ABSTRACT
In 1995, four years after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Arthur Schlesinger—historian, former presidential adviser and once a vocal critic of American intervention in the Vietnam War—wrote that the age of American internationalism was coming to an end. Looking back on the commitment to collective security during the Cold War, he described the hope that “Americans had made the great turning and would forever after accept collective responsibilities” as “an illusion.”
It is now surely clear that the upsurge in American internationalism during the Cold War was a reaction to what was seen as the direct and urgent Soviet threat to the security of the United States. It is to Joseph Stalin that Americans owe the 40-year suppression of the isolationist impulse. The collapse of the Soviet threat faces us today with the prospect that haunted Roosevelt half a century ago—the return to the womb in American foreign policy … The isolationist impulse has risen from the grave, and it has taken the new form of unilateralism (Schlesinger 1995, 5).
