isolationism

The term "isolationism" has been used—most often in derogation—to designate the attitudes and policies of those Americans who have urged the continued adherence in the twentieth century to what they conceived to have been the key element of American foreign policy in the nineteenth century, that is, the avoidance of political and military commitments to or alliances with foreign powers, particularly those of Europe. It was most nearly applicable to American policy between the two world wars, especially after 1935, when the U.S. Congress attempted to insulate the country from an increasingly dangerous world situation through the enactment of so-called neutrality laws. Since World War II, efforts to limit or reduce the vastly increased American commitments abroad have sometimes been called neoisolationism.

The term itself is of relatively recent origin. Its first known application to the foreign policies of the United States was by Edward Price Bell, the London correspondent of the Chicago Daily News. In an article entitled "America and Peace" (Nineteenth Century, November 1922), Bell was critical of what he called the essentially negative attitude of the United States toward international cooperation, but noted that the country was nevertheless in the process of moving gradually "from isolation into partnership." Pointing out that the United States had, despite strong misgivings, ultimately declared war on Germany in 1917, he concluded: "Her isolationism, such as it was, discovered that the strain of a formidable advance against freedom was more than it could bear."

The word "isolationist" was listed for the first time in the 1901 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, although without any indication as to when or where it had been used in its political sense. Standard American dictionaries did not incorporate the word until 1922, and the 1933 supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary cites no political use of it before 21 April 1921, when it appeared in the Glasgow Herald. Mitford M. Matthews, in A Dictionary of Americanisms on Historical Principles (Chicago, 1951), makes a logical but erroneous inference from the listing in the 1901 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (it remains unchanged in the current edition) and traces "isolationist" in a political sense to an article in the Philadelphia Press of 25 March 1899. This article, however, uses the word in a medical sense in connection with a smallpox epidemic in Laredo, Texas.

The Scholarly Literature

The scholarly literature on isolationism began in 1924 with J. Fred Rippy and Angie Debo's essay "The Historical Background of the American Policy of Isolation" (Smith College Studies in History 9). The term was not prominently used, however, until 1935, when Albert K. Weinberg offered a provocative interpretation of it in Manifest Destiny. World War II and its immediate aftermath, when the United States for the first time actively sought to assume the mantle of a major power, provided the major impetus for its serious study.

American policy during the interwar years, which frequently was described as isolationist, came then to be regarded as an anomalous one that required explanation and analysis. Isolation, it was argued, had generally been imposed on major powers only against their will, as in the case of France after the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871) or of Great Britain in the 1890s. Although the speech by George Eulas Foster in the Canadian House of Commons on 16 January 1896 led to a flurry of oratory concerning Britain's "splendid isolation," it was clear that the term had been used ironically more often than not and that British policy had been designed to help the empire emerge from that apparently undesirable state. Voluntary isolation had been sought only by some smaller nations, such as Switzerland, as a way to avoid falling victim to more powerful neighbors, and by culturally threatened ones, such as China and Japan, as a defense against Western incursions.

The United States was the only major Western industrialized nation that had apparently displayed a positive interest in some form of isolation, and that phenomenon attracted the attention of scholars in the late 1940s, and with increasing frequency in the two decades that followed. Ray Allen Billington sought to give isolationism a geographic base in his "The Origins of Middle Western Isolationism" (Political Science Quarterly, March 1945); Henry Nash Smith examined its relationship to "the myth of the garden" (Virgin Land, 1950); Samuel Lubell exposed what he took to be its "ethnic and emotional roots" (The Future of American Politics, 1952); and Wayne S. Cole explained it as an expression of the "needs, desires, and value systems" of American agricultural society (Senator Gerald P. Nye and American Foreign Policy, 1962).

Extended analyses of isolationism were also published by Robert E. Osgood, who defined it as a form of "passive egoism" in his Ideals and Self-Interest in American Foreign Relations (1953); by Selig Adler, who stressed economic self-sufficiency, the illusion of security, and ethnic prejudices as causative factors (The Isolationist Impulse, 1957); by Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr., who explained isolationism as a policy designed to assure de facto independence after the American Revolution had been won (Ideas, Ideals, and American Diplomacy, 1966); and by Manfred Jonas, whose Isolationism in America, 1935–1941 (1966) analyzed the assumptions underlying the isolationist position prior to World War II and suggested that these indicated a survival of unilateralism bolstered by a fear of war. John Milton Cooper, Jr., sought to define isolationism as "a political position with programmatic and ideological dimensions" somewhat akin to a political movement (The Vanity of Power, 1969), and a host of other scholars—historians, political scientists, sociologists, and even psychologists—have investigated the subject from the perspective of their respective disciplines.

The Myth of the Founders

While controversy continues about the precise meaning of the term "isolationism" and about the relative importance of various factors that might explain the phenomenon, some areas of agreement emerged from the research. It became clear, for example, that isolationists of whatever stripe always regarded themselves as traditionalists with respect to American foreign policy and regularly invoked the Founders, particularly George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, in support of their position.

Washington was the father of the first American neutrality act (1794), which incorporated both the principle of his Proclamation of Neutrality (1793)—that the United States should pursue "a conduct friendly and impartial towards the Belligerent Powers"—and the subsequently developed Rules Governing Belligerents. The neutral stance of the United States was noteworthy primarily because of its obvious incompatibility with the French alliance that had been concluded despite strong misgivings in 1778. Since France chose not to invoke the alliance in the 1790s, American neutrality remained unchallenged, and could thus develop into a tradition that was reasserted, at least initially, with respect to every major international conflict up to World War II.

In his Farewell Address in 1796, Washington supplied the rationale for this policy and urged its continuance. He pointed out that "Europe has a set of primary interests which to us have none or a very remote relation," and advised his countrymen "to steer clear of permanent Alliances" and involvement "by artificial ties in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics and the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships and enmities." Less than five years later, Jefferson put substantially the same advice into even more enduring phraseology in his first inaugural address, where he insisted that American policy should continue to be based on the principle of "peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none."

