孤立主义不是一个肮脏的词
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/09/virtue-isolationism/616499/
美国人已经与他们外交政策传统中的一个关键因素失去了联系。
通过 Charles A. Kupchan 2020 年 9 月 27 日
孤立主义曾经为美国的崛起扫清了道路，使国家富强安定。 然而，今天，开国元勋反对纠缠联盟的告诫声名狼藉，孤立主义者这个词本身也成了一种侮辱。 由于国家在海外的野心没有受到限制，美国的大战略已经成为过度扩张的牺牲品，并在政治上资不抵债。 这个国家现在面临着看似无穷无尽的一系列外国纠葛、中东长达 20 年的错误战争，以及一场大流行病正在造成自大萧条以来从未经历过的经济崩溃。 美国需要重新发现孤立主义的历史并吸取教训，缩小其在国外的足迹，并使其对外承诺与其手段和目的相一致。
长期以来，美国人一直认为他们的民主实验是非凡的，这迫使他们将自由传播到全球各地。 甚至在这个国家诞生之前，热情地倡导脱离英国独立的托马斯·潘恩 (Thomas Paine) 就劝告美国殖民者“我们有能力重新开始世界”。 但是在这个国家的大部分历史中，大多数美国人都设想只能通过他们榜样的力量来改变世界。 他们不想将其战略范围扩展到北美以外。 从建国到 1898 年的美西战争，美国人将其海外野心的范围限制在国际商业上。 他们坚定不移地在北美扩张——践踏美洲原住民，发起几次试图夺取加拿大的失败尝试，在一场从 1846 年到 1848 年的战争中夺取了墨西哥的大片土地，并于 1867 年从俄罗斯手中购买了阿拉斯加——但没有进一步推进 比太平洋沿岸。
美国人没有管理世界，而是逃离了它。 他们坚持乔治·华盛顿总统在其 1796 年的告别演说中提出的治国之道：“我们对外国的重要行为准则是扩大我们的商业关系，尽可能减少与他们的政治联系。 ”
尤其是在南北战争之后，这种对国内发展的关注帮助美国经济起飞，这得益于对运河、港口、公路和铁路的投资，而不是对战舰和殖民地的投资。 从 1865 年到 1898 年，煤炭产量增加了 800%，铁路里程增加了 567%。 到 1880 年代中期，美国已经超过英国成为世界领先的制成品和钢铁生产国。 美国海军有时会捍卫美国商人的利益，但与此同时，无论哪个政党执政，这个国家都在遏制地缘政治野心。 这是美国崛起的故事。
当然，孤立主义也有阴暗面。 1930年代，美国四处逃窜，法西斯主义和军国主义横扫欧亚，后果不堪设想。 如果国家重蹈覆辙，轻率地、本能地逃离当今世界，将是一个严重的错误。 但美国人已经过度纠正了他们在两次世界大战期间的消极态度，转向了相反的极端，造成了长期的过度扩张，并增加了突然和破坏性地从战略过度中撤退的风险。
美国人需要重拾建国者留下的经久不衰的智慧，即远离国外的麻烦往往是最好的治国之道。 重新发现孤立主义的战略优势——同时牢记其缺点——为美国人提供了在做太多和做得太少之间找到中间立场的最大希望。
1941 年 12 月 7 日，即日本袭击珍珠港的那一天，孤立主义成为一个肮脏的词。 并且有充分的理由。 由于未能对抗轴心国，美国在 1930 年代追求一种自欺欺人且弄巧成拙的战略豁免权，当之无愧地给孤立主义留下了今天的坏名声。 正如参议员阿瑟·范登堡 (Arthur Vandenberg) 以前是坚定的孤立主义者，他在日军空袭后的日记中写道，“那一天结束了任何现实主义者的孤立主义。”
许多外交政策机构的成员继续使用孤立主义作为对付任何胆敢质疑美国作为全球监护人角色的人的绰号。 外交官和学者们都嘲笑唐纳德特朗普总统是非美国人，因为他质疑美国在海外结盟的价值，并竭力从中东撤军。 去年 10 月，众议院以 354 票赞成、60 票反对的票数通过了一项谴责特朗普从叙利亚北部撤军决定的决议，这是一个罕见的两党礼让时刻，对特朗普进行了严厉的谴责。 已故参议员约翰麦凯恩称参议员兰德保罗和其他少数敢于呼吁美国摆脱外国承诺的政客为“怪鸟”。
对孤立主义战略逻辑的笼统谴责不仅扭曲了美国历史，而且对美国人造成了严重伤害。 这个国家不能也不应该回到 19 世纪的半球孤立状态。 经济相互依存和全球化威胁——例如洲际导弹、跨国恐怖主义、流行病、气候变化和网络攻击——意味着毗邻的海洋不再像过去那样受到保护。 但是，这个国家迫切需要在全面了解历史教训的指导下，就如何负责任地缩减其对外纠葛展开坦诚和公开的对话。
美国无休止的战争并没有得到选民的欢迎。 巴拉克奥巴马总统明白这一点，试图通过呼吁“关注国内的国家建设”来让美军走出中东泥潭并竞选连任。 该地区不会放手； 奥巴马最终将美军留在阿富汗以帮助平息混乱，并派遣军队前往伊拉克和叙利亚打击伊斯兰国。 （从 2014 年到 2017 年，我在奥巴马政府的国家安全委员会任职。）
特朗普随后继承了公众对国家在中东的努力非常厌倦。 事实上，2019 年的一项民意调查显示，多数美国人希望该国在世界上的作用缩小或完全消失。 大流行只是加强了这种向内的转变。 2020 年 7 月的一项调查显示，四分之三的公众希望美军撤离阿富汗和伊拉克。 难怪特朗普一直忙于从该地区撤出美军。 “我竞选是为了让我们的士兵回家，这就是我正在做的事情，”他在下令美国从叙利亚北部撤军时解释说。
向内转向的势头在两党都有，而不仅仅是特朗普的支持者。 2020 年民主党纲领呼吁“翻开过去 20 年在中东的大规模军事部署和无休止战争的一页”，并声称美国“不应将政权更迭强加于其他国家”。 自由事业的慷慨捐助者乔治·索罗斯和保守派慈善家查尔斯·科赫最近联手建立了一个新的华盛顿智囊团——昆西责任治国研究所——“促进使美国外交政策远离无休止战争的想法。 ” 他们以前国务卿兼总统约翰·昆西·亚当斯 (John Quincy Adams) 的名字命名该研究所，他在 1821 年宣布美国“不走出国门，去寻找要摧毁的怪物”。 就连外交精英中的少数持牌成员也开始背离国际主义共识，甚至呼吁美国从欧亚和中东撤军。 外交政策机构的喉舌《外交事务》(Foreign Affairs) 的封面最近刊登了标题“美国回家吧？”
