ABSTRACT
For two centuries, American foreign policy has been marked by a cyclical pattern in which decades of involvement have been followed by decades of isolationism. Now, on the two-hundredth anniversary of our independence, although the cycle watchers have us scheduled to turn inward, we find our leaders proclaiming that interdependence has entangled us with other nations. Have we finally buried George Washington and the isolationist tradition he
fathered? Not yet. As the Vietnam debacle punctuated the end of an era of hyperinvolvement, public debate and public opinion polls became transfixed, right on cycle, by the shadowy ghost of isolationism. Our foreign policy leaders have turned from the tarnished talisman of “national security” that served them so well in the cold war to the rhetoric of interdependence in order to exorciseWashington’s ghost and try to rebuild the public consensus for a foreign policy of involvement. Our thirty-fifth president announced that “the age of interdependence is here.” Our thirty-eighth president warns us that “we are all part of one interdependent economic system.” Wrestling withWashington’s ghost is not the best way to enter the third century.
The slogan “isolationism” both misleads us about our history, and creates a false debate that hinders the making of relevant distinctions among types, degrees, and directions of American involvement with the rest of the world. The choices that confront us as we enter our third century are not between isolationism and interdependence. Both slogans contain a large mixture of myth. We were never all that isolated from the rest of the world and we are not now fully interdependent with the rest of the world. Mexicans, Nicaraguans, Filipinos, and Japanese, among others, must be permitted an ironic smile when they hear about our isolationist history. Isolation was our posture toward the European balance of power, and for a century that posture of independence rested on our tacit military dependence on British naval power. Even in the interwar period of this century, our independence from Europe was a military posture while we tried to influence events through dollar diplomacy. It is ironic that the end of the Vietnamwar stimulated neoisolationist arguments:
A strong case can be made that, with only a quarter of our trade and investment involved in the militarily weak, poor countries, American economic welfare and military security depend rather little on what kinds of domestic political regimes
rule such countries; exports to less developed countries represent about 1 per cent, and earnings on direct investments in such countries represent about one half of 1 per cent of our gross national product; less developed countries have limited – in some cases, negligible – military importance; except for ideologues, the interests of Americans were poorly served by a foreign policy that involved the Third World as an arena in which to combat communism; Americans do not really know what the best regimes for less developed countries are. Neoisolationist arguments such as these were badly needed a decade ago. Now they are like an innoculation against a disease from which we have largely recovered: helpful against recurring symptoms of the past, but possibly harmful as a prescription for the future.