Neither Washington nor Jefferson, however, regarded themselves as advocates of a policy of isolation and, indeed, that word had not yet migrated to the English language from the French at the time they expressed their views. Both men actually sought to increase American contacts with the outside world. Washington vigorously espoused the expansion of foreign trade and promoted a series of commercial agreements on the model of the one negotiated with Prussia in 1785. Jefferson, although he would, in moments of great frustration, have preferred the United States "to practise neither commerce nor navigation, but to stand, with respect to Europe, precisely on the footing of China," clearly recognized after he had become president the necessity of fostering commerce and other forms of international intercourse. Indeed, he sent the U.S. marines to the shores of Tripoli to protect American commerce and acquired the whole Louisiana Territory from France in order to keep the mouth of the Mississippi open to the new nation's trade. Both presidents welcomed continued immigration and, Jefferson in particular, the influx of European ideas and culture.

The two did not even categorically rule out alliances. Washington indicated in his Farewell Address that the new nation might "safely trust to temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies." Jefferson advised President James Monroe in 1823 to accept Foreign Secretary George Canning's invitation to joint action with Great Britain against the threat posed to Latin America by the Holy Alliance. While reasserting that the "first and fundamental maxim [of the United States] should be never to entangle ourselves in the broils of Europe" and the second maxim, "never to suffer Europe to meddle with cis-Atlantic affairs," Jefferson nevertheless concluded that "the war in which the present proposition might engage us, should that be its consequence, is not her war, but ours," and that if "we can effect a division in the body of the European powers, and draw over to our side its most powerful member, surely we should do it."

The basic aim of both Washington and Jefferson was to safeguard the independence of a new and weak nation by avoiding, whenever possible, involvement in the military and political affairs of the major powers while at the same time expanding trade and commerce as a means of fostering national development. But both men were fully aware that economic and political matters could not be separated as neatly as their phraseology suggested, and neither can be regarded in any meaningful way as an isolationist. Together with many of the other Founders, they merely followed the logic of the American Revolution and its consequences.

Thomas Paine had pointed out in Common Sense (1776) that one of the advantages of breaking the connection with Great Britain lay in the possibility of assuming a position of neutrality with respect to a Europe "too thickly planted with Kingdoms to be long at peace" and thus promoting and protecting trade with all nations even in wartime. John Adams urged the Continental Congress to enter only into treaties of commerce and "to lay it down, as a first principle and a maxim never to be forgotten, to maintain an entire neutrality in all future European wars." Were the fledgling United States to do otherwise, Adams feared, "we should be little better than puppets, danced on the wires of the cabinets of Europe." The Congress that he addressed had earlier established a committee to draft a declaration of independence and, at the very same time, one to devise a model treaty for regulating relations with foreign nations. The model treaty, Adams declared, was to be only commercial and have neither political nor military clauses. Such a treaty proved impossible to conclude, however, and foreign aid was needed if independence were to become a reality. Less than six months after adopting the Declaration of Independence, therefore, Congress dispatched John Jay to Spain, Benjamin Franklin to France, and John Adams himself to Holland to seek both money and full-fledged alliances. Isolating the United States from the rest of the world was the last thing they had in mind.

The United States was involved almost from the beginning in the first world crisis after independence was achieved: the quarter century of wars spawned by the French Revolution. That was due in part to the fact that the new nation could not be indifferent to the outcome of these wars, and that Jefferson and the Republicans generally favored the cause of France, while Washington, Hamilton, and the Federalists favored Great Britain. Washington's Neutrality Proclamation of 1793 was not intended primarily to insulate the United States against foreign conflicts, but was rather an anti-French measure for evading America's obligations under the Treaty of Amity and Commerce of 1778 and thereby helping the British cause. Both Jefferson and James Madison denounced it on that account, particularly after the Washington administration negotiated a new treaty, this one with Great Britain, shortly thereafter. Alexander J. Dallas, the future secretary of the Treasury who would have been much happier to have the French alliance continue, in 1795 denounced the treaty that John Jay had negotiated in London as a scheme for "wantonly involving ourselves in the political intrigues and squabbles of the European nations."

After Napoleon came to power in France, Jefferson played a role in the ongoing struggles by buying Louisiana from the financially strapped emperor and by a series of manipulative trade measures including the Embargo Act of 1807 and the Nonintercourse Act of the following year. Over the protests of staunchly Federalist New England, the United States even went to war in 1812 with Great Britain and attempted to conquer Canada, thereby becoming in effect an ally of Napoleon. The Boston Gazette promptly lamented the shedding of American "blood for Bonaparte" and, after the French occupied Moscow, Czar Alexander I offered his services as mediator in the conflict between his British ally and the United States.

The nation was thus, in its early years, neither isolated nor isolationist. It consistently recognized its involvement with the world but sought to pursue its international interests unilaterally without making long-term commitments or entering formal alliances. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams correctly assured the assembled multitude on 4 July 1821 that the United States "does not go forth in search of monsters to destroy" because "by once enlisting under banners other than her own" it would become party to "all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy and ambition." But Adams had already served as minister to the Netherlands, Prussia, Russia, and Great Britain and had been one of America's negotiators of the Treaty of Ghent ending the War of 1812. As secretary of state, he was to conclude formal treaties with Spain and Great Britain and to protect the newly independent states of Latin America with the Monroe Doctrine.

America's Foreign Policy in the Nineteenth Century

The unilateralist foreign policy that Adams pursued—the actual legacy of the Founders—proved serviceable and was followed with reasonable consistency until the end of the nineteenth century. It was a policy peculiar to the United States not in its motivation but only in the circumstances that allowed it to work. Americans had deliberately shaken off their major tie with Europe during the Revolution and understandably had little interest in replacing it with other ties. Moreover, in 1776 Americans had acted partly out of a sense of uniqueness and of superiority to the Old World and its institutions, and they regarded it as essential to the success of the mission of the United States that its policies remain uncontaminated and free from foreign influence. The development of the traditional American foreign policy was thus coeval with the first flowering of an assertive American nationalism.

The freedom of action that the United States sought for itself during the nineteenth century is, however, the ideal of all nation-states. Alliances, however desirable or even necessary under certain circumstances, inevitably circumscribe that freedom, and the avoidance of alliances and the maintenance of neutrality in the quarrels of others are, therefore, a universally appealing policy.

