Isolationism or non-interventionism was a powerful, even at times dominant, strain in American political thinking and policy through the 19th century and into the first half of the 20th. Part of this was a results of the beliefs of Washington, Jefferson and other early Presidents. But it was primarily a function of geography and strategy: separated from Europe by ocean and pre-occupied with becoming dominant in North America, it was sensible to avoid distractions elsewhere. Where foreign powers threatened American interests, war could result, as even arch-isolationist Thomas Jefferson battled the Barbary pirates.
The Monroe Doctrine in 1827 established it to be US policy to oppose the establishment of new European colonies in the Western hemisphere, at a time when most of the Spanish and Portuguese colonies were finding their independence. The policy was an attempt to keep the victorious monarchist powers of Europe from attempting to re-establish mercantilist colonies. It was supported unofficially by the Pax Brittanica of free trade and free shipping.
The United States achieved paramountcy in North America by 1848 with the Mexican-American War but remained divided internally over slavery until 1865. The cataclysm of the Civil War required a generation to heal. After that, Americans turns their focus to South and Central America. The US and UK had a fierce diplomatic dispute in the Venezuelan border crisis in 1895. President Cleveland broadened the Monroe Doctrine from just forbidding new European colonies in the Americas, to proclaiming an American interest in any matter in the hemisphere. The British backed down, tacitly accepting US hegemony in the Western hemisphere.
In 1898, the Spanish-American War was an even stronger assertion of American hegemony in the Western hemisphere, and marked an end to isolationism as the dominant foreign policy. After 1898, the United States had territorial possessions in the Caribbean and Pacific. Americans thought of themselves in that conflict as “a righteous people fighting for a righteous cause.” When that attitude could be activated in the future, the nation could go to war. When that attitude was stifled by memories of a recent military struggle, isolationism again held sway.
In the First World War, the US stayed neutral but took on a progressively anti-German public opinion. Atrocities in Belgium (1914) and the sinking of the Lusitania (1915) positioned the Germans as the aggressors and began to activate that “righteous” attitude. In early 1917, Germany began unrestricted submarine warfare against American merchant shipping in an effort to starve Britain out of the war. Knowing this could lead to war with the US, Germany tried to lure Mexico into the war on their side, in an effort to keep the American troops focused in the Western hemisphere. The “Zimmerman telegram” was intercepted and – combined with attacks on American ships – provided the trigger for war.
After the war, Wilson’s League of Nations was defeated by isolationist Senators and isolationism remained a strong impulse. Similarly, in the Second World War, American public opinion remained disinclined to fight until pushed by Pearl Harbour. German-Americans were particularly opposed to entry into the Second World War. The isolationist America First Committee had 800,000 members, including future Presidents John Kennedy and Gerald Ford, future VP nominee Sergeant Shriver and future Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart.
Pearl Harbour was a thunder clap on the American political psyche. The America First Committee disbanded four days after the attack. Samuel Lubell found that sons of isolationist families fought as often as interventionist families. Future presidents used Pearl Harbour as short-hard to demolish isolationism.
Immediately after the Second World War, there was some reversion to the previous isolationism, particularly in the mid-west states where it had been strongest before the war. Former VP Henry Wallace advocated a humanitarian foreign policy of a “people’s century” or a world New Deal. But the beginning of the Cold War created a new situation where pure isolation was less tenable. The Soviet Union could come to dominate the Eastern Hemisphere, and then threaten the Western. As such, most isolationists who remained turned to a more modest version that can be called “non-interventionism.”
Robert Taft was the leading non-interventionist in the Senate after 1945, and the leader of the Senate Republicans. He was opposed within his own party by interventionists like Arthur Vandenberg and most effectively by Dwight Eisenhower. Taft opposed the Marshall Plan and wanted to limit American intervention to NATO, Israel and Taiwan.
However, Taft’s influence waned with the election of Eisenhower in 1952. Ike was an avowed interventionist and cold warrior, and he used his personal popularity and credibility as a successful war leader to impose his view as orthodoxy in the Republican Party. Taft also died in 1953, robbing non-interventionism of its leading spokesperson.
Taft’s eventual successor as the leader of the right-wing of the Republican Party was Barry Goldwater, a hardliner on the Cold War and supporter of active measures against the Soviet Union. As a result of Goldwater’s influence, the right-wing of the Republicans tended toward a hardliner position that opposed the détente of the 1970s and culminate in Reagan’s reestablishment of an interventionist policy in the 1980s. In fact by the time of Reagan’s presidency, Goldwater was criticizing him for mining harbours in Nicaragua, arguably part of a “rollback” strategy or at least a very aggressive containment strategy.
In contrast, the Democrats attracted some isolationist or non-interventionist elements as a result of the New Left opposition to the Vietnam War. By 1970, James Johnson was able to argue in Foreign Policy that
The decade of the sixties has produced a new school of isolationism. The reaction to the war in Vietnam, the demands of domestic problems and the seeming hollowness of traditional assumptions of international involvement- all give rise to this outlook. The isolationism is sometimes incoherent, occasionally inconsistent, and very attractive to a large portion of the younger generation.
Similarly, Ronald Rubin argued in 1966 that: “Among the significant intellectual byproducts of American military commitment in South Vietnam is the resurgence of isolationist thought as a leading theme in American foreign relations.”
But Vietnam did not lead to a general policy of isolationism on the left either. Instead, the foreign policy establishment in both parties moved toward détente or de-escalation with the Soviets, in contrast to the containment strategy that had underpinned the Vietnam and Korean wars. But the US did not retreat from major alliances like NATO, diminish support for South Korea, Germany and Japan, or curtail aggressive involvement in countries from Chile to Ethiopia to Iran. And even this middle course was called into question with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 that saw first Carter and then more significantly Reagan shift away from détente.
Doenecke examined the positions of isolationists through the era before and after WWII. He concluded that isolationists followed the Jeffersonian ideas of the yeoman farmer. They were “engaged in a rear-guard effort to preserve a rural arcadia from the inevitable onslaughts of modernity.”
That isolationism became less pronounced during the Cold War in part because the Democrats became less Jeffersonian and the Republican conservativism was opposed to communism. There were some Congressmen who would fall into the “non-interventionist” bracket. For instance, Ron Paul represented Texas as early as 1976, and voted against extending the draft in 1980 in opposition to President Carter and most Republicans.
There is some strain of Jeffersonian thinking in the New Left anti-War positions of some Democrats. Robert Drinan was a Catholic priest who defeated an interventionist Democrat in the primaries in 1970 to represent a district in Massachusetts. He tied his opposition to war with social justice and world peace. But his geography was resolutely suburban and his profession and world view far from the gentleman farmer.
Isolationism returned to some of the Republicans quickly after the end of the Cold War. Pat Buchanan ran for President in part on isolationism in 1992. By 1995, President Clinton was accusing the Republicans of “the most isolationist policies of the last fifty years.” But isolationism was only one strain of GOP attitudes in foreign policy, with other factions including idealist neo-conservatism, bellicose conservatism and traditional realist interventionism. Similarly, the Democrats adopted a “humanitarian interventionism” that argued for intervention in Somalia, Kosovo and elsewhere, but it was counter-balanced by protectionist impulses and some pure anti-war sentiment lingering from Vietnam.
Sources:
Quinn: US Foreign Policy in Context
Adler: The Isolationist Impulse
Lubell: The Future of American Politics
Patterson: Mr. Republican; a biography of Robert A. Taft