an always well written piece by daniel greenfield of sultan kinish
There is one fundamental element that is absolutely necessary for an isolationist foreign policy. Isolation. Isolationism without physical isolation is as much good as belligerence without an army to back it up.
American isolationism might have been feasible during WW1 when its neighbors were either friendly or no threat, there was no danger from the Pacific and a fleet crossing the Atlantic seemed unlikely. Though it wasn’t so unlikely even then.
As far back as 1897 and long before any American involvement in Europe, Operational Plan Three called for shelling New York and seizing parts of Virginia, as a staging base for attacks on Washington and Baltimore. Plans were drawn up in Germany for the occupation of Boston and Philadelphia.
Vice-Admiral August Thomsen wrote, “At the moment every thinking German officer is occupied with the consequences of a belligerent conflict between Germany and the United States of America.”
No American politician was thinking the same thing. America had not intervened in any European wars and had no interest in Germany. But that didn’t matter. The Kasier wanted to seize parts of the hemisphere and that meant breaking the dominant power in the region. America’s weak fleet made it seem like an easy target.
That is the most important part of the equation that isolationists fail to include in their calculations. Regardless of our foreign policy, we are still a target. Whatever our calculations are, potential enemies may have calculations entirely different from our own. They don’t just react to what we do, they have their own plans and agendas. Passivity isn’t a defense for the ostrich or for a nation.
In 1900 while America slept, German diplomats were scouting Cape Cod and Provincetown as support bases for an attack on Boston. And the Germans weren’t alone. In the early 20th century there were British plans for an assault on New England. But Germany’s failure to formulate an alliance with other European powers against the United States led to the abandonment of Operational Plan Three.
When Charles Lindbergh ridiculed the idea of a foreign attack on America, such an attack was less than a year away, but variations of it had been planned by European powers for a good deal longer than that. Terrorist attacks by foreign agents were a now forgotten reality during WW1, including the Black Tom explosion which severely damaged the Statue of Liberty, the Vanceboro bridge bombing, and in an early form of biological warfare a laboratory in Chevy Chase was working on anthrax and glanders cultures to be used on horses.
With the jet plane and the intercontinental ballistic missile, isolationism became completely unworkable without strong deterrence. Even if the United States had chosen to abandon Europe, it would still have needed massive nuclear missile stockpiles, a sizable fleet and military, and a policy of Mutually Assured Destruction just to pursue a policy of isolationism. And had the USSR managed to make even deeper inroads in South America, the United States would have been forced to either push it out or increase the size of its forces to compensate for the loss of a buffer zone against preemptive attacks.
It’s not impossible to have an isolationist foreign policy today, to cut any alliances with the rest of the world. But there’s a fundamental difference between a responsible and an irresponsible isolationist policy. A responsible isolationist policy recognizes that we have enemies who will act regardless of what we do and prepares against the possibility of war without actively seeking it out.
An irresponsible isolationist foreign policy however acts as if we have no enemies and that any talk that we have enemies is a conspiracy to bring us into a war. It accepts every bit of enemy propaganda as gospel and assumes that if we just “stop bothering them”, they’ll “stop bothering us”. It assumes that the enemy is entirely motivated by our actions, that any conflict we are in is the result of our foreign policy and that isolationism will avert any such conflicts.
This is the version of isolationism that you hear in the Republican debates from Ron Paul.
It’s the version that Americans heard back in the 1930’s from Lindbergh. Rather than recognizing that a military buildup is an important deterrent to war, it attacks military buildups as provocative. It assumes that the only possible reason why we might be attacked are foreign entanglements and if we just tuck our heads in then there will be no conflict.
The absurdity of this approach when it comes to the current clash of civilizations with Islam is obvious enough. This isn’t a conflict that dates back from 1991 or 1948 or even the First Barbary War in 1805. It’s a war that predates the United States and modern day Europe. It is a conflict that goes back over a thousand years to the decline and fall of the eastern remains of the Roman Empire and the rise of Islam as a militant unification ideology to fill that void.