For most nations, however, the policy is also self-defeating and dangerous, since it is often incompatible with the continuance and further development of commercial and cultural ties, largely rules out assistance from others when that may be necessary, and invites attack by stronger neighbors. For the United States in the early nineteenth century, as a country of little economic and no military importance, without strong neighbors, protected by wide expanses of ocean and the polar ice cap, and favored by a world balance of power that tended in most instances to safeguard its interest, the policy was not only appealing, however, but also practicable. Unallied and uncommitted, threatened neither by invasion nor loss of territory, and possessed of a vast, rich, and sparsely developed hinterland, the United States was able to act independently and at its own discretion in those cases in which events elsewhere in the world seemed to affect the nation's interests.

Over the course of the century, the United States was able to expand its trade and commercial relations to an extraordinary degree, absorbed European immigrants in unparalleled numbers, and engaged freely in the process of cultural exchange. Moreover, it quite consistently displayed strong interest in political and military matters outside its borders.

It encouraged the revolutions in Spain's American colonies and sought to protect their newly won independence with the Monroe Doctrine. It followed the Greek Revolution and the European revolutions of 1830 and 1848 with sympathetic interest, and treated at least one of their leaders, the Hungarian Lajos Kossuth, to a hero's welcome. It vied with the British for control of the Oregon Territory in the 1840s and tried to buy Cuba in the 1850s. It went to war with Mexico in order to acquire not only Texas but California as well, and was instrumental in bringing Japan, a truly isolated country, into contact with the world at large. At the close of the Civil War, it helped effect the withdrawal of French troops from Mexico and acquired Alaska, its first non-contiguous territory, from Russia.

At the same time, the United States consistently sought to avoid "entanglements" by either acting alone or, when that proved impossible, refraining from action. Not only did it take part in the Napoleonic Wars without entering into an alliance with France, it never made certain the support of the British fleet by formal treaty even though that fleet was essential to the effectiveness of the Monroe Doctrine. Despite some strong sentiments to the contrary, the United States consistently refused to commit itself to active support of the European revolutionaries, and limited its treaty making during the entire nineteenth century to the settlement of specific disputes concerning boundaries, immigration, and fishing and sealing rights. The only treaty to carry even the suggestion of joint action with another power, the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty of 1850 with Great Britain, which limited action by the United States with regard to the building of a trans-isthmian canal, has been called by the historian Thomas A. Bailey "the most persistently unpopular pact ever concluded by the United States."

By the middle of the nineteenth century, America's traditional policy had become so firmly established that it was above serious challenge. In rejecting, on 11 May 1863, an invitation to join with France, Great Britain, and Austria in an attempt to persuade Czar Alexander II to modify his designs on Poland, Secretary of State William H. Seward cited Washington's Farewell Address as the basis for his action, and applauded the hitherto successful resistance to "seductions from what, superficially viewed, seemed a course of isolation and indifference." It was the first known official use of the term "isolation" in connection with the traditional American policy, and it was used, of course, only to be rejected as inapplicable. "Our policy of nonintervention, straight, absolute, and peculiar as it may seem to other nations," concluded Seward, "has … become a traditional one, which could not be abandoned without the most urgent occasion, amounting to manifest necessity."

Trying the Role of World Power

As long as this policy was regarded as natural and obvious, it provided no basis for factional disputes and required, therefore, neither ideological nor programmatic definition nor a specific label. Isolationism emerged as a distinctive and definable political position only when the foreign policy consensus derived from the teachings of Washington and Jefferson began to break down, a development that found its basis in the conditions of the late nineteenth century but full expression only in the period of World War I.

By the end of the nineteenth century, virtually all of the circumstances that had made the traditional policy of the United States possible had either been greatly modified or disappeared altogether. With rapid industrialization and the opening of vast new lands to agriculture, the United States had become a serious factor in the world economy and was converting itself from an importer into an exporter of capital. The need for the protection of trade and investments, as well as the chauvinistic search for the sinews and symbols of power that infected all Western nations in these years, led the United States to follow the teachings of Alfred Thayer Mahan, who in his lectures at the newly established Naval War College—subsequently published as The Influence of Sea Power on History, 1660–1783 (1890)—argued that great countries were built by great navies. Even as the United States thus embarked on the road to military power, advances in technology and communications continued to shrink the oceans and thereby to move the country from the periphery of power to a place closer to the center. And the nineteenth-century balance of power, which, for all the abuse that had been heaped on it by American statesmen, had served the nation well, was upset by the simultaneous rise to international prominence of two ambitious newcomers, Germany and Japan.

The United States responded to these changes with a more active foreign policy and greater international involvement. In 1884 it joined the International Red Cross and participated in the Berlin Conference that was intended to solve the problems in the Congo. Three years later, it hosted the first international conference of its own, the Washington Conference on Samoa, and in 1889 the first Pan-American Conference. These expanded international contacts soon led to further involvement. The Venezuela Crisis of 1895 was followed by the War with Spain, the acquisition of Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, and the enunciation of the Open Door policy designed to assure equal international access to the markets of China. The United States sent delegates to the First International Peace Conference at The Hague in 1899, and the following year contributed 5,000 troops to an international expeditionary force that put down the Boxer Rebellion in China.

The pace of America's involvement with the world quickened during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, who hugely enjoyed asserting America's growing power. In 1902, after Great Britain, Germany, and Italy had blockaded Venezuela and brought its dictator, Cipriano Castro, to his knees, he facilitated an arbitration of the dispute that protected America's long-standing interests in Latin America. In 1903 he encouraged rebellion in Colombia, promptly recognized the new country of Panama that emerged, and acquired territory from it on which to build a trans-isthmian canal. In 1904 his corollary to the Monroe Doctrine arrogated to the United States the exercise of an international police power in the Caribbean, and for the next twenty years U.S. marines landed periodically in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Haiti, and, on occasion, even Mexico. In 1905 he mediated the peace treaty between Russia and Japan that was concluded at a conference in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. For his efforts he became the first of three Americans who were to win the Nobel Peace Prize before 1920.