美国领导人普遍未能应对这些政治压力，这有可能将危险的过度扩张变成更危险的扩张不足——这正是 1930 年代发生的事情。 事实上，美国目前的困境令人担忧地模仿了促使该国在两次世界大战之间迷惑性撤退的情况。 公众感觉到战略过度扩张，就像国家在美西战争中获得海外财产并随后不久加入第一次世界大战之后所做的那样。 在 COVID-19 的传播造成的巨大经济困难中，美国人希望在阿肯色州而不是阿富汗进行投资，这与上世纪 30 年代发生的内向转变相呼应。 保护主义和单边主义再次盛行，推动了同样单打独斗的美国外交，这在两次世界大战之间的民主国家之间造成了团结的混乱。 反自由主义和民族主义正在欧洲和亚洲蔓延，就像美国在二战前背弃世界时一样。
在这些政治条件下，美国的撤退即将到来。 尚不清楚的是，裁员是有意为之还是默认发生。 一个有计划的、有节奏的、有衡量的设计缺陷是更可取的。 这一结果将需要恢复孤立主义，并就不纠缠的好处和代价进行仔细和深思熟虑的全国辩论。 不进行这场辩论可能会导致危险的撤退，而不是按顺序进行的明智的撤退。
美国人度过了他们最初的几十年，使自己摆脱了英国、法国和西班牙的帝国设计。 在 1812 年战争中与英国对峙之后，他们在很大程度上取得了成功，并且在 19 世纪余下的时间里，他们将势力范围扩大到整个欧洲大陆。 与此同时，欧洲列强纷纷撤出西半球。
随着联盟的扩大，美国人也经常考虑是否要占领北美以外的领土。 海地、圣多明各、古巴、维尔京群岛、拉丁美洲的各个部分和夏威夷都是潜在的收购目标。 尽管如此，在美西战争之前，行政部门、国会或两者的结合还是一个接一个地否决了这样的提案。
长期以来，美国人回避大国纠缠和海外领土，因为他们认为，要保持他们在政治和经济自由方面的独特实验，就需要远离国家海岸以外的危险和腐败影响。 保护这个国家的特殊性需要地缘政治的超然，而不是今天等同于美国例外论的全球野心。
开国元勋们乐于接受孤立主义，这在很大程度上取决于国家的地理优势——东部和西部毗邻海洋，北部和南部毗邻相对友好的邻国。 正如华盛顿在他的告别演说中所肯定的那样，该国享有“超然而遥远的境地……为什么要放弃这种特殊情况的优势呢？ 为什么要放弃自己的立场而站在外国的立场上呢？ 保护性海洋将阻止掠夺性力量进入，而非洲大陆的资源和不断增长的人口将创造财富。 美国经济从一开始就依赖于国际贸易，这凸显了避免有可能中断海运贸易的外国纠纷的必要性。 “与所有国家建立和平、贸易和真诚的友谊，不与任何国家结成联盟，”托马斯·杰斐逊坚持道。 值得注意的是，尽管开国元勋试图扩大对外贸易，但他们几乎不是自由贸易者，这让该国走上了一条长期依赖关税来增加收入和保护制造业的道路。
单边主义和随之而来的行动自由强化了这些孤立主义倾向。 从英国独立意味着：国家获得了对外交关系行为做出自己决定的能力。 正如华盛顿在 1796 年写给亚历山大·汉密尔顿的信中所说，“如果外国势力告诉我们……我们应该做什么，不应该做什么，我们还有待寻求的独立。” 华盛顿的孤立主义和单边主义本能强烈到足以产生赤裸裸的不忠行为，促使他违背美国在 1778 年为扭转革命战争的局势而勉强达成的与法国的防务协定。 当法国和英国在 1793 年再次开战时，华盛顿拒绝援助该国的盟友，而是宣布中立并背弃这个使美国能够建立独立的国家。 尽管开国元勋普遍同意该国不应代表法国参战，但并非所有人都对华盛顿的中立宣言感到满意。 詹姆斯·麦迪逊 (James Madison) 称此举为“可耻的背信弃义”，杰斐逊很快辞去国务卿一职，部分原因是法国受到的待遇不佳。 直到第二次世界大战之后——150 多年后——美国才再次缔结正式联盟。
孤立主义不仅是为了推进美国的物质野心，也是为了推进其作为“被选中的”国家的救世主使命。 正如赫尔曼·梅尔维尔 (Herman Melville) 简洁地抓住了这个国家对例外主义呼唤的感觉，“我们美国人是特殊的、被选中的人——我们时代的以色列； 我们承载着世界自由的方舟。” 为了履行其作为救世主国家的角色，美国不得不放弃旧世界的地缘政治，追求一种以法律和理性为指导的治国之道，而不是帝国主义的野心。 许多虔诚的新英格兰人走得更远，拥护和平主义。 美国和平协会 (American Peace Society) 成立于 1828 年，和平主义者的声音将有助于孤立主义在未来几十年内几乎锁定该国的政治。
外国野心不仅有可能迫使美国按照现实政治规则行事，而且还需要常备军和过于强大的联邦当局，从而危及国内自由。 华盛顿在他的告别演说中警告说，“杂草丛生的军事机构”“特别敌视共和自由”。 其他创始人担心，卷入大国政治会从生产性投资中吸走资金并导致高税收，这两者都会对经济增长和繁荣造成压力，并危及国家的商业崛起。
孤立主义还旨在防止美国以白人为主的人口被稀释，从而进一步加强其所选择地位的种族成分。 用公理会牧师贺拉斯·布什内尔 (Horace Bushnell) 的话来说，“在世界上所有的居民中……一个精选的血统，撒克逊人，从这个英国家庭中，最高贵的血统被选为我们国家的人民。” 美国对待黑人、美洲原住民和拉丁美洲居民的方式与其建国宣言“人人生而平等”几乎不一致。 但是例外论者只把这个国家的特殊性归因于它的白人移民。 其他人被认为不适合成为美国实验的正式成员。 美国将随着白人定居者的推进而向西扩张，但天定命运不得不止步于水边，以免该国最终将非白人纳入政治体。
尽管杰斐逊在 1801 年设想这个年轻的国家最终会横跨整个大陆，但他警告不要允许“在那个表面上留下污点或混合物”。 1826 年，当约翰·昆西·亚当斯总统想派遣一个小型美国代表团参加在巴拿马举行的外交聚会时，国会发起了反对，这在很大程度上是出于偏执。 代表约翰·伦道夫 (John Randolph) 对美国代表“在非洲本土人、他们的美国后裔、混血儿、印第安人和混血儿旁边工作，在如此杂乱无章的混合体中没有任何冒犯或丑闻”的想法感到反感。 在国会拒绝尤利西斯·格兰特总统于 1870 年吞并圣多明各的努力时，众议员约翰·富兰克林·法恩斯沃思对将“来自西非各地的印第安人、野蛮人和黑人”融入国家人口的前景感到畏缩。 这种种族主义态度一再导致将联盟扩大到加勒比海、拉丁美洲和太平洋地区的提议落空。 从 1880 年代开始，对稀释国家公民的恐惧导致对移民的限制收紧。
