Stop Saying "Isolationist"

It's misleading, invidious, and it obscures what's actually bad and scary about right-wing nationalist foreign policy

At one point in Joseph Heller’s Good as Gold, the main character demands of one of his frenemies: “Don’t words mean anything to you?” This is how I feel when I hear or read people talking about isolationism. Bret Stephens is only the dumbest of countless pundits making objectively false statements such as:

It’s [JD Vance’s] isolationist instincts that stand out the most, and worry me the most. Vance really is one of those Republicans who think that practically the only foreign policy we need as a country is a secure, militarized southern border

What kind of way is this to talk about someone who wants to “bring [the Ukraine war] to a rapid close so America can focus on the real issue, which is China”? Someone who “want[s] to empower the president of the United States, whether that's a Democrat or Republican, to use the power of the U.S. military to go after these drug cartels”? Someone who says “we need to do something with Iran - not those weak little bombing runs ... If you're going to punch the Iranians, you punch them hard, and that's what [Trump] did when he took out [Soleimani]”? Who says it “is of utmost importance that the United States stand with our allies in Israel”? Some people realize this is weird, so they say “quasi-isolationist.” But what does that even mean?

Not only language suffers. People also shamelessly say false things about history. Here’s Time magazine:

Trump’s intention to remake America’s relations abroad may be just as consequential. Since its founding, the U.S. has sought to build and sustain alliances based on the shared values of political and economic freedom.

That second sentence is just not true! And that’s not a partisan judgment: the people who launched the US on its post-1945 path would also have told you without hesitation that they were doing something new.

The disregard for truth and language is corrosive, affecting other words as well. Here’s Politico: “Vance is an avowed isolationist.” Leave aside the i-word itself for a second. What does “avowed” mean? Vance’s avowed position is this: “no, I don’t think that we should pull out of NATO, and no, I don’t think that we should abandon Europe.” Is he lying? Very possibly! This is a man who believes in almost nothing, who switched from Never Trump to Trump Forever because “elites” made fun of Ron Howard’s adaptation of his best-selling memoir. But he’s not an avowed isolationist.

Is anyone an avowed isolationist? If anyone claimed the label, you might expect it to be Col. Robert E. Wood—a visionary Midwestern retailer, the driving force behind America First, an anti-Semite, and an all-around nasty piece of work. But Wood said:

To the best of my knowledge, there has never been a real isolationist, one corresponding to the definition of an isolationist generally attributed to that word by the easterners.

It is not literally true that no one ever called themselves an isolationist. But historians have overwhelmingly agreed with Col. Wood that the terms is misleading, at best.¹ It’s almost always used as a pejorative, which makes it more emotive (“I disapprove of this person’s foreign policy”) than analytical. Proponents of specific foreign policy interventions were being polemical, and obviously not accurate, when they said that isolationists would “compel us to confine all activities of our people within our own frontiers” (to quote the influential internationalist, Cordell Hull). As historian Brooke Blower has written, the idea of “isolationism” cannot survive even brief contact with the real people it supposedly describes:

Herbert Hoover, after all, was a world-renowned humanitarian, who had lived and traveled abroad extensively, spoke some Mandarin, supported the League of Nations, and spearheaded numerous relief campaigns from Belgium to Soviet Russia. Charles Lindbergh was an adventurous aviator, who shrunk the distance between New York and Paris and helped Pan American Airways stretch its routes across the oceans.

Most likely, you (like me) abhor the foreign policy visions of “isolationists” like Wood, Hoover, and Lindbergh. But even if you think they deserve to be stuck with pejorative labels, the term is also just misleading. It obscures the fact that the “isolationists” had (and, to the extent they still exist, have) their own visions of global order. Here again is Col. Wood of America First:

Our true mission is in North America and South America…With our resources and organizing ability we can develop ... a virgin continent like South America. The reorganization and proper development of Mexico alone would afford an outlet for our capital and energies for some time to come.

Wood served on the board of United Fruit, nobody’s idea of an anti-interventionist outfit. Long before most American businesses thought about the rest of the world at all, Wood led Sears into Cuba (1942) and Mexico (1947). This vision of international relations gave rise to its own foreign policy, for example when Wood said in 1940:

no government in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean South American countries will be tolerated unless it is friendly to the United States...we are prepared to use force to attain that objective.

Thus, the “isolationist” label actually makes it impossible to understand the precise dangers of a certain kind of right-wing foreign policy. The scariest thing about someone like Robert Taft was not his reluctance to go to war, but the fact that once he supported a war, he was willing to consider extreme forms of intervention. Taft made a bit of a fuss over the lack of Congressional authorization for the Korean War. But he soon became more frustrated with the fact that the war was stalemated, a situation he likened to “a football game in which our team when it reaches the 50-yard line is always instructed to kick. Our team can never score.”