All of this activism in international affairs was deemed to be compatible with the foreign policy of the Founders, and the traditional American consensus therefore remained largely intact. Even the anti-imperialists at the turn of the century, while opposing the acquisition of colonies on the grounds that this would fundamentally change the character of the American Republic, made surprisingly little of the fact that it would inevitably lead to involvement in the great power rivalries against which President Washington had warned, and that the Open Door policy would have the same effect if attempts were made to enforce it. When the Senate ratified the Algeciras Agreement of 1906, an international compact dealing with the future of Morocco, and the Hague Convention of 1908 that established the rights of neutrals and of noncombatants—both clearly "entangling" in nature—it simply added the proviso that agreeing to them was "without purpose to depart from the traditional American foreign policy."

Less than three months before the outbreak of World War I, Woodrow Wilson, who still insisted that "we need not and we should not form alliances with any nation in the world," reasserted the traditional policy: "Those who are right, those who study their consciences in determining their policies, those who hold their honor higher than their advantages, do not need alliances." Consequently, the onset of hostilities in Europe produced the traditional American response: a declaration of neutrality and a reassertion of the policy of friendship with all and entanglements with none, which, as an editorial in the magazine World's Work put it, "was made for us by wise men a hundred years ago."

Interventionism and Isolationism

World War I nevertheless proved to be the first clear indicator that the United States, would, by virtue of its new power position, find it difficult, and perhaps also undesirable, to remain "unentangled." Since the conflict pitted many ideological friends and major trading partners of the United States against a group of European autocracies—most particularly after the March Revolution of 1917 in Russia—it proved extraordinarily difficult, even for the president himself, to heed Wilson's admonition to be "impartial in thought as well as in action." The wartime increase in trade flowed naturally into previously developed channels, and loans and credits largely followed the route of established business connections, thus not only favoring one set of belligerents and arousing the ire of the other but giving the United States a tangible stake in the outcome of the war.

Even aside from such specific considerations, the possibility that nations with political systems and economic aims different from those of the United States might dominate the world after the war could be ignored only with difficulty. For all of his original devotion to neutrality, Wilson himself was moved to his desire for a negotiated "peace without victory" at least in part because he found one of the other alternatives—the victory of the Central Powers—to be wholly incompatible with American interests. "The world," he was to say in his declaration of war, "must be made safe for democracy."

The situation of the United States during World War I brought respectability for the first time to the proposition that, given its changed world position, the United States might best protect its interests by more active cooperation with other nations, even through commitments and alliances not in keeping with the traditional policy. Wilson's espousal of such ideas led him to propose a League of Nations, which required full-fledged American participation in a system of collective security. Others with similar views joined together in June 1915 to found the League to Enforce Peace, an American counterpart to the Netherlands-based Organisation Centrale pour une Paix Durable. Among the leaders of the new organization were former president William Howard Taft, President A. Lawrence Lowell of Harvard, and Hamilton Holt, the influential editor of the Independent.

This initial articulation of an approach to foreign policy that differed from the traditional one chiefly in its espousal of collective action as a necessary element in the defense of the national interest produced, in its turn, the defensive position generally called isolationism. In the context of the time, it amounted to an assertion, implicit or explicit, that changed world conditions had not made a departure from traditional policies either necessary or desirable and that entanglement in what continued to be regarded as the affairs of other nations was more dangerous to the United States than any conceivable result of continued noninvolvement. Among the early isolationists, in this sense, were Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, Senators William E. Borah of Idaho and George W. Norris of Nebraska, and the pacifist-intellectual Randolph S. Bourne. On a popular level, such sentiments found support in the Hearst press beginning in early 1917.

Although the occasion for this development of an isolationist position was the debate over American entry into World War I, the actual declaration of war did not prove to be the really divisive issue. If the United States entered the war on its own volition and in defense of its own interests, such a step did not necessarily violate traditional policy, particularly not if it fought, as it did, not in formal alliance with other nations, but simply as an "associated power." Accordingly, a number of confirmed isolationists in the Senate voted for war. Among these were not only Democrats like Charles S. Thomas of Colorado and Thomas P. Gore of Oklahoma, who might be considered to have put partisanship ahead of conviction, but also Republicans Joseph I. France of Maryland, Hiram Johnson of California, and Borah.

Wilson soon realized, however, that any serious effort to make the world safe for democracy required that the United States enter into de facto alliance with the European powers, under whatever label, so that he himself would be able to exert the leadership necessary to the attainment of that objective. In his Fourteen Points address of 18 January 1918 he in effect supplied all of the Allies with a set of war aims that included the removal of economic barriers among nations, the adjustment of competing colonial claims, the freedom of the seas, and a "general association of nations" to secure "mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike." Less than a year later, he went to Paris in an effort to have these objectives, especially the establishment of a League of Nations, incorporated in the Treaty of Versailles that ended the war.

America's entry into the League of Nations would have been an obvious violation of the traditional policy. The league was clearly an alliance, an open-ended commitment of the very sort against which the Founders had warned. Wilson in fact promoted U.S. participation in the international organization as "an entirely new course of action" made necessary by the fact that the isolation of the United States was at an end, "not because we chose to go into the politics of the world, but because by the sheer genius of this people and the growth of our power we have become a determining factor in the history of mankind and after you have become a determining factor you cannot remain isolated, whether you want to or not."

The isolationists would have none of that. They generally agreed with the contention that isolation was no longer a realistic aim, if indeed it had ever been one, but took sharp issue with the proposed policy reversal. "We may set aside all this empty talk about isolation," Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, the chairman of the Senate's Committee on Foreign Relations, told his colleagues in 1919. "Nobody expects to isolate the United States or make it a hermit Nation, which is sheer absurdity." At the same time, however, he warned against the injury the United States would do itself by "meddling in all the differences which may arise among any portion or fragment of humankind" and urged continued adherence to "the policy of Washington and Hamilton, of Jefferson and Monroe, under which we have risen to our present greatness and prosperity." The Senate debate over ratification of the Treaty of Versailles sharpened and clarified the isolationist position. It turned entirely on the question of America's so-called meddling, and set the course of American foreign policy for the next two decades.

The Triumph of Isolationism

The rejection of the Treaty of Versailles by the Senate and the overwhelming popular ratification of that action in the election of 1920 can be regarded as a triumph of American isolationism. It was not, as has sometimes been argued, a return to an earlier policy. The world had changed too much to allow that. But it was a reassertion of that policy in the face of the first fundamental challenge it had ever faced. The isolationism of the 1920s was real, despite the continuing commercial expansion of the United States and despite the greater influence on world affairs that the country enjoyed. The traditional policy, which the isolationists thought they were preserving, had always, after all, emphasized trade and commerce even while shrinking from political commitments, and American influence and the desire for it had traditionally been a component of the "mission" of the United States.

Nevertheless, the American position during the 1920s was in some ways an ambiguous one. The experience of World War I had greatly increased the role of the United States as an economic, political, and even military factor in world affairs, and made some degree of coordination with other nations all the more crucial. At the same time, the war had served as an object lesson on the danger of international commitments. The success of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia was only the most threatening of the postwar events that persuaded most Americans that their intervention had clearly failed to make the world safe for democracy. It thus appeared to demonstrate the wisdom of the contention that meddling in the affairs of others was useless and self-defeating. The reflexive logic that this intervention had almost led to a total abandonment of the policy of the Founders only served as a further warning.

On the basis of such perceptions, the United States set out on an isolationist course that could best be described as one of cooperation without commitment. The United States, for the first time in its history, sharply curtailed immigration. It took the lead in negotiations on naval disarmament that would make war less likely and took pains to clarify the purely hortatory character of the Open Door policy. The Four-Power Treaty of 1921 changed any commitments the United States might once have assumed with respect to the openness or territorial integrity of China into a commitment, proposed by Senator Lodge, "to communicate … fully and frankly in order to arrive at an understanding as to the most efficient measures to be taken, jointly or separately, to meet the exigencies of the particular situation." Even then, the Senate ratified the treaty only after adding a further disclaimer: "The United States understands that under the statement in the preamble or under the terms of this treaty there is no commitment to armed force, no alliance, no obligation to join in any defense."

During these years the most heralded diplomatic achievement by the United States, the Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928), was in its origins simply a way of gracefully denying France the security guarantees it had sought to obtain. Although generally regarded at the time as a positive contribution to the maintenance of world peace and order, it formally committed the United States to no action of any kind and was strongly supported by many of the most prominent isolationists, including the new chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Borah.

By the beginning of the 1930s, the United States was retreating from military intervention in Latin America by adopting the so-called Good Neighbor Policy, and Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson reacted to the Japanese conquest of Manchuria with a unilateral action that threatened nothing more serious than nonrecognition. President Herbert Hoover restated the isolationist consensus in 1931. Although recognizing a greater interdependence among nations in the modern world, Hoover nonetheless distinguished between the path of the United States and that of other nations. "We should cooperate with the rest of the world;" he told his cabinet, "we should do so as long as that cooperation remains in the field of moral pressures…. But that is the limit." There were few dissenters.

Isolationism At High Tide

During the remainder of the 1930s, America's isolationism was most clearly defined and most ardently defended, and it reigned triumphant until fatally undermined by the very world events that had helped to promote it. The isolationism of the 1930s emanated clearly from a world situation in which the totalitarian states—most notably Germany, Japan, and Italy—challenged the status quo and with it the power position and security of the United States. Traditional American foreign policy had always rested on the assumption that the United States was safe from attack and that American trade and ideas would continue to find acceptance regardless of developments elsewhere. As that assurance diminished, it seemed more important than ever before to try and seal off the United States from threats from abroad, especially the threat of war. It was not until the end of the decade that most Americans faced up to the question then raised rhetorically by the formerly isolationist Progressive of Madison, Wisconsin: "If Hitler defeats England and the British fleet is destroyed, what becomes of our splendid isolation, with Hitler on the Atlantic side and Japan and Russia on the Pacific side?"

Until that time, the Great Depression provided a new and for a time persuasive rationale for the isolationist position. Confronted by urgent domestic problems, the immediate impulse of the United States was to turn inward and to regard events outside its borders as distractions tending to impede the solution of problems at home. Even President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who, as a disciple of Woodrow Wilson was anything but an isolationist, spurned international cooperation to alleviate the crisis in favor of unilateral American action and, in effect, torpedoed the London Economic Conference in 1933.

The depression also deflated confidence in the strength of the United States and in its ability to influence events elsewhere. Faced with evidence that much was wrong at home, many Americans abandoned the traditional belief that their institutions should serve as a model for the rest of the world. Others reasoned that the economic crisis had so sapped the nation's strength that it would be futile to intervene in international affairs. Both lines of thought led to essentially isolationist conclusions. Finally, the depression increased popular distrust of bankers and businessmen and thus the willingness to sacrifice even trade and commerce, if necessary, to maintain political and military noninvolvement. Because the reputation of the American businessman reached its nadir in the 1930s, the attempt was made to resolve the increasingly apparent dichotomy between "commerce and honest friendship with all nations" and "entangling alliances with none" not by increasing American political involvement but by circumscribing the then suspect commercial contacts.

The high-water mark of American isolationism was therefore reached in the years from 1934 to 1937, in the depth of the Great Depression. Beginning with the Johnson Act, which in 1934 prohibited loans to countries in default on previous debts—only Finland could qualify for a loan under that provision—Congress took a series of actions designed to prohibit activities of the sort that were presumed to have involved the United States in World War I. The Senate established a committee headed by the isolationist Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota to investigate the American munitions industry and its ties to European arms makers. In 1935, 1936, and 1937, by means of so-called neutrality acts, the United States banned loans and the export of arms and ammunition to countries at war, prohibited Americans from traveling on belligerent vessels, forbade the arming of American merchant ships trading with countries at war, and prohibited the sale on credit of war materials other than arms and ammunitions as well as transportation of such materials on U.S. vessels. A substantial majority of the members of Congress believed that such measures could insulate the country against increasingly threatening world events.

The rationale behind these acts provides us with the clearest expression of isolationist assumptions. Their purpose was simply to make possible in the twentieth century the stance first adopted by the United States in 1794. Although the recognition that legislation was necessary to achieve this implied an acknowledgment that the world had changed since the eighteenth century, it also suggested that the United States might accommodate itself to these changes and maintain its traditional position of neutrality by simply taking certain relatively minor precautions. This assumption required a continuing belief that the vital interests of the United States were not substantially affected by events elsewhere; that Europe still had a set of interests "which to us have none or a very remote relation"; and that the country had become involved in other international quarrels, particularly in World War I, for reasons having little to do with genuine national interest.