美国可能相信它注定要拯救世界，但它必须通过榜样的力量来做到这一点，而不是通过冒险的十字军东征。 它一次又一次地错过了向北美以外地区扩张的机会，甚至拒绝暂时干预国外以支持共和事业，包括在自己的后院。 1823 年，当詹姆斯·门罗 (James Monroe) 总统警告欧洲人不要在西半球建立新的帝国野心时，他只是空谈而已。 直到19世纪末，美国才准备支持门罗主义的西半球霸权主张。
开国元勋发起国家的孤立主义路线成功地实现了其目标。 到 19 世纪末，美国已经建立了一个稳定繁荣的共和国，以白人为主的定居者居住并驯服了从一个海岸到另一个海岸的广阔土地。 欧洲列强尚未完全撤离周边地区，但它们不再威胁已经确立了西半球霸主地位的美国。 除了南北战争期间，美国陆军和海军仍然规模小且便宜； 到 1880 年代末，该国的经济体是世界上最大的经济体之一，但海军排名第 17 位。 美国在崛起的同时小心翼翼地避免卷入可能损害其国内外安全、繁荣和自由的联盟或大国竞争。
事实上，华盛顿不纠缠的“伟大规则”非常奏效，以至于美国人至少暂时发现了外国野心的诱惑。 在 1890 年代，美国建立了一支战舰舰队，以响应越来越多的国家要求其繁荣与相称的地缘政治影响力相匹配的呼声。 历史学家弗雷德里克·杰克逊·特纳 (Frederick Jackson Turner) 推广了关闭西部边境会危及美国实验的观点，他认为“边境个人主义从一开始就促进了民主”。 西奥多·罗斯福 (Theodore Roosevelt) 和海军上将阿尔弗雷德·塞耶·马汉 (Alfred Thayer Mahan) 等人与他一起坚持认为，只有将昭昭天命带到国外，美国才能保持其政治和经济活力。
但是美国人对涉外事务的热情并不容易。 这将需要几次错误的开始，再过四个十年才能坚持下去。 当扩张主义者第一次提出他们的理由时，孤立主义者拼命反击。 1890 年本杰明·哈里森总统首次向国会提议国家获得一支战舰舰队，随之而来的是一场抗议风暴。 参议员约翰麦克弗森辩称，这艘战舰是“这个国家根本没有用的一类舰船”，并称建造计划是“我见过的最疯狂的奢侈计划”。 参议员约瑟夫·多尔夫坚称，“一支伟大的海军更有可能带领我们与外国开战，而不是维护和平。” 但最终，地缘政治野心的诱惑占了上风。 1890 年的海军法案批准了美国的前三艘战列舰，随后还有更多。 孤立主义的共识正在破裂。
1898 年，美国开始使用其新的战争工具，不仅放弃了非纠缠，而且拥抱了它早已宣誓放弃的帝国主义。 为回应西班牙对古巴叛乱分子的血腥镇压，总统威廉·麦金莱声称他的行为是“为了人类的事业”，发动了一场将西班牙驱逐出美国邻国的战争。 美国海军在加勒比海和太平洋轻而易举地击败了西班牙舰队，并继续夺取了对古巴、波多黎各、夏威夷、菲律宾、关岛、萨摩亚和威克群岛的控制权。 麦金莱称吞并夏威夷是“天定的命运”，并将对菲律宾的军事占领描述为“神圣的事业”，并解释说“我们别无他法，只能把他们全部拿下，教育菲律宾人，提升 并使他们文明化和基督教化。”
许多美国人不买账——尤其是在菲律宾爆发了血腥的叛乱，夺走了大约 4,000 名美国士兵和数十万菲律宾人的生命之后。 美国人以为他们是在接受例外主义的召唤而上路，但他们已成为另一个帝国霸主。 1898 年夏天成立的反帝国主义联盟帮助策划了一场强大的政治反弹。 美国保住了新的海外领地，在南邻维持着胁迫的方式，继续建造战列舰。 但它逐渐被半球孤立所吸引，恢复了主要关注商业而非地缘政治野心的外交政策——在威廉·霍华德·塔夫脱担任总统期间被称为美元外交。
随着国家对麦金莱的现实主义国际主义感到厌恶，伍德罗威尔逊转向理想主义品牌的治国方略，这将与美国的例外主义使命保持一致而不是矛盾。 他最初避开第一次世界大战，称这是一场“我们与它无关”的冲突，并将美国的角色限制在“公正的调解”。 1917 年德国潜艇开始击沉美国船只后，威尔逊改变了路线，要求国会批准该国参战。 尽管如此，他继续宣誓放弃现实主义的野心：“我们没有自私的目的可以服务。 我们不渴望征服，不渴望统治……我们的动机不是报复，也不是国家实力的胜利主张，而只是捍卫权利和人权。” 德国战败后，威尔逊试图引导美国加入国际联盟，这是他建立和平、民主的战后秩序的心血结晶。 当他走遍全国为他提议的国家协调中设想的共同防御义务建立政治支持时，他预见到“美国希望和历史的顶点”，并断言“美国拥有实现她的命运和拯救美国的无限特权 世界。”
但威尔逊在意识形态和政治上都过火了。 他崇高的理想主义与壕沟战的现实不符，参议院最终拒绝批准该国加入国际联盟，宁愿保持单边主义的自主权。 威尔逊不会放弃，将 1920 年的总统选举设想为对他和他的民主党同僚提出的新国际主义的全国公投。 共和党候选人、参议员沃伦·哈丁上钩了，他在接受提名时宣称，“我们支持[乔治]华盛顿的政策，并且……反对总统提出的国际主义和与外国的永久联盟。” 他在美国历史上最不平衡的选举之一中击败了民主党候选人詹姆斯考克斯，为两次世界大战期间的美国优先孤立主义扫清了道路。
直到日本偷袭珍珠港，美国人才终于克服了对外国纠缠的厌恶。 在国家参加第二次世界大战后，富兰克林罗斯福总统有效地融合了麦金莱的现实主义和威尔逊的理想主义，催生了自由国际主义。 通过将国家的优势力量融入国际伙伴关系并成为民主的斗士而不仅仅是榜样，美国能够同时确保其利益并传播其价值观。 保护和促进民主和资本主义将立即确保国家安全并推进其救赎使命。 第二次世界大战结束时，华盛顿监督了多边机构、军事协定和设施以及开放市场的全球网络的建设，开启了美式和平时代。
罗斯福塑造了美国在世界上的参与品牌，这种参与在政治上是可持续的，因为它建立在现实主义和理想主义的基础之上。 美国人喜欢他们从这种利益和理想的结合中得到的东西，为苏联的物质和意识形态遏制奠定了基础。 根据 1950 年指导美国冷战战略的文件 NSC-68，美国面临的主要威胁来自不可避免的权力现实：“克里姆林宫控制地区的任何实质性进一步扩张都会增加可能性 无法组建足以对抗克里姆林宫的更强大的联盟。 正是在这种背景下，这个共和国及其公民在他们的力量优势中处于最深的危险之中。” 但这还不足以“检查克里姆林宫的设计”。 根据 NSC-68，美国还有责任“以符合自由和民主原则的方式实现秩序和正义”。
这种现实主义和理想主义的结合得到了两党的稳定支持，确保了自由国际主义在冷战之后长期存在。 苏联的解体和国家日益加剧的两极分化确实削弱了其国内基础，但共和党人和民主党人都继续支持美国在海外的积极参与——尤其是在 9 月 11 日的袭击之后。 在孤立主义长期存在之后，自由国际主义从 1941 年一直持续到巴拉克奥巴马总统任期。
“从今天开始，”唐纳德特朗普在 2017 年的就职演说中宣称，“一个新的愿景将统治我们的土地。 从今天起，将只有美国优先。 美国优先。” 在他上任的第一分钟，特朗普将自由国际主义换成了两次世界大战期间的孤立主义口头禅。 从那以后，他一直在吹捧不纠缠、不干涉和单边主义的优点。
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Isolationism: A History of America's Efforts to Shield Itself from the World.
Charles A. Kupchan: The decline of the West
Juliette Kayyem: Trump turns the U.S. into an outcast
Thomas Wright: The return to great-power rivalry was inevitable
Read: How the Great War shaped the world
America Fails the Civilization Test
Isolationism Is Not a Dirty Word
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/09/virtue-isolationism/616499/
Americans have lost touch with a crucial strain of their foreign-policy tradition.
Isolationism once cleared the way for America's ascent, making the country prosperous, powerful, and secure. Today, however, the Founders’ admonition against entangling alliances has fallen into disrepute, and the word isolationist itself has become an insult. In the absence of constraints on the nation’s ambition abroad, American grand strategy has fallen prey to overstretch and grown politically insolvent. The nation now confronts a seemingly unlimited array of foreign entanglements, two decades of errant war in the Middle East, and a pandemic that is causing an economic debacle of a sort not experienced since the Great Depression. The United States needs to rediscover the history of isolationism and apply its lessons, shrinking its footprint abroad and bringing its foreign commitments back into line with its means and purposes.
Americans have long deemed their democratic experiment to be exceptional, obliging them to spread liberty to all quarters of the globe. Even before the country’s birth, the passionate advocate of independence from Great Britain, Thomas Paine, counseled American colonists that “we have it in our power, to begin the world all over again.” But for much of the nation’s history, most Americans envisaged changing the world only by the power of their example; they wanted nothing to do with extending their strategic reach beyond North America. From the nation’s founding until the Spanish-American War of 1898, Americans restricted the scope of their overseas ambition to international commerce. They steadfastly expanded across North America—trampling on Native Americans, launching several failed attempts to grab hold of Canada, seizing a sizable chunk of Mexico in a war that ran from 1846 to 1848, and purchasing Alaska from Russia in 1867—but pushed no farther than the Pacific coast.