Taft wanted to score, and to do so he was willing to countenance major escalation: “using Chiang Kai-shek's troops in Korea or South China…the bombing of Chinese communications…perhaps imposing a blockade on the Chinese mainland…dismissing ‘any hesitation about the possibility that the Russians may come into the war.’”² People like Taft especially liked nuclear air power, which they saw as an economical, capital-intensive, private-sector-friendly alternative to standing armies. “The ability of our Air Force to deliver atom bombs on Russia should never be open to question,” said the nation’s leading isolationist.

On this point, I always think of Phyllis Schlafly—most famous as an anti-feminist, but also a committed Taft factionalist whose most successful book had a whole chapter about how the big international New York banks rigged the Republican convention for Eisenhower in 1952. Here she is trying to untangle her views on the Korean War, sixty years after the fact:

DePue: What was your position on the Korean War?

Schlafly: Well, my position was we should win it. I think with hindsight now, it’s too bad we didn’t win it.

DePue: When it first broke out in June of 1950, did you think we got into the war in the right way?

Schlafly: No. Truman got us into the war without a Declaration of War by Congress, which the Constitution calls for.

DePue: Would you have been in favor of supporting the war if he had taken it to Congress and gotten that Declaration of War?

Schlafly: Probably not…

DePue: But 1952 of course, all of that is fait accompli, it’s already behind you. Your position in 1952 then was to win the war?

Schlafly: To win the war, yes. We were already in it…

DePue: Some of the things that I’ve read in terms of what you were advocating in 1952, during the campaign, were a blockade against China, and bombing the bridges over the Yalu River, which is of course, the way that the Chinese were getting their reinforcements and their supplies in, and basically an escalation of the war. If you settle for nothing but victory, then you’re talking about pushing that line all the way up, so basically, invasion of North Korea again. Does that sound right?

Schlafly: Well, it’s just as MacArthur said, “There’s no substitute for victory.” We’re in the war; let’s win it or get out.

DePue: The fear at that time was if we did push that hard, that that might trigger a much larger war at the worldwide level.

Schlafly: Well, I would go with MacArthur’s wisdom rather than Truman’s.

That’s a long quote, but I’ve actually edited out many more rounds of back and forth. I think the exchange perfectly illustrates the frequent incoherence of right-wing versions of foreign policy “restraint,” and more importantly the fact that the contradiction is usually resolved in favor of massive violence (in this case, Schlafly would have allowed MacArthur to start a global, probably nuclear, war with China in order to “win” a smaller war which Schlafly hadn’t even initially supported). We see this same inclination towards the “knock out blow” with Trump and Vance: “Finish the job”, “Punch them hard.”

What’s the alternative? There may be no perfect term to substitute for “isolationism.” Following two of my intellectual heroes, Bruce Cumings and Mike Davis, I think a good default is “nationalism.” People on both sides in 1948 would have understood the term, and accepted it as value-neutral. For example, Michigan’s Arthur Vandenberg described a contest between “the ‘Eastern internationalist’ school of thought” and the “‘Middle Western nationalist’ school of thought.” At the time, Vandenberg identified himself with nationalism, though this would famously change. But, to me, that ideological switch shows the utility of the terms: Vandenberg called himself a “nationalist” when he was a nationalist, and an “internationalist” when he was an internationalist.

Of course, there’s no reason we should necessarily defer to categories used by historical actors. But “nationalist” also fits well with the way we use language today. The word connects, via “economic nationalism,” to the protectionist impulses common to Robert Taft, Robert E. Wood, Pat Buchanan, and James David Vance. No one has ever imagined that nationalism was inconsistent with expansionism, so the concept allows for the so-called “isolationists” to have a foreign policy—indeed, a militaristic vision—of their own. Just something to keep in mind, given what Trump and Vance have said about Mexico.

1. Brooke Blower: “The concept of isolationism hovers like a pall over histories of American political culture between the world wars. Few historians really believe in the term’s utility anymore, and many simply ignore it in their pursuit of new, internationally oriented studies of the period. Yet others continue to use it halfheartedly for want of a better way to explain Americans’ prickly stance toward foreign affairs before the bombing of Pearl Harbor.” For another careful explanation of where the word came from and why we shouldn’t use it, see Stephen Wertheim.

2. Robert Patterson, Mr. Republican: A Biography of Robert A. Taft, 484-489.