The last of these beliefs was given powerful support not only by the conclusions of the Nye Committee that the greed of America's "merchants of death" had led the nation into war in 1917, but also by the work of so-called revisionist historians who, at least since the appearance of Harry Elmer Barnes's The Genesis of the World War (1926), had been hammering away at the theme that the entry of the United States into the world war had been brought about, contrary to the true interests of the United States, by direct and indirect Allied pressure and by the machinations of bankers, brokers, and businessmen who had unwisely tied American prosperity to the cause of Great Britain and France. In the mid-1930s, Charles A. Beard and Charles C. Tansill were the most prominent of the historians who repeated this theme and alleged the existence of a "deadly parallel" to the situation twenty years before. Walter Millis repeated these arguments in his best-selling Road to War (1935).

The neutrality legislation of the 1930s clearly reflected the isolationist contention that the United States went to war in 1917, and might do so again, not because its interests were threatened, but merely because its activities, particularly those relating to trade, produced incidents that blurred judgment and inflamed passions. By prohibiting loans and the trade in arms, by keeping Americans off belligerent vessels, and by insisting that title to all war material had passed to the purchaser and that such material be carried only in non-American ships, the United States expected to avoid such incidents and thereby involvement in war.

Isolationism in Retreat

The isolationist's beliefs, however, no longer reflected the realities of the world situation. The United States had acquired a far greater stake in the international power balance and exerted far more influence on it than the isolationists were prepared to admit. Neutrality legislation did not reduce this influence but simply redirected it, not necessarily into desirable channels.

In general, the American policy gave aid and comfort to would-be aggressors since it offered tacit assurance that this country would not actively oppose their actions as long as they did not directly threaten the United States. More specifically, the neutrality legislation in effect aided the Fascist dictators—Italy's Benito Mussolini when applied to the Italo-Ethiopian War and Spain's Francisco Franco when applied to the Spanish Civil War. The legislation also tended, at least in the first of these cases, to undercut possible peacekeeping actions by the League of Nations.

Since even most isolationists agreed that the victories of the Italian and Spanish fascists were less desirable from the American viewpoint than were other possible outcomes, the wisdom of a policy that contributed to such a result came increasingly to be questioned. "In the long run," the Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas, a staunch isolationist and an original proponent of neutrality legislation, told President Roosevelt in December 1936, "it is not peace for the world, even for America which will be served by applying to the Spanish rebellion a general principle which should be asserted more rigorously than is yet the case in Congressional legislation concerning neutrality in international law." As a socialist who supported the elected government of Spain and abhorred Franco, Thomas was caught in a dilemma that could not be resolved in isolationist terms.

The two events that destroyed the rationale for American isolationism altogether were the fall of France in June 1940 and the attack on Pearl Harbor in December of the following year. The defeat of France by a seemingly invincible Germany created a profound sense of insecurity in the United States. It raised fears not only of an Axis victory but also of a direct attack on this country in the event, now deemed possible, that the British fleet would either be destroyed or captured. The founding of the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, the first influential interventionist organization, was a direct result of this fear, and the success of that organization produced the establishment of the America First Committee, the last stronghold of the embattled and soon outnumbered isolationists.

The attack on Pearl Harbor, in its turn, graphically demonstrated the vulnerability of American territory to foreign aggressors. Under these circumstances cooperation and even alliance with others to forestall further danger seemed dictated by prudence and common sense. "In my own mind," one of the most outspoken and influential of the congressional isolationists, Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg of Michigan, confided in his diary some time after the event, "my convictions regarding international cooperation and collective security for peace took firm form on the afternoon of the Pearl Harbor attack. That day ended isolationism for any realist."

The End of America's Isolationism

Vandenberg was essentially right. Both the traditional American foreign policy, based on the precepts of Washington and Jefferson, and isolationism, regarded by its proponents as an adaptation of that policy to the conditions of the twentieth century, had rested on the assumption that Europe's interests were sufficiently different from those of the United States and that the United States was sufficiently safe from attack to make political or military involvement with Europe unnecessary. If unnecessary, such involvement was undesirable by definition, since it could only limit the country's freedom of action and thereby its sovereignty without bringing any compensating benefits. Although these assumptions had been challenged by world events since the end of the nineteenth century, they had never before been clearly disproved. When the assumptions were disproved, the isolationist structure was no longer a viable one, and the United States moved rapidly not only into tacit alliance with Great Britain and into war as a formal ally of the anti-Axis powers but also very consciously into a commitment to collective security.

Even before World War II had ended, the world economy and the political structure of the new league of nations, the United Nations, would be laid out under American leadership at international conferences at the Bretton Woods resort in New Hampshire and the Dumbarton Oaks estate in Washington, D.C. The United States not only joined the United Nations without serious opposition, but also symbolized its change of course by welcoming that organization's headquarters to New York City.

What had been destroyed, of course, had only been the practicality of the isolationist position. Its emotional appeal remained largely intact, as it had in nations for whom isolationism had never been a realistic position. Isolationist rhetoric, therefore, continued to be used by some opponents of American postwar policies. In the debate over military aid to Europe, which began late in 1950, Joseph P. Kennedy, the isolationist former ambassador to Great Britain, spoke of "unwise commitments" in Berlin and Korea and scoffed at the idea that the United States had any interest in or responsibility for the defense of Western Europe. Herbert Hoover argued that the Americas were still "surrounded by a great moat," and referred once again to "the eternal malign forces of Europe" with which this country should have as little as possible to do. Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio, a leading prewar isolationist, minimized the danger that this country faced from the Soviet Union in terms virtually identical to those in which he had discussed the threat emanating from Nazi Germany.

Although some observers promptly labeled this outburst "the new isolationism," it bore little practical relation to true isolationism. Hoover, in fact, strongly favored an American commitment to the defense of a "Western Hemisphere Gibraltar," the outlying bastions of which were the British Isles, Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, and, possibly, Australia and New Zealand. Taft recognized that an effective international organization would give the best assurance of world peace and, therefore, of American peace, and stated flatly that "nobody is an isolationist today." The whole discussion centered largely on the extent of American military and economic aid to other nations, and not on the necessity for such assistance. It turned on the question of how the cooperation among allies of the United States might best be secured, not how American alliances could be terminated most rapidly.

