"The US Senate's failure to ratify the League of Nations treaty (which [President Woodrow] Wilson had imagined as a proto-world government) left most Americans persuaded of the prudence of national isolation, support for which remained majority opinion in the United States until Pearl Harbor. When World War II ended, the isolationist bias remained, and foreign policy was an issue in the 1946 and 1948 elections. As late as 1949, the leading figure in the Republican Party, Senator Robert A. Taft, objected to the NATO treaty, saying that it involved unforeseeable commitments. (We can only imagine what he would have made of NATO in Afghanistan today.)" (NY Review of Books) Isolationism was originally used as a term of derision; ?non-interventionism? is a better and more accurate term for what the proponents had in mind.