Yesteryear’s Forgotten Isolationists

The U.S. Senate’s rejection of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty last month revived a debate that transcends the defeated agreement to prohibit the testing of nuclear weapons. This debate not only lays bare deep political divisions over the conduct of U.S. foreign policy but also speaks to the soul of the nation. The question of America’s proper role in the world has been debated since the founding of the Republic. Despite the rhetoric on both sides, the issue is not so much isolationism as about different approaches to U.S. engagement abroad.

Neither conservatives nor liberals can claim, historically, an exclusive monopoly on internationalism. Elements within both major political parties have been drawn, at one time or another, to isolationism. But stigmatizing Republicans as the “new isolationists,” as the Clinton administration has done, ignores the historical record.

It was Democratic President Woodrow Wilson who ran successfully for reelection in 1916 as the peace candidate, while the GOP leader in the Senate, Henry Cabot Lodge, urged U.S. intervention in World War I to help Europe’s embattled democracies. And Wilson did not undertake military preparedness before the United States entered the fighting, despite Republican promptings to do so.

Senate Republicans could have accepted Wilson’s cherished League of Nations but not its ironclad guarantee of security to all member states. That clause was far too open-ended for Republicans. A less rigid Wilson might have secured passage and U.S. membership in the new international organization but without military force to deter aggression, the League’s only arsenal against militarism was moral argument. In the long run, it was a weak instrument on which to base U.S. security, just as the United Nations is today.

During the 1930s, isolationist longing to escape brewing conflicts in Europe and Asia attracted liberals, conservatives and socialists, but the movement was identified with the political right. The America First movement held that Nazism and communism were both despicable creeds and that a destructive war between Adolf Hitler’s Germany and Josef Stalin’s Russia would only redound to America’s advantage. Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor dramatically ended the debate and discredited the isolationist agenda.

Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman nailed the internationalist plank firmly into the Democratic Party’s platform. Roosevelt led the nation through most of World War II, and Truman set the Cold War course to confront, if not contain, Soviet aggression. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidency quashed the isolationist wing of the Republican Party and brought near-bipartisanship to U.S. policy toward the U.S.S.R. until the late 1960s.

But the unpopularity of the Vietnam War opened a fissure in U.S. society and politics that endures to this day. Under the banner of “Come home, America,” George S. McGovern’s presidential bid at the height of U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia crystallized isolationist sentiments within the Democratic Party and the U.S. left that linger today. The Democrats chose arms control and “give-peace-a-chance” slogans to confront Soviet power and expansion in Africa, Central America and Asia during the 1970s.

Beginning in 1980, Republicans rode to presidential victories, in part, on their internationalist agenda and strong defense posture. Ronald Reagan’s resolve to counter the Soviet offensive in Afghanistan, unravel communism in Poland by supporting Solidarity and underwrite the Contra cause in Nicaragua set the Republicans on an internationalist course that contributed to the collapse of Washington’s greatest adversary. Democrats railed against such U.S. assertiveness, cut the defense budget and claimed that Reagan’s approach heightened the risk of nuclear war.

Earlier this decade, President George Bush, despite Democratic opposition, assembled a U.S.-led coalition of more than 30 nations to expel Iraq from Kuwait. Bush also secured Soviet withdrawal from Eastern Europe, reunification of East and West Germany and German membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. It’s a freshly spun myth, then, that Republicans are the party of isolationism.

As in so many domestic policy areas, President Bill Clinton has sought gingerly to realign Democratic foreign policy with the political mainstream. He secured ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement over the opposition of many in his party. But then the White House failed to conclude an agreement for China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, which undermined the administration’s engagement strategy.

Reflecting Wilson’s high-minded faith in international bodies to guarantee peace and security, Clinton advocates a multilateralist approach as a cheaper and safer way of advancing his foreign policy and transforming his party from its Vietnam-protest posture. The White House adroitly let the United Nations take the blame for failing to halt Serb atrocities during the breakup of Yugoslavia and standing on the sidelines while 200,000 perished in the Bosnia conflict. Condemnation of U.S. policy and fear of losing votes because of it finally persuaded the Clinton administration to take action.

Although Washington did the correct thing when it intervened in Kosovo earlier this year, it badly misjudged Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic’s toughness and ineptly managed the air campaign ostensibly undertaken to save Kosovars from massacre. When the bombing stopped, the White House flirted with a Clinton doctrine that pledged to stop ethnic cleansing anywhere, which Republicans correctly criticized because it would spread U.S. forces too thin for the dubious purpose of international social work.

Most worrisome, the administration places U.S. security in the unenforceable mechanism of arms-control agreements such as the test-ban treaty, a chemical-weapons convention and a biological- weapons regime. When North Korea violated the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the White House responded by overseeing the construction of two multibillion-dollar nuclear reactors for the communists. It continues the fiction of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty despite the fact that its co-signatory, the Soviet Union, no longer exists. It drags its feet on the construction of a missile-defense system to protect the United States against growing threats from such “rogue” states as North Korea, Iraq and Iran.

Neither Democrats nor Republicans endorse isolationism outright as a foreign policy. Nor can they. As Condoleezza Rice, advisor to Republican candidate George W. Bush, remarked, the United States is too powerful and too influential to be isolationist; even its absence from the world stage would have an impact on events. The new is not old wine in new bottles; it mislabels the contents altogether. Republicans are less inclined to rely on moral suasion and unverifiable international agreements to ensure U.S. security. This is not isolationism.

Now, nearly a decade after the Soviet Union’s implosion and in time for the 2000 presidential campaign, we may get a genuine debate on which direction U.S. foreign policy should take. As a result of political cross-fire over the test-ban treaty, the nation will hear alternative foreign-policy visions. Do we mistake “assertive multilateralism” for true internationalism?