Isolationism was simply no longer viable in a world in which neutrality for the United States was impossible, if for no other reason than that the Soviet Union regarded the United States as its primary foe; in which the United States could clearly not be indifferent to wars in Europe or Asia that affected the world power balance; and in which the development of nuclear weapons and intercontinental missiles had eliminated the margin of safety that geography had once provided. In short, isolationism was made practically impossible when the United States emerged as the dominant world power in an unstable world. Just as "splendid isolation" had emotional appeal but dangerous practical implications for Great Britain at the close of the nineteenth century, so isolation in any form posed a threat to the position of the United States in the postwar world.

For a brief period, even the traces of the isolationist strain in American foreign policy seemed to disappear. The United States embraced its world leadership role at a time when it was, by a considerable margin, the strongest power on earth. It thus could expect to control whatever alliances it entered and saw no necessary conflict between such alliances and the traditional insistence on unilateral action. The refusal of the Soviet Union to recognize a Pax Americana did not shatter that expectation, but initially strengthened the belief that America's security required cooperation with and commitments to like-minded nations. In the Cold War that resulted, the United States laid claim, without having to consult anyone, to the leadership of what it chose to define as the free world. That leadership produced the Marshall Plan, a massive program to rebuild war-devastated Western Europe, in 1948 and, in 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a permanent formal, military alliance—its first in 171 years—with Canada and a group of ten Western European nations. It was manifested again the following year, when the United States was able to use the UN to muster an international force to serve under American command in Korea. A powerful United States controlling its allies fully met the test of unilateralism.

Isolationism Reconfigured?

Over time, however, American control of the UN and of its allies declined even as its worldwide commitments multiplied. As a result, U.S. foreign policy became both less effective and more costly, and domestic criticism of it increased. The Vietnam War, in particular, spawned critics who argued that there were limits to America's power and that, in consequence, the United States should withdraw from some of its more exposed positions and reduce its international commitments. These critics were often referred to as "neo-isolationists" and sometimes even applied that label to themselves. A leading scholar of American foreign policy, Robert W. Tucker, applauded their position in his book A New Isolationism: Threat or Promise? (New York, 1972).

Yet major spokesmen for this point of view, such as Senators Wayne Morse of Oregon, Ernest Gruening of Alaska, J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, George McGovern of South Dakota, and Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, or George F. Kennan, who as a foreign service officer had been the first to advocate "containment" of the Soviet Union, were not isolationists in any meaningful sense. All favored increasing the role of the United Nations, the maintenance of key alliances, and new attempts to reach agreements with the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China. None suggested, even remotely, that the cure for current problems might be found in a return to the foreign policies of the 1920s or 1930s.

The Vietnam War, to be sure, had a traumatic effect on both American policymakers and the American public. It caused President Lyndon Johnson to withdraw as a candidate for reelection, assured the defeat of his vice-president, Hubert Humphrey, in the 1968 election, and produced major reassessments of American military and strategic policies. But the lessons that were drawn from the failure in Vietnam did not seriously question America's international commitments. They concentrated instead on the clearer and perhaps more limited definition of American goals, the avoidance, where possible, of no-win situations, and, above all, the avoidance of American casualties in future conflicts.

The internationalist consensus thus remained largely intact, and all subsequent presidents vigorously exercised their presumed prerogative of world leadership. Richard Nixon traveled to China in 1972 to definitively change that nation's relationship to the Soviet Union as well as to the United States. President Jimmy Carter tried policies based on the ideas of the Trilateral Commission, a private group of American, Western European, and Japanese businessmen, and in 1979 negotiated a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel at Camp David in Maryland.

Ronald Reagan outdid even Woodrow Wilson in what Frank Ninkovich has defined as crisis internationalism (The Wilsonian Century, Chicago and London, 1999). "Our mission is to nourish and defend freedom and democracy" runs the socalled Reagan Doctrine he enunciated in his State of the Union message in 1985. "We must stand by all of our democratic allies. And we must not break faith with those who are risking their lives—on every continent …—to defy Soviet-supported aggression." Reagan's successor, George H. W. Bush, launched the Gulf War against Iraq in 1991 and brought a number of European and Middle Eastern allies into it. President Clinton, throughout the 1990s, played a direct role in conflicts throughout the world, from Ireland to Israel to Yugoslavia and even beyond.

Throughout these years, isolationism has, to be sure, remained in the area of public discourse. But it has remained there largely as a bogeyman. All presidents since Nixon have defended their policies by labeling their opponents isolationists, and they continue to do so. On 8 December 2000, President Clinton traveled to Kearney, Nebraska, for a foreign policy speech in which he warned his listeners against "isolationist sentiment," and at his confirmation hearing on 17 January 2001, incoming Secretary of State Colin L. Powell found it necessary to assure the Senate that under his guidance the United States would not become "an island of isolationism."

Political commentators continued to treat such allegations with great seriousness. The American Enterprise Institute as recently as 1996 found good cause to publish Joshua Muravchik's The Imperative of American Leadership: A Challenge to Neo-Isolationism, and publications on both sides of the question abound. Yet isolationism is no longer a serious prescription for American policy. With the possible exceptions of the pseudo-populist industrialist Ross Perot, an independent candidate for president in 1992, and Patrick Buchanan, a disgruntled Republican who ran on the Reform Party ticket in 2000, no responsible leader has proposed withdrawal from NATO or the UN or urged the United States to go it alone in a world still considered dangerous, even after the end of the Cold War and the relative triumph of both democracy and free-market capitalism. Ironically, even Buchanan's A Republic Not An Empire (Washington, D.C., 1999) contains a section entitled "The Myth of American Isolationism."

The persistence of isolationism as a talking point half a century after its effective demise led some scholars, particularly in the field of security policy, to redefine the term, sometimes in quite sophisticated ways. Eric Nordlinger's Isolationism Reconfigured (Princeton, N.J., 1995), for example, sees isolationism essentially as the unilateralist component of the traditional American foreign policy that is wary of entangling alliances and, therefore, as a permanent counterweight to the traditional policy's internationalist component that has carried the day since World War II. In somewhat similar fashion, Frank Ninkovich has defined isolationism as the "normal internationalism" he attributes to the Founders. The Wilsonian counterpart to that which has dominated U.S. foreign policy for the past half century he calls "crisis internationalism."

