Back to the Womb? Isolationsm's Renewed Threat

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

From Foreign Affairs, July/August 1995

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Summary:  U.S. isolationism has risen yet again from the grave. The new Republican Congress threatens Wilson's and F.D.R.'s magnificent dream of collective security.

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., is Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at the Graduate School and University Center, the City University of New York. This article is drawn from his George W. Ball Lecture, delivered at Princeton University in April.

American isolationism is an ambiguous concept. The United States has never been isolationist with regard to commerce. Our merchant vessels roamed the seven seas from the first days of independence. Nor has the United States been isolationist with regard to culture. Our writers, artists, scholars, missionaries, and tourists have ever wandered eagerly about the planet. But through most of its history, the republic has been isolationist with regard to foreign policy. From the start, Americans sought to safeguard their daring new adventure in government by shunning foreign entanglements and quarrels. George Washington admonished his countrymen to "steer clear of permanent alliances," and Thomas Jefferson warned them against "entangling alliances."

Only a direct threat to national security could justify entry into foreign wars. The military domination of Europe by a single power has always been considered such a threat. "It cannot be to our interest," Jefferson observed when Napoleon bestrode the continent, "that all Europe should be reduced to a single monarchy." America would be forever in danger, he said, should "the whole force of Europe [be] wielded by a single hand." But between Napoleon and the kaiser, no such threat arose, and Americans became settled in their determination to avoid ensnarement in the corrupt and corrupting world. Isolationism, in this political sense, was national policy.

Then World War I revived the Jeffersonian warning. Once again, as in the time of Napoleon, the force of Europe might have been wielded by a single hand. A balance of power in Europe served American interests as it had served British ones. The United States entered the Great War in its own national interest. But for Woodrow Wilson, national interest was not enough to excuse the sacrifice and horror of war. His need for a loftier justification led him to offer his country and the world a strikingly bold American vision.

The position of the United States had changed since the days of the founding fathers. Where Washington and Jefferson had seen independence, Wilson saw interdependence. His aim was to replace the war?breeding alliance system and the bad old balance of power with a "community of power" embodied in a universal League of Nations. The establishment of the League, Wilson said, promised a peaceful future. Should this promise not be kept, Wilson warned in Omaha in September 1919, "I can predict with absolute certainty that within another generation there will be another world war."

For a glorious moment, Wilson was the world's prophet of peace. No other American president--not Lincoln, not F.D.R., not J.F.K., not Reagan--has ever enjoyed the international acclaim that engulfed Wilson. But Wilson was a prophet without much honor in his own country. His vision of a community of power implied a world of law. It rested on the collective prevention and punishment of aggression. Article X of the league covenant imposed on member nations the "obligation" to "preserve against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of all members of the league." This meant, or seemed ...

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