Instead of running the world, Americans ran away from it. They stuck to the brand of statecraft laid out by President George Washington in his 1796 farewell address: “The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible.”
Especially after the Civil War, this focus on domestic development helped the American economy take off, boosted by investment in canals, ports, roads, and railways—rather than battleships and colonies. Between 1865 and 1898, coal production rose by 800 percent and railway track mileage by 567 percent. By the middle of the 1880s, the United States had surpassed Britain as the world’s leading producer of manufactured goods and steel. The U.S. Navy on occasion defended the interests of U.S. traders, but all the while, the country, regardless of which party was in power, kept geopolitical ambition at bay. This is the story of America’s rise to greatness.
Isolationism, of course, has also had a dark side. During the 1930s, the United States ran for cover while fascism and militarism swept across Europe and Asia—with disastrous results. It would be a grave error for the country to repeat that mistake and rashly and instinctively flee from today’s world. But Americans have overcorrected for their interwar-era passivity and swung to the opposite extreme, producing chronic overreach and raising the risk of an abrupt and disruptive retreat from strategic excess.
Americans need to reclaim the enduring wisdom laid down by the Founders that standing apart from trouble abroad often constitutes the best statecraft. Rediscovering isolationism’s strategic advantages—while at the same time keeping in mind its downsides—offers Americans the best hope of finding the middle ground between doing too much and doing too little.
Isolationism became a dirty word on December 7, 1941, the day Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. And with good reason. By failing to stand up to the Axis powers, the United States during the 1930s pursued a deluded and self-defeating quest for strategic immunity, deservedly giving isolationism the bad name it has today. As Senator Arthur Vandenberg, formerly a staunch isolationist, wrote in his diary after the Japanese raid, “That day ended isolationism for any realist.”
Many members of the foreign-policy establishment continue to deploy isolationist as an epithet against anyone who dares question America’s role as global guardian. Diplomats and scholars alike have pilloried President Donald Trump as un-American for questioning the value of the nation’s alliances abroad and straining to withdraw U.S. troops from the Middle East. The House last October—in a rare moment of bipartisan comity—dealt Trump a stinging rebuke, passing by a vote of 354–60 a resolution condemning his decision to pull U.S. troops from northern Syria. The late Senator John McCain dubbed Senator Rand Paul and the few other politicians daring to call on the United States to shed foreign commitments “wacko birds.”
Blanket condemnation of the strategic logic of isolationism not only distorts U.S. history but also does Americans a grave disservice. The country cannot and should not return to the hemispheric isolation of the 19th century. Economic interdependence and globalized threats—such as intercontinental missiles, transnational terrorism, pandemics, climate change, and cyberattacks—mean that adjoining oceans are less protective than they used to be. But the nation desperately needs a frank and open conversation, guided by a full account of the lessons of history, about how to responsibly scale back its foreign entanglements.
America’s endless wars have not gone over well with the electorate. President Barack Obama understood that, trying to get U.S. troops out of Middle East quagmires and running for reelection by calling for a “focus on nation-building here at home.” The region would not let go; Obama ended up keeping U.S. forces in Afghanistan to help quell the chaos and sent troops to Iraq and Syria to fight the Islamic State. (From 2014 to 2017, I served on the National Security Council in the Obama White House.)
Trump then inherited a public more than weary of the nation’s exertions in the Middle East. Indeed, a poll from 2019 revealed that a plurality of Americans want the country’s role in the world to shrink or end altogether. The pandemic has only strengthened this inward turn. A survey from July 2020 indicated that three-quarters of the public wants U.S. troops to leave Afghanistan and Iraq. No wonder Trump has been busy extracting U.S. forces from the region. “I campaigned on bringing our soldiers back home, and that’s what I am doing,” he explained as he ordered the U.S. withdrawal from Syria’s north.
The inward turn is gaining momentum on both sides of the aisle, not just among Trump’s base. The 2020 Democratic platform calls for “turning the page on two decades of large-scale military deployments and open-ended wars in the Middle East” and asserts that the United States “should not impose regime change on other countries.” George Soros, a generous benefactor of liberal causes, and Charles Koch, a conservative philanthropist, recently teamed up to establish a new Washington think tank—the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft—which “promotes ideas that move U.S. foreign policy away from endless war.” They named the institute after former Secretary of State and President John Quincy Adams, who in 1821 declared that the United States “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.” Even a handful of card-carrying members of the foreign-policy elite have begun to defect from the internationalist consensus, going so far as to call for U.S. withdrawal from Europe and Asia as well as the Middle East. The cover of Foreign Affairs, the mouthpiece of the foreign-policy establishment, was recently emblazoned with the headline “Come Home, America?”
The general failure of U.S. leaders to respond to these political pressures risks turning dangerous overreach into even more dangerous underreach—exactly what happened in the 1930s. Indeed, America’s current predicament worryingly mimics the conditions that prompted the nation’s deluded interwar retreat. The public senses strategic overstretch, just as it did after the nation’s acquisition of overseas possessions in the Spanish-American War and its entry into World War I soon thereafter. Amid the extraordinary economic hardship spawned by the spread of COVID-19, Americans want investment in Arkansas, not in Afghanistan, paralleling the inward turn that occurred during the ’30s. Protectionism and unilateralism are again in vogue, pushing forward the same go-it-alone U.S. diplomacy that made a hash of solidarity among the interwar democracies. And illiberalism and nationalism are on the march in Europe and Asia, just as they were when the United States turned its back on the world prior to its entry into World War II.
Under these political conditions, an American pullback is coming. What remains unclear is whether retrenchment occurs by design or by default. A planned, paced, and measured drawback by design is far preferable. That outcome will require the rehabilitation of isolationism and a careful and thoughtful national debate over the benefits as well as the costs of nonentanglement. Failure to have that debate risks producing a perilous retreat rather than the judicious pullback that is in order.
As the union enlarged, Americans also regularly considered whether to take hold of territory beyond North America. Haiti, Santo Domingo, Cuba, the Virgin Islands, various pieces of Latin America, and Hawaii were among the targets of potential acquisition. Nonetheless, up until the Spanish-American War, the executive branch, Congress, or a combination of the two swatted down one such proposal after another.
Americans long shunned great-power entanglement and overseas territories because they believed that preserving their unique experiment in political and economic liberty required standing aloof from the perils and corrupting influences that lay beyond the nation’s shores. Guarding the country’s exceptional character required geopolitical detachment, not the global ambition that is today equated with American exceptionalism.
The Founders’ ready embrace of isolationism rested in no small part on the nation’s geographic good fortune—flanking oceans to its east and west and relatively benign neighbors to its north and south. As Washington affirmed in his farewell address, the country enjoyed a “detached and distant situation … Why forgo the advantages of so peculiar a situation? Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground?” Protective oceans would keep predatory powers at bay while the continent’s resources and growing population would generate wealth. The American economy was dependent on international trade from the get-go, underscoring the need to avoid foreign entanglements that risked interrupting seaborne commerce. “Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none,” insisted Thomas Jefferson. Notably, even though the Founders sought to expand foreign commerce, they were hardly free traders, setting the country on a course that long relied on tariffs to raise revenue and protect manufacturing.
Unilateralism and the freedom of action that would accompany it reinforced these isolationist inclinations. Independence from Britain meant just that: The nation gained the ability to make its own decisions about the conduct of foreign relations. As Washington wrote to Alexander Hamilton in 1796, “If we are to be told by a foreign Power … what we shall do, and what we shall not do, we have Independence yet to seek.” Washington’s isolationist and unilateralist instincts were strong enough to produce a bald act of infidelity, prompting him to renege on the defense pact with France that the U.S. had reluctantly concluded in 1778 to turn the tide in the Revolutionary War. When France and Britain again went to war in 1793, Washington refused to come to the aid of the nation’s ally, instead proclaiming neutrality and turning his back on the country that had enabled the United States to establish independence. Although the Founders were in general agreement that the country should not enter the war on France’s behalf, not all of them were pleased with Washington’s declaration of neutrality. James Madison called the move “ignominious perfidy,” and Jefferson soon resigned as secretary of state in part due to the shabby treatment of France. It would not be until after World War II—more than 150 years later—that the United States would again conclude a formal alliance.
Isolationism was to further not only America’s material ambitions but also its messianic mission as the “chosen” nation. As Herman Melville succinctly captured the nation’s sense of its exceptionalist calling, “We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people—the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world.” To fulfill its role as redeemer nation, America had to renounce the geopolitics of the Old World, pursuing a brand of statecraft guided by law and reason instead of imperial ambition. A good many religious New Englanders went further and embraced pacifism. The American Peace Society was founded in 1828, and pacifist voices would contribute to isolationism’s virtual lock on the country’s politics for decades to come.
Foreign ambition risked not only forcing the United States to play by the rules of realpolitik but also imperiling domestic liberty by requiring standing armies and too-powerful federal authorities. Washington warned in his farewell address that “overgrown military establishments” are “particularly hostile to republican liberty.” Other Founders feared that entanglement in great-power politics would siphon funds from productive investment and lead to high taxation, both of which would weigh on growth and prosperity and imperil the nation’s commercial ascent.
Isolationism was also intended to prevent the dilution of America’s predominantly white population, thereby furthering the racial component of its chosen status. In the words of Horace Bushnell, a Congregational minister, “out of all the inhabitants of the world … a select stock, the Saxon, and out of this the British family, the noblest of stock was chosen to people our country.” America’s treatment of its Black, Native American, and Latin American inhabitants was hardly consistent with its founding claim that “all men are created equal.” But the exceptionalist narrative attributed the nation’s special character only to its white immigrants; others were deemed unfit to be full members of the American experiment. The United States was to expand westward in step with the advance of its white settlers, but Manifest Destiny had to stop at water’s edge lest the country end up incorporating nonwhites into the body politic.
Indeed, Washington’s “great rule” of nonentanglement worked so well that Americans, at least temporarily, discovered the allure of foreign ambition. Over the course of the 1890s, the United States built a battleship fleet, responding to growing calls for the nation to match its prosperity with proportionate geopolitical heft. The historian Frederick Jackson Turner popularized the notion that the closing of the western frontier would jeopardize the American experiment, arguing that “frontier individualism has from the beginning promoted democracy.” He was joined by the likes of Theodore Roosevelt and Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan in insisting that only by taking Manifest Destiny abroad could the United States maintain its political and economic dynamism.
In 1898, the United States put its new tools of warfare to use, not only abandoning nonentanglement but also embracing the imperial drive it had long sworn off. In response to a blood-soaked Spanish crackdown on insurgents in Cuba, President William McKinley, claiming that he was acting “in the cause of humanity,” launched a war to expel Spain from America’s neighborhood. The U.S. Navy handily defeated the Spanish fleet in the Caribbean and Pacific, and proceeded to wrest control of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, the Philippines, Guam, Samoa, and the Wake Islands. McKinley called the annexation of Hawaii “manifest destiny” and portrayed the military occupation of the Philippines as a “holy cause,” explaining that “there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them.”
But Wilson overreached both ideologically and politically. His lofty idealism did not wear well against the realities of trench warfare, and the Senate ultimately refused to approve the nation’s entry into the League of Nations, preferring to preserve the autonomy of unilateralism. Wilson would not give up, envisaging the presidential election of 1920 as a national referendum on the new internationalism that he and his fellow Democrats had put on offer. The Republican candidate, Senator Warren Harding, took the bait, proclaiming as he accepted the nomination, “We stand for the policies of [George] Washington and … against the internationalism and the permanent alliance with foreign nations proposed by the President.” He prevailed against the Democratic nominee, James Cox, in one of the most lopsided elections in American history, clearing the way for the America First isolationism of the interwar era.