Either redefinition does away with the need to explain isolationism or to account for its appearance, especially in the 1920s. For that reason, both lend themselves to the development of ingenious and highly persuasive analyses with substantial postmodernist appeal. They do so, however, by dealing scarcely, if at all, with the objective reality of that isolationism that was an important phase in the development of American foreign policy. That phase has now been superseded, and reentry into it seems no longer possible, even if a nostalgic longing for it survives.

Born of the universal aspiration for unrestricted national sovereignty and the peculiar relation of the United States to the rest of the world in the nineteenth century, isolationism was staunchly defended and raised to the level of dogma when world events in the twentieth century threatened America's traditional foreign policy consensus. In a shrinking world with an increasingly global economy and ever more deadly weapons that can be delivered anywhere, however, it is an untenable position for a country that has gone to great expense to develop and maintain a fully global military reach, dominates virtually every international institution or agency to which it belongs, and labors ceaselessly to remain the center of global finance and of world trade.

Bibliography

Adler, Selig. The Isolationist Impulse: Its Twentieth Century Reaction. London and New York, 1957. The classic early work that regards economic self-sufficiency and the illusion of security, as well as some ethnic prejudices, as the causes of isolationism.

Clemens, Diane Shaver. From Isolationism to Internationalism: The Case Study of American Occupation Planning for Post-War Germany, 1945–1946. An exceptionally detailed examination of the definitive turning point.

Cole, Wayne S. America First: The Battle Against Intervention, 1940–1941. Madison, Wis., 1953. Still the only full-scale study of an isolationist organization.

——. Roosevelt and the Isolationists, 1935–1945. Lincoln, Neb., 1983. The isolationists' heyday and how they were outflanked by FDR.

Cooper, John Milton, Jr. The Vanity of Power: American Isolationism and the First World War, 1914–1917. Westport, Conn., 1969. Defines isolationism as a political position with ideological dimensions.

Doenecke, Justus D. Not to the Swift: The Old Isolationists and the Cold War. Lewisburg, Pa., 1979. Traces the varied responses of the old isolationist to the new world created by World War II.

——. Storm on the Horizon: The Challenge to American Intervention, 1939–1941. Lanham, Md., and Oxford, 2000. The most complete analysis of anti-interventionist assumptions and arguments prior to Pearl Harbor.

Fensterwald, Bernard, Jr. "The Anatomy of American 'Isolationism' and Expansionism." Journal of Conflict Resolution 2 (1958). An interesting though unprovable psychological explanation for the persistence of American isolationism.

Foster, H. Schuyler. Activism Replaces Isolationism: U.S. Public Attitudes, 1840–1975. Washington, D.C., 1983. The public opinion studies conducted by the State Department.

Graebner, Norman A. The New Isolationism: A Study in Politics and Foreign Policy Since 1950. New York, 1956. A "realist" view of America's postwar role.

Guinsburg, Thomas N. The Pursuit of Isolationism in the United States from Versailles to Pearl Harbor. New York, 1982. A full-scale study of the most clearly isolationist period in U.S. history.

Jonas, Manfred. Isolationism in America, 1935–1941. Ithaca, N.Y., 1966, and Chicago, 1990. Analyzes the arguments and actions of the isolationists up to Pearl Harbor and concludes that their common denominator was unilateralism strengthened by the fear of war.

Kull, Steven. Misreading the Public: The Myth of a New Isolationism. Washington, D.C., 1999. Defends those looking to limit America's commitments against the charge of isolationism.

McDougall, Walter A. Promised Land, Crusader State. Boston, 1997. Divides U.S. diplomatic history into "Old Testament" and "New Testament" phases and argues that foreign policy debates revolve around the differences between the two.

Muravchik, Joshua. The Imperative of American Leadership: A Challenge to Neo-Isolationism. Washington, D.C., 1996. Argues that the United States must remain the fully committed leader of the free world.

Ninkovich, Frank. The Wilsonian Century: U.S. Foreign Policy Since 1900. Chicago and London, 1999. A brief analytical survey that does away with isolationism by defining American policy as a tug of war between the "normal" internationalism of the Founders and the "crisis" internationalism of Woodrow Wilson.

Nordlinger, Eric A. Isolationism Reconfigured: American Foreign Policy for a New Century. Princeton, N.J., 1995. Argues that isolationism is simply the unilateralist component of the traditional and relatively constant American foreign policy.

Osgood, Robert E. Ideals and Self-Interest in American Foreign Relations: The Great Transformation of the Twentieth Century. Chicago, 1953. A classic.

Powaski, Ronald E. Toward an Entangling Alliance: American Isolationism, Internationalism and Europe, 1901–1950. New York, 1991. A straightforward account of how the "isolated" United States came in time to create the North Atlantic Treaty.

Rieselbach, Leroy N. The Roots of Isolationism: Congressional Voting and Presidential Leadership in Foreign Policy. Indianapolis, 1966. The most ambitious behavioral analysis of congressional isolationism.

Rossina, Daniela, ed. From Theodore Roosevelt to FDR: Internationalism and Isolationism in American Foreign Policy. Staffordshire, England, 1995. A collection of essays most of which offer a European view of the United States.

Russett, Bruce M. "Demography, Salience, and Isolationist Behavior." Public Opinion Quarterly 24 (1960). Offers the most serious challenge to ethnic and geographical explanations for isolationism.

Smith, Glenn H. Langer of North Dakota: A Study in Isolationism, 1940–1959. New York, 1979. One of the few biographies of a leading isolationist senator.

Tucker, Robert W. A New Isolationism: Threat or Promise? New York, 1972.

Weinberg, Albert K. "The Historical Meaning of the American Doctrine of Isolationism." American Political Science Review 34 (1940).The classic brief statement of what traditional American foreign policy was and what it was not.

Williams, William A. "The Legend of Isolationism in the 1920s." Science and Society 18 (1954). Argues that the absence of genuine economic isolationism demonstrates the mythical nature of the entire concept.

— Manfred Jonas