Our New Isolationism
Nicholas Blechman
By BILL KELLER
Published: September 8, 2013
THE United States has just spent thousands of American lives in a
distant land for a victory that now seems hollow, if indeed it can be
called a victory at all. Our own country, moreover, is emerging from a
recession, dispirited and self-absorbed, worried about the fragility of
the recovery and the state of our democracy. Idealism is in short
supply. So, as another far-off war worsens, Americans are loath to take
sides, even against a merciless dictator, even to the extent of sending
weapons. The voices opposed to getting involved range from the pacifist
left to the populist right. The president, fearful that foreign conflict
will undermine his domestic agenda, vacillates.
Connect With Us on Twitter
For Op-Ed, follow @nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page
editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow @andyrNYT.
This is the United States in 1940. Sound a little familiar?
I’ve been reading two engrossing new histories of that time — “Those
Angry Days” by Lynne Olson and “1940” by Susan Dunn — both focused on
the ferocious and now largely forgotten resistance Franklin D. Roosevelt
had to navigate in order to stand with our allies against Hitler.
Of course, 2013 is not 1940. The Middle East is not Europe. President
Obama is not F.D.R. But America is again in a deep isolationist mood. As
a wary Congress returns from its summer recess to debate Syria, as
President Obama prepares to address the nation, it is instructive to
throw the two periods up on the screen and examine them for lessons. How
does a president sell foreign engagement to a public that wants none of
it?
The cliché of the season is that Americans are war-weary from our long
slogs in Iraq and Afghanistan. That is true, but not the whole story. To
be sure, nothing has done more to discredit an activist foreign policy
than the blind missionary arrogance of the Bush administration. But the
isolationist temper is not just about the legacy of Iraq. Economic
troubles and political dysfunction have contributed to a loss of
confidence. Add to the mix a surge of xenophobia, with its calls for
higher fences and big-brotherly attention to the danger within. (These
anxieties also helped give rise to the expanding surveillance state,
just as nativism in that earlier period gave license to J. Edgar
Hoover’s obsessive eavesdropping.)
Isolationism is strong in the Tea Party, where mistrust of executive
power is profound and where being able to see Russia from your front
yard counts as mastery of international affairs. But sophisticated
readers of The New York Times are not immune, or so it seems from the
comments that arrive when I write in defense of a more assertive foreign
policy. (In recent columns I’ve advocated calibrated intervention to shift the balance in Syria’s civil war and using foreign aid to encourage democracy in Egypt.) Not our problems, many readers tell me.
Isolationism is not just an aversion to war, which is an altogether
healthy instinct. It is a broader reluctance to engage, to assert
responsibility, to commit. Isolationism tends to be pessimistic (we will
get it wrong, we will make it worse) and amoral (it is none of our
business unless it threatens us directly) and inward-looking (foreign
aid is a waste of money better spent at home).
“We are not the world’s policeman, nor its judge and jury,” proclaimed
Representative Alan Grayson, a progressive Florida Democrat, reciting
favorite isolationist excuses for doing nothing. “Our own needs in
America are great, and they come first.”
At the margins, at least, isolationists suspect that our foreign policy
is being manipulated by outside forces. In 1940, as Olson’s book
documents, anti-interventionists deplored the cunning British
“plutocrats” and “imperialists,” who had lured us into the blood bath of
World War I and now wanted to goad us into another one. In 2013, it is
supposedly the Israelis duping us into fighting their battles.
Many pro-Israel and Jewish groups last week endorsed an attack on Syria,
but only after agonizing about a likely backlash. And, sure enough, the
first comment posted on The Washington Post version of this story was,
“So how many Americans will die for Israel this time around?” This is
tame stuff compared with 1940, when isolationism was shot through with
shockingly overt anti-Semitism, not least in the rhetoric of the
celebrated aviator Charles Lindbergh.
Both Lynne Olson and Susan Dunn, in interviews, were wary of pushing the
analogy too far. The Middle East, they point out, is far murkier, far
less familiar.
Connect With Us on Twitter
For Op-Ed, follow @nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page
editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow @andyrNYT.
Olson told me she was startled to hear Secretary of State John Kerry
inveighing against “armchair isolationism” last week in his testimony on
Syria. “I think to be skeptical now does not mean you’re an
isolationist,” said Olson, who is herself skeptical about taking sides
in Syria. “It’s become a dirty word.”
Fair enough. But can we dial down the fears and defeatist slogans of
knee-jerk isolationism and conduct a serious discussion of our interests
and our alternatives in Syria and the tumultuous region around it?
The event that ultimately swept the earlier isolationists off the board
was, of course, Pearl Harbor. But even before the Japanese attack the
public reluctance was gradually giving way, allowing the delivery of
destroyers to the British, the Lend-Lease program, a precautionary
weapons buildup and the beginning of military conscription.
One factor that moved public opinion toward intervention was the
brazenness of Hitler’s menace; Americans who had never given a thought
to the Sudetenland were stunned to see Nazis parading into Paris.
Another was a robust debate across the country that ultimately transcended partisanship and prejudice.
Most historians and popular memory credit Roosevelt’s leadership for the
country’s change of heart, but Olson points out that for much of that
period Roosevelt was — to borrow a contemporary phrase — leading from
behind. He campaigned in 1936 on a pledge to “shun political commitments
which might entangle us in foreign wars” and to seek to “isolate
ourselves completely from war.” It was a vow he renewed repeatedly as
Hitler conquered country after country: there would be no American boots
on the ground.
Olson argues that while Roosevelt resolved early to send aid to Britain,
it is not at all clear that he would have taken America into the war if
it had not been forced upon him by Pearl Harbor. But by December 1941,
she writes, “the American people had been thoroughly educated about the
pros and cons of their country’s entry into the conflict and were far
less opposed to the idea of going to war than conventional wisdom has
it.”
“Obviously we got into it because of Pearl Harbor, but that debate made a
crucial difference,” Olson told me. “And I think that is what’s called
for now.”
Congress in recent years has not won much respect as an arena of policy
debate, but it was heartening last week to hear leaders of both parties
moving a little beyond petty obstructionism and bitter partisanship and
inviting a serious discussion.
I hope that Congress can elicit from the president this week a clear and
candid statement of America’s vital interests in Syria, and a strategy
that looks beyond the moment. I hope the president can persuade Congress
that the U.S. still has an important role to play in the world, and
that sometimes you have to put some spine in your diplomacy. And I hope
Americans will listen with an open mind.
No comments:
Post a Comment