Not until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor did Americans finally overcome their aversion to foreign entanglement. After the nation’s entry into World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt effectively melded McKinley’s realism and Wilson’s idealism, giving birth to liberal internationalism. By embedding the nation’s preponderant power in international partnerships and becoming a crusader for democracy and not just an exemplar, the United States was able to simultaneously secure its interests and spread its values. The protection and promotion of democracy and capitalism would at once keep the nation safe and advance its redemptive mission. At the close of World War II, Washington oversaw the construction of the global network of multilateral institutions, military pacts and installations, and open markets that launched the era of Pax Americana.
This synthesis of realism and idealism enjoyed steady bipartisan support, ensuring that liberal internationalism long outlasted the Cold War. The demise of the Soviet Union and the nation’s growing polarization did weaken its domestic foundations, but Republicans and Democrats alike continued to support robust U.S. engagement abroad—especially following the September 11 attacks. After isolationism’s long run, liberal internationalism endured from 1941 through the presidency of Barack Obama.
Much of the foreign-policy establishment has been up in arms as a result, dismissing Trump’s statecraft as the work of a know-nothing who has orchestrated only a temporary, even if destructive, detour from the nation’s global calling. Conventional wisdom holds that America will return to the liberal internationalist fold as soon as he leaves office.
But this interpretation misses the mark; the nation’s current predicament may well lend itself to the stubborn isolationism of the interwar years as opposed to the zealous internationalism that came after World War II. As after World War I, Americans are again confronted with a toxic combination of strategic overreach and economic crisis. The nation’s pullback from the world during the 1920s and ’30s offers sobering lessons for today. Indeed, Americans need to keep that history close at hand in order to avoid repeating the costly mistakes of that era.
After they rejected both McKinley’s realist internationalism and Wilson’s idealist alternative, Americans clamored to return to the isolationism that had come before. During the 1920s, the country reclaimed dollar diplomacy, seeking economic influence outside the Western Hemisphere but shunning strategic responsibility. Anti-immigrant sentiment surged; Congress passed legislation in 1924 that not only excluded Asians but also decreased by 90 percent the inflow of Jews and Catholics from eastern and southern Europe. The Great Depression then prompted a complete economic and geopolitical withdrawal. Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt went it alone on trade and finance, ending solidarity with fellow democracies and tanking the global economy. Some 1 million persons of Mexican heritage—many of them U.S. citizens—were deported to Mexico.
Roosevelt is remembered as a great wartime leader and the president who finally forged a sustainable brand of U.S. internationalism, but he was anchored in the isolationist mainstream throughout the 1930s. As fascism and militarism began to sweep Europe and Asia, he oversaw the tightening of neutrality laws that effectively severed commercial contact with belligerents in an attempt to cordon off the nation from any risk of war. Even after he began to worry, in early 1939, that the potential fall of Britain and Nazi control of Europe would enable the Axis powers to threaten the Western Hemisphere, he moved cautiously and incrementally. Following the German invasion of Poland in September of that year, FDR convinced Congress to permit the victims of Nazi aggression to purchase American weaponry, but only if they paid cash and transported the materiel on their own ships. Americans were not permitted to put themselves in harm’s way, ensuring no repeat of the turn of events that had drawn the country into World War I. German and Japanese expansion continued apace.
In 1941, FDR stepped up assistance to countries resisting the Axis powers, but his exertions were in the service of defending hemispheric isolation, not joining the fight against fascism. Confronted with the America First Committee, which helped convince some 80 percent of the public that the country should stay out of the war, Roosevelt rallied support for his “aid-short-of-war” policy by assuring Americans that sending armaments was the best way to keep foreign trouble at bay. As he put it in one of his signature fireside chats, Americans had to send arms to those fighting the Axis “so that we and our children will be saved the agony and suffering of war which others have had to endure … There is no demand for sending an American Expeditionary Force outside our own borders. There is no intention by any member of your Government to send such a force. You can, therefore, nail any talk about sending armies to Europe as deliberate untruth.”
FDR kept his word until he had no choice but to join the fight; ultimately, Japan brought the war to the United States. Some 80 million people, including more than 400,000 Americans, perished in World War II, the deadliest war in history. If the 19th century was isolationism’s finest hour, the interwar era was surely its darkest and most deluded.
The conditions that led to this misguided run for cover are making a comeback. Even though the United States prevailed in the Spanish-American War and World War I, Americans recoiled from both conflicts, preferring to return to the strategic detachment that had preceded them. Today, Americans are acutely aware of the nation’s overreach in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. These conflicts have killed or wounded tens of thousands of U.S. personnel, cost some $6 trillion, and left behind little good. Flanking oceans do not provide the natural security that they once did. But the United States is still far from Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, and the prospect of immunity from the dangers of foreign entanglement still has an intrinsic appeal. Trump’s questioning of the value of alliances and his pledges to end the era in which “our politicians seem more interested in defending the borders of foreign countries than their own” have found ready audiences. The nation’s enviable location will always sustain the isolationist temptation.
Most Americans still believe in the nation’s exceptionalist calling but have come to regret playing the role of crusader rather than exemplar. The end of the Cold War was supposed to have cleared the way for the “end of history” and the completion of America’s messianic mission. American forays into the Middle East were to have advanced the cause; President George W. Bush pledged that a “liberated Iraq can show the power of freedom to transform that vital region.”
Nothing of the sort has happened. Illiberalism is on the march worldwide, backed by a rising China and a pugnacious Russia. The recent targets of U.S. interventions are anything but stable democracies. The public now puts “promoting democratic values and institutions around the world” near the bottom of its list of foreign priorities. Trump has pledged that the country is “getting out of the nation-building business” and that “we do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone.” As during the 1930s, the United States is seeking to cordon itself off from, rather than transform, a world that is not breaking its way.
