Isolationism

Isolationism. Isolationism is best defined as opposition to U.S. intervention in war outside the Western Hemisphere, particularly in Europe; to involvement in binding military alliances; and to participation in collective‐security organizations. Historically, isolationists have sought above all to preserve the nation's freedom of action. In contrast to pacifists, isolationists can favor unilateral military action.

From the founding of the republic through the early twentieth century, the United States pursued an isolationist policy. In Common Sense (1776), Thomas Paine warned that continued ties to Britain “tends directly to involve this continent in European wars and quarrels.” John Adams's Model Treaty of 1776 envisioned a purely commercial treaty with France, a proposal the French rejected. President George Washington's Farewell Address of 1796 advised his countrymen “to steer clear of permanent Alliances.” In his first inaugural address in 1801, Thomas Jefferson sought “peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.” As part of what was later known as the Monroe Doctrine, President James Monroe proclaimed in his annual message of 1823: “In the wars of the European powers in matters relating to themselves we have never taken part, nor does it comport with our policy to do so.”

Although the United States engaged in several major wars in the nineteenth century—the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the Spanish‐American War—all these conflicts were fought unilaterally and therefore did not violate classic isolationist principles. Even when the United States entered World War I in 1917, it did so as an “associated power,” so as to avoid any obligations that might come from a binding military alliance. In 1919, President Woodrow Wilson unsuccessfully sought American membership in the League of Nations, whose covenant obligated member states to engage in collective security if one of its members faced “external aggression.” The Republican senators Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, William E. Borah of Idaho, and Hiram Johnson of California invoked isolationist tenets to fight the proposal, as did the League for the Preservation of American Independence. Hence, throughout the 1920s and most of the 1930s, traditional isolationism remained intact.

The years 1934–1937 marked the peak of isolationist activism. As President Franklin Delano Roosevelt sought discretionary power to aid nations facing fascist aggression, his foes rallied and strongly fought such entanglements. In 1934, Congress forbade private loans to nations in default of obligations; in 1935, it rejected American membership in the World Court; and from 1935 to 1937 it passed a battery of neutrality acts that remained law until September 1939.

As more and more Americans endorsed collective action against rising dictatorships, however, isolationism became increasingly contested. As the word itself became more pejorative, isolationists preferred such terms as “noninterventionist,” “hemispherist,” “nationalist,” and “continentalist”—the term favored by the historian Charles A. Beard. After September 1939, when war again broke out in Europe, isolationists determinedly fought Roosevelt's interventionist proposals, though without success. Although a number of groups were involved, including the quasi‐pacifist National Council for the Prevention of War and the short‐lived No Foreign War Committee, the major isolationist organization was the America First Committee, formed in September 1940.

Classic isolationism ended on 7 December 1941, with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. After both world wars, however, “revisionist” historians such as Beard, Charles Callan Tansill, and Harry Elmer Barnes wrote accounts claiming that in each case the isolationist position had been the correct one.

During the Cold War, some citizens fought against America's major internationalist and interventionist moves: membership in the United Nations (1945) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (1949), entry into the Korean War (1950), and early involvements in Indochina (1954). However, such former isolationists as Senator Robert A. Taft (Rep.–Ohio) sacrificed consistency by supporting more militant action in Asia. Isolationists suffered a major defeat in 1953–1954 when the Senate defeated a constitutional amendment proposed by Senator John Bricker (Rep.–Ohio) limiting presidential treaty‐making power.

Most opponents of the Vietnam War could not be called isolationists in the traditional sense as they seldom, in principle, repudiated membership in international organizations, military aid overseas, economic sanctions, or the use of combat forces under certain circumstances. In the 1980s and 1990s, a few “neo‐isolationist” political scientists and historians called for America's withdrawal from alliance systems, security arrangements, and international organizations and advocated a defense limited to the Western Hemisphere. Like their predecessors in the late 1930s, however, they shunned the discredited label “isolationism” and preferred such terms as “interest‐based policies,” “strategic disengagement,” “strategic independence,” or “national strategy.”
See also Foreign Relations: U.S. Relations with Europe; Internationalism; Pacifism; World War II: Military and Diplomatic Course.

Bibliography

Manfred Jonas , Isolationism in America, 1935–1941, 1966.
John Milton Cooper Jr. , The Vanity of Power: American Isolationism and World War I, 1914–1917, 1969.
Justus D. Doenecke , Not to the Swift: The Old Isolationists in the Cold War Era, 1979.
Wayne S. Cole , Roosevelt and the Isolationists, 1932–45, 1983.
Justus D. Doenecke , Anti‐Intervention: A Bibliographical Introduction to Isolationism and Pacifism from World War I to the Early Cold War, 1987.
Justus D. Doenecke , The Battle Against Intervention, 1939–1941, 1997.

Justus D. Doenecke