The Bogey Of Isolationism

By Daniel Larison
Posted on December 3rd, 2009
Courtesy Of The American Conservative

The new Pew survey (via RCP) that purports to show a record-high level of “isolationist sentiment” is fairly misleading. No doubt, there was a higher percentage that answered that the U.S. should “mind its own business and let other countries get along the best they can on their own,” but the alternative was to answer that the U.S. “is the most powerful nation in the world, we should go our own way in international matters, not worrying about whether other countries agree with us or not.” Given that choice between something that sounds reasonable and something that sounds idiotic, a great many non-”isolationists” would prefer the former response. Essentially, the survey offered two choices. On the one hand, the respondent can choose arrogant hegemonism and disregard the interests of all other nations, or he can choose something less obviously obnoxious. One depressing thing about the survey results is that hegemonism still gets 44%. The other depressing thing is that the 49% don’t really mean what they claim to believe.

This survey is a bit like generic poll questions on the size and role of government. You can routinely get pluralities or even majorities to say that they want smaller government, they want the government to do less, they think the government spends too much, and so on, but you can’t actually get very many people to vote for a politician who proposes to eliminate programs or reduce spending when it might affect a large number of voters. The terrifying thing is that even after the last eight years there is not even a majority that theoretically supports “minding our own business,” whatever people might think this means, and if we were to probe deeper I think we would find that most of these so-called “isolationists” wouldn’t actively support the policy changes that would have to be made to “mind our own business.”

The phrase “mind our own business” is unfortunately imprecise. Certainly, I think we should “mind our own business,” but what I would define as “our business” is very different from the definitions many of these respondents would offer. After all, Bush’s Second Inaugural held out the idea that the liberty of every nation on the planet was necessarily “our business” and closely tied to American liberty. This was insane, but in his way even George W. Bush believed he was “minding our business” by promoting global democratic revolution and launching unnecessary wars. The trouble is that Bush and those like him define “our business,” “the national interest” and “American security” in such absurdly broad ways that they encompass virtually everything.

It is a mistake to identify the “mind our own business” response with “isolationist sentiment” insofar as both possible responses convey an attitude that ignores the possibility of any sort of international alliances or partnerships. After all, the security of an ally is “our business” in a way that the security of other states simply isn’t. This is one reason why a thoroughgoing non-interventionist would insist that we have as few permanent alliances as possible. If we posed the question another way and asked whether America should defend its allies, we would get a dramatically different result, but thanks to the sheer number of security guarantees our government has made this means that “minding our own business” entails minding the business of much of the rest of the world. So it depends very much on what Americans think “our business” is to determine whether or not they are interested in less aggressive policies overseas. One could just as easily say that the other response (”going our own way”) is “isolationist” in certain respects inasmuch as it shows indifference to other nations. Since “isolationist” is an utterly pejorative label, there is no substantive agenda or set of policies to which it can be attached, and this is why it is unusually unproductive to use it to describe public opinion.

In practice, the U.S. has never actually been “isolationist” in any meaningful way, and very few people have identfied themselves by this name because of the tremendously negative associations with which the label was tarred during and after WWII. The bogey of an instinctively “isolationist” American public that must be saved from itself by wise internationalist leaders is trotted out on a regular basis, but there is nothing real behind it. As Prof. Bacevich observed in American Empire, the bogey of “isolationism” has regularly been summoned to justify each new intervention abroad and it is invoked as a domestic political threat that requires a constant struggle to overcome:

As would be the case with Clinton, Bush professed to be mightily concerned that Americans after the Cold War would again succumb to the temptation to which he believed they were peculiarly susceptible: turning inward and ignoring the rest of the world.

No cause was more important than saving his fellow citizens from this error. Decrying the danger of isolationism became a frequent theme of the president’s speeches. Bush denounced those who would “retreat into an isolationist cocoon.” He railed against those “on the right and left [who] are working right now to breathe life into those old flat-Earth theories of protectionism, of isolationism.”

Bacevich writes a little later:

There were in fact few indications that the American people after the Cold War were inclined to “turn their backs on the world”–few, indeed, that they had ever done so throughout their history. But by reviving this shopworn refrain–and by portraying every foreign policy issue as a test of whether Americans would stay the course or shirk their duty to the world–Bush used isolationism as a calculated device for shoring up popular and congressional deference to the executive branch. Bill Clinton would do likewise.

Obviously, George W. Bush did the same during the six years after American Empire was published.

Other results from this very survey show how shallow and meaningless this “mind our own business” response really is:

Among the public, 63% approve of the use of U.S. military force against Iran if it were certain that Iran had produced a nuclear weapon; just 33% of CFR members agree.

That means that at least a third of the “mind our own business” respondents have no problem reconciling that “isolationist” sentiment with starting a completely unprovoked, unjust war against yet another country. That calculation takes for granted that all of the other 44% automatically favor attacking Iran under these circumstances, which may not necessarily be the case. It is possible that there are even more respondents who believe we should “mind our own business” and should attack Iran.

What may be even more dispiriting for non-interventionists is the degree of support “pre-emptive” (i.e., aggressive) war receives. While the 52% figure is considerably lower than it has been in recent years, it remains very high. Support for attacking Iran is highest among Republicans, but an attack has majority support among Democrats and independents as well. This is not the product of a nation on the verge of “turning inward,” much less is it one interested in an America First policy of non-intervention and peace. This a nation that has been whipped up into a paranoid fear of non-existent and exaggerated threats. As ever, “isolationism” is not what should concern us. On the contrary, it is the constant willingness to meddle in, interfere with and lash out at the world that continues to represent the greatest threat to our security.