In the minds of many Americans, though, the economic costs of foreign entanglement have outstripped even the negative impact on liberty. Trump has explicitly linked globalization to the plight of American workers. To redress what he calls “this American carnage,” Trump has pursued a “nationalist” rather than “globalist” agenda, bringing back tariffs to protect the manufacturing sector and keeping out foreign workers. Bad times for the working class have, in the meantime, revived pacifist inclinations among progressives. During the Democratic presidential primaries, Bernie Sanders insisted that “it is time to invest in the working families of this country and not a bloated military budget.” For Elizabeth Warren, writing in The Atlantic, advancing national security means “promoting prosperity and lessening inequality” instead of launching “yet another unnecessary, costly, and counterproductive war.”
Finally, racism and anti-immigrant sentiment are once again feeding the nation’s isolationist impulses. Trump’s efforts to build a wall on the border with Mexico and radically cut back on immigration have been about not only protecting jobs but also making America white again. Amid the Black Lives Matter protests, he has only doubled down, touting himself as the guardian of the nation’s “great heritage” against “those who want us to be ashamed of who we are.” Trump’s America First agenda has deftly melded identity politics with economic protectionism and strategic pullback.
Trump is a symptom, more than a cause, of the nation’s inward turn. He is tapping into popular discontent over the nation’s foreign policy: its strategic excesses in the Middle East, counterproductive efforts to promote democracy, protection of allies that do not do enough to protect themselves, and pursuit of trade deals that have disadvantaged American workers. A recent poll by the Center for American Progress—a left-leaning think tank—revealed that liberal internationalists represent only 18 percent of the public, while a majority of the country favors either America First or global disengagement. Younger voters are much less supportive of a traditional internationalist agenda than their elders, meaning that this inward turn is likely to deepen in the years ahead.
Isolationism is making a comeback because U.S. statecraft has become divorced from popular will. A strategic adjustment that puts the nation’s purposes back into equilibrium with its means is inevitable. The paramount question is whether that adjustment takes the form of a judicious pullback or a more dangerous retreat.
America’s isolationist past should not be its future. Global interdependence makes it both unfeasible and unwise for the United States to return to being a North American or hemispheric redoubt. With U.S. forces still scattered around the world at hundreds of overseas bases, a precipitous strategic retreat hardly seems in the offing. But that may be exactly what lies in store unless the United States gets ahead of the curve and crafts a strategy of judicious retrenchment by design.
Isolationism is the default setting for the United States; the ambitious internationalism of the past eight decades is the exception. A yearning for geopolitical detachment has from the outset imbued the American creed and been part and parcel of the American experience. The allure of nonentanglement reemerges even when the internationalists deem it to be extinguished for good. When the likes of McKinley, Mahan, and Roosevelt launched the Spanish-American War, they had no idea that their actions would trigger a potent backlash and a quick retreat to dollar diplomacy. When Wilson entered World War I with the overwhelming support of Congress, little did he know that U.S. participation in the Great War would set the stage for the dogged isolationism of the interwar era.
Isolationist pressures are again building—and will only strengthen as the pandemic continues to wreak havoc on the global economy. Trump has been channeling those pressures, but without competence. He is right to head for the exits in Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, but he has done so without a coherent strategy, leaving behind chaos and ceding ground to adversaries. His recent decision to downsize the U.S. presence in Germany blindsided not only NATO allies but also his own Pentagon.
This is exactly how pullback should not happen. Instead, the winner of the November election needs to launch the nation on a searching debate about how to craft a grand strategy that aims to do less while still doing enough. Rather than taking cheap shots at each other, the die-hard internationalists and the Come Home crowd should be discussing what a responsible and well-paced retrenchment should look like.
The starting point for this debate should be recognition that isolationism, no less than internationalism, has both strategic upsides and strategic downsides. Isolationism succeeded in enhancing America’s security and prosperity during the 19th century and helped the nation resist the imperial temptation after 1898, but led it into dangerous delusion during the interwar years. Liberal internationalism was an effective and sustainable grand strategy during the Cold War, but the nation’s internationalist calling has since gone awry, producing pronounced strategic excess.
A judicious retrenchment should entail shedding U.S. entanglements in the periphery, not in the strategic heartlands of Europe and Asia. America’s main misstep since the end of the Cold War has been unnecessary embroilment in wars of choice in the Middle East. In contrast, pulling back from Eurasia in the face of Russian and Chinese threats constitutes precisely the kind of rash overcorrection that the United States must avoid. The nation learned that the hard way when it failed to confront Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.
Obstinate unilateralism is a nonstarter in today’s world. Managing international trade and finance, combatting climate change, shutting down terrorist networks, preventing nuclear proliferation, overseeing cybersecurity, addressing global pandemics—these urgent challenges all necessitate broad international cooperation. Moreover, as the United States retreats from its role as global policeman, it will want like-minded partners to help fill the gap; the necessary partnerships become stronger only through diplomacy and teamwork. Since the Senate can be a tough customer when it comes to ratifying treaties—as Woodrow Wilson found out to his chagrin—informal pacts and coalitions of the willing need to be the new staples of U.S. diplomacy.
An increasingly illiberal world desperately needs the United States to again anchor democratic ideals; the progressive flow of history may end if America is no longer interested in or capable of tipping the scales in the right direction. The top priority, however, must be getting the nation’s political and economic house in order rather than going abroad in search of monsters to destroy. The U.S. cannot serve as a model for the world unless its republican institutions earn their keep.
Working to spread democracy through advocacy and example rather than more intrusive means will help the United States find the middle ground between isolation and overreach. This middle course will require that Americans become comfortable operating in the world as it is, not as they would like it to be. For much of its history, the nation cordoned itself off from a world that it feared would spoil the American experiment. Beginning with World War II, it sought to run the world and recast the globe in its own image. Moving forward, Americans will need to engage in a messy and imperfect world while resisting the temptation either to recoil from it or to remake it. The United States needs to step back, without stepping away.
