill. “That was the message of the last election.”

Scholars have to go back to the years immediately after the two world wars to find a congressional climate comparable to today’s.

“What happened on the Mexico package . . . suggests that in addition to the partisan changes in Congress (in November), there may well be changes that are a result of the end of the Cold War,” said Jeremy D. Rosner of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The new isolationism also reflects the tremendous turnover in personnel on Capitol Hill. More than half of the current members of the House were first elected in 1990 or later--that is, after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Even in the stodgier, more stable Senate, 29 of the 100 members were first elected in 1990 or later.

“This wave represents a real, generational transformation in the House, in the Congress and in the American political system,” said a congressional staff member who asked not to be named.

So concerned is the Clinton Administration that, according to top aides, Secretary of State Warren Christopher has quietly decided to hold down his overseas travel for the next few months to concentrate on working with the new members of Congress.

The secretary is trying to win over Congress with the same sort of low-key tenacity that he earlier devoted to Mideast peace talks and, during the Jimmy Carter Administration, the negotiations to free U.S. hostages in Iran. He has testified on Capitol Hill five times in the past three weeks and is appearing three more times this week.

There have been countless private sessions as well. Any informal gathering of new congressional members is a likely target for a visit by Christopher.

“I think the Mexico situation is part of a tendency on the part of Congress to assume we can go back to an America that was economically self-sufficient,” Christopher said in a recent interview.

He said he had decided that the Administration would have to make its case for internationalist foreign policies on Capitol Hill one member at a time. “The Sam Rayburn days are long behind us, the Lyndon Johnson days are long behind us, when a leader (in Congress) could produce votes,” he said.

This much is sure: Today’s congressional leaders cannot always marshal their troops on foreign policy issues.

In the immediate aftermath of the Republican triumph in November, worried representatives of foreign governments began quietly visiting the new House Speaker. They were cheered to find that he generally favors a continuation of U.S. involvements overseas.

“I just talked to Gingrich, and I think everything’s going to be OK,” one ambassador said in December.

Clinton, seeking votes for his original Mexico aid package, obtained the early support of both Gingrich and Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) as well as the Democratic leaders, Rep. Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri and Sen. Tom Daschle of South Dakota. In the end, their endorsements didn’t matter.

Some of the freshmen Republicans discounted Gingrich’s public stance in favor of Clinton’s Mexico package, insisting that it must not have reflected his true, private beliefs.

“I think that if Newt were in my shoes, he’d be acting the same way,” Stockman said with a smile.

Reflecting the isolationist mood, another freshman, Helen Chenoweth (R-Ida.), said at a recent news conference that the unilateral action Clinton eventually took to help Mexico would not be justified “short of the bombing at Pearl Harbor.” The United States, she said, should seek to replace oil imports from Mexico with increased production in this country in order to “make America more independent.”

A Republican staff member said that congressional freshmen also had been worried that a vote for the original Mexico package, which would have committed $40 billion in taxpayer money to guarantee private bank loans to Mexico, might undercut the credibility of the party’s austere domestic initiatives.

He said members of Congress kept asking, “How can you ask me to vote for a balanced-budget amendment, cut welfare and also do this?”

The upshot is that while Democratic and Republican members of Congress have starkly different agendas, they tend to agree that solving the United States’ domestic problems is the top priority and that the nation should spend less money and energy on foreign policy.

That represents a significant historical change. From the 1930s through the 1950s, isolationist sentiments in the nation were anchored mostly in the Republican Party. Later, after the Vietnam War, the Republicans tended to be the internationalists while many Democrats echoed 1972 anti-war presidential candidate George McGovern’s famous line, “Come home, America.”

Now sizable constituencies in both parties want America to come home.

A Los Angeles Times poll taken late last month showed that 79% of Americans opposed Clinton’s proposal for loan guarantees to Mexico and only 18% favored it. Significantly, the poll indicated that political party membership didn’t matter much: 77% of independents, 77% of Democrats and 83% of Republicans were against the plan.

Similar public sentiments are starting to be reflected on other foreign policy issues--and the likely 1996 presidential candidates are responding. In Dole’s recent appearances before Republican audiences, one of his biggest applause lines has been an attack on U.N. control over U.S. foreign policy.

The seeming drift toward isolationism has commentators and scholars at home and abroad groping to find the right historical comparison. Some find the nation’s volatile public mood reminiscent of the sudden lurches in U.S. foreign policy at the end of World War I, when the United States stayed outside the League of Nations.

“In the beginning of the 20th Century, the balance-oriented diplomatic policy of the United States was replaced with the moralistic diplomacy of former President Woodrow Wilson, and then that was changed to international isolationism,” Yoichi Funabashi, a leading Japanese journalist, wrote in the Asahi Shimbun last month.

Others are reminded of 50 years ago, during the startling era after World War II when, for example, British voters threw their wartime leader, Winston Churchill, out of office.

“The closest parallel I see is to 1946, when the Republicans came back to power and they were committed to curbing the President’s authority overseas, to reducing taxes and limiting the role of government,” said Warren Cohen, a 20th-Century historian at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County.

The post-World War II retrenchment didn’t last long. The Soviet Union’s expanding role in Europe prompted Congress to switch course and support strong U.S. involvement overseas again.

And even in today’s climate, there are signs that Congress would still support the Administration on foreign policy issues that are perceived as clear and serious threats to national security.

In recent weeks, members of Congress have signaled their willingness to go along, however reluctantly, with the deal the Administration signed to stop North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. U.S. officials argued that the only alternative was a continuation of the North Korean program, and few in Congress wanted to be held responsible for that.

But if the United States’ current isolationist mood is a reaction to the end of the Cold War, that raises the question of why it took so long. After all, the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, and the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991. Why is the phenomenon only showing up years later?

Perhaps the impact was slowed by the U.S. victory over Iraq in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, which seemed to suggest that the United States could and would take on new foreign involvements with little cost in lives or money.

Or perhaps the end of the Cold War did indeed have an immediate impact--but one that has only recently become apparent.

Rosner, at the Carnegie Endowment, recently studied the votes on foreign policy in the 103rd Congress, the one that sat during 1993 and 1994. “The freshmen were less supportive of free trade, less supportive of foreign spending, and at least the freshmen Democrats were less supportive of defense spending,” he said.

November’s elections greatly accelerated these trends. The Democrats who were defeated tended to be from the moderate, internationalist wing of their party, while their replacements were disproportionately from the more populist, isolationist wing of the Republican Party.

In 1993, the North American Free Trade Agreement was passed by the House by a margin of 34 votes, with the support of 102 Democrats.

Out of those 102 pro-NAFTA Democrats, according to a recent study by Congressional Quarterly, only 68 are still in Congress. The figures suggest that even without Mexico’s recent financial problems, NAFTA might have a tough time winning approval if it came back to Congress for a vote today.

Rosner said Clinton’s original package of aid for Mexico this year “had all the things it should have needed to be a slam-dunk.”

“The President reached out to the Republicans and lined up significant Republican support. He made it a clear priority. There were powerful champions in both (executive and legislative) branches. . . . The fact that it wasn’t a slam-dunk strikes me as very significant, as a sign of what the new Congress is going to look like.”

Overseas, the reaction to the new mood on Capitol Hill is phrased more bluntly.

“Seduced by populism, the Americans no longer want a foreign policy that costs them money,” asserted the French newspaper Le Figaro after Congress failed to support the Mexico package. “Today, (U.S.) public opinion is tempted by a withdrawal (to) ‘fortress America.’ ”