john's thoughts

Nearly everyone speaking or writing about the current US Presidential campaign has at some point noted foreign policy or at least our relations with other nations as a part of it. It usually does not receive the same attention as border security and immigration(though they’re related), inflation and the overall apparent dissatisfaction of much of the middle classes, particularly those between the Appalachians and the Rockies.

But foreign policy keeps sticking its nose in and for good reason. We have Ukraine and we have Israel, including Gaza. Sitting in the background(but not far in it) we have Putin, Russia’s ruler and a lot of other people we’d rather not think about. There are also possible outcomes we’d like to ignore, but can’t. I shall mention most if not all of these, or more, in this blog, but I intend mainly to look at American conservatism and its shifting and sometimes contradictory attitudes. This means mostly the Republicans, but not exclusively.

Not wanting a thousand word article, I will not go into the subject of historical isolationism back to the American Revolution in great detail. Suffice it to say that mostly, from the founding of the nation into the 20th century, the US preferred a minimum amount of foreign connections. There were exceptions, mostly economically inspired, but this was the main thrust. It changed somewhat late in the 19th century when the US, led by Admiral Mahan and Theodore Roosevelt jumped on the European bandwagon of colonialism and tried, sometimes with some success, to compete with the older European powers and their colonialist policies.

This ran into trouble about the time of the Wilson Administration because of the outbreak of WWI in Europe and a great American desire to stay out of it. As it turned out we couldn’t. At least WW thought not, and he, basically a man of peace, was likely right, even though this is not a simple issue. What we can say without much hesitation is that after WWI the US became largely an isolationist nation. This happened for a number of reasons, mostly related to the idea that we had been tricked into WWI and/or had not gotten our due out of helping bring about the Allied victory. As a result, during the 1920’s the US took a low profile in most international moments. There were exceptions such as the useless Kellogg-Briand pact, but this was the tendency. After all, it was the “Roaring Twenties,” the era of bathtub gin and F Scott Fitzgerald and Speak-easies. It seemed everyone just wanted to have a good time and ignore the bigger world.

This ended abruptly with the 1929 Market Crash and the subsequent depression, but this didn’t change foreign policy ideas. If anything the US was more isolationist in the ’30’s because of dealing with out own troubles. Foreign policy, like Prohibition, was hardly debated in the 1932 Presidential election. It would return, however, in 1936 and to a much greater degree another four years later after another European war threatened–and now as a largely partisan issue.

For most of the 1930’s both parties were divided on whether to be isolationist and if so, how isolationist to be. The more super isolationists were usually Republicans, particularly Midwestern ones, and ironically they included a number of old GOP progressives–Hiram Johnson and Robert LaFollette, for example. But there were also eastern isolationists and Democratic Isolationists. Southern Democrats seem to have tended toward isolationism more than others, at least UNTIL 1940, But the member of the House who tried to amend the constitution to require a public referendum on going to war was Rep Louis Ludlow of Indiana. So it was not entirely a regional thing.

In the first FDR administration the President’s attention had to be on domestic affairs. With 1/4, maybe 1/3 of the work force unemployed and maybe nearly as many under employed, there was no other choice. But even then for those who closely watched foreign affairs, there were signs of trouble. Mussolini had risen to power in Italy in the 1920’s with the Fascist Party as his tool. It was not clear he was a US enemy but there was no doubt he was anti-democratic and anti-individual liberties so the presumption was that he could be trouble.

IN 1933 in Germany Hitler and his Nazis took power not long before FDR became President. It was evident from the beginning that he was a potential enemy of democracy and the ways of Western Individual rights and freedoms. At about the same time there was a plethora of books that “revealed” how the US should not have been involved in World War I and that the war was partly a plot by international bankers to get even richer. Much of this information was incorrect, but a lot of it was widely believed and public opinion to some degree accepted this. This position was also aided by the Nye Committee, led by Sen Gerald Nye a ND Republican which held investigations from 1934-’37 and basically approved and publicized some of these views

This combination of disappointment, suspicion and outrage was a strong driver of isolationist opinion and one of the driving powers, along with American suspicion of anyone not American)of the Neutrality Acts. But shortly after the First Neutrality Act the Spanish civil war began, which turned out to be an invitation for the dictatorial European powers to intervene and make trouble for their own benefit. This grabbed the attention of many previoisyly indifferent to what was going on elsewhere,

Beginning with 1935 there were, depending on how you count it, three or four Neutrality Acts–some of them were actually extentions of prior passed laws. Without going into detail about each one, suffice it to say that they mainly restricted or forbade American trading with belligerent powers(participants in a conflict)and first advised then commanded that Americans not travel on belligerent nations’ ships. All of this is obviously based on the idea that we got into WWI by mistake and one thing that caused it was getting too closely involved with the participants.

Basically, FDR did not like these acts which he saw as naive and foolish in their attempt to reject the rest of the world and worse than useless in preventing another European War. But he did have serious opposition from both parties. A large number–minority, but still a sizeable one–of Republicans were for the Acts. This was particularly the work of a group of Isolationist Republicans mostly from the Midwest and West, many of them powerful Senators who FDR feared might attempt to interfere with his New Deal policies. So he signed the Neutrality Acts although not without discussion and a few compromises. There were Democratic opponents too, mainly from the South, but the majority opposition was Republican and sort of a mixture of hidebound conservatives and old Progressives who still saw WWI as a boon to “warmongers” in big business..

As the decade wore on things got more complicated. The Spanish civil war brought disorder and chaos to Europe and served as an invitation to the totalitarian powers, Italy, Germany and the USSR to try to profit from it politically and to use it as a training/testing ground to check out and develop weapons for later fighting. Mussolini seized Ethiopia, Hitler re-occupied the Rhineland and then in 1938 caused the Munich Crisis. All of this pushed some–but not many–isolationists a bit towards FDR’s view that it was a big world and the US had to be part of it and would certainly have to deal with any widespread war.

In 1939 this became less theoretical and more of a daily issue when the war actually began. Hitler invaded Poland in September, 1939 and , pursuant to the Nazi-Soviet Pact Stalin attacked Poland from he East with the two supposedly hostile but now cooperating powers quickly dividing that unfortunate nation. In December, 1939 Stalin struck again , this time against neighboring Finland, and the following spring Hitler began his attacks on Western Europe. It appeared he would soon have the whole continent at his feet except, possibly the UK.

This triggered a huge and strong response from the isolationist community in the US. In September of 1940 the powerful but short lived America First Committee was formed at, of all places, Yale University. Its single purpose was the keep the US out of any foreign war and it asserted that a Nazi victory over Britain would not imperil the US. It included people of many different stripes. For good reasons a lot of people were just against another war. Historian Susan Dunn who has studied the movement extensively concluded it had “farmers, union leaders, wealthy industrialists, …Democrats, Republicans, Socialists, communists, anti-communists, radicals, pacifists and simple FDR haters.” So clearly it attracted people of many different views. Certainly those who had known the horror of the trenches in WWI and their families had reason to want to avoid another war.

Dunn stated that “Though most of its members were probably patriotic, well-meaning and honest…the AFC would never be able to purge itself of the taint of anti-Semitism.” This was because many of its founders and early leaders and speakers at least sounded anti-Semitic. The first well-known leader of the AFV was industrialist Henry Ford, the most notorious Anti-Semite in the US. So the committee was burdened with suspicion, some of it well founded, from the start. It remained powerful, however, until the Japanese attacked. Pearl Harbor. On Dec 11, 1941 it disbanded.

From Pearl Harbor on to VJ day isolationism was hardly a question at all. There was almost universal agreement that the Axis powers had to be defeated. But during the war there did arise among conservative Republicans, and perhaps a few others, a dread and loathing of the Soviet Union. Now I’m not going to say there was no reason to loath Stalin and his dictatorial Communist state. There certainly was. But along with this there came a near-hysterical fear of anything that smacked of socialism or communism and of anyone who had ever read about it or considered it, no matter how far in the past. I think this was in the air as the war ended.

It was not long before the dreams of allied unity after the war began to fade and within a few years it was clear a Cold War between the USSR and the West was developing. Part of this was the Iron Curtain which cut off Eastern Europe from the rest of the continent. With the USSR both intransigent and obviously pursuing atomic weapons, it was not unreasonable to form an alliance to caution the Soviets that it would mean trouble if they attempted to take Western Europe by military force. Their army was big enough that they might well have done it, so it was thought they needed to understand this would make them the enemy of the US and a number of allies.

This all led to the NATO(North Atlantic Treaty Organization)alliance. The original members were the US, Canada ad several European democracies including the UK, France and Italy, with a total of 12. The signers of the NATO Treaty agreed to cooperate for their mutual defense. Article 5 declared than an attack upon any one of the countries meant an attack upon all and would lead the USSR into war with all of them.

This treaty which pleased many people on both sides(Liberal and Conservative, Democrat and Republican) was approved by most of the public and, formally, by the US Senate, which voted for NATO by an overwhelming 82-13. But there were dissenters, most of them on the far right. Whoa! What sense does this make? The right wingers, a group who prided themselves on “patriotism” and willingness to fight evil opposed it? Well a lot of them didn’t but some did. This means that the strain of conservative thought that leads to isolationism runs very deep in American conservative thought and, like a drug-repressed case of acne, may erupt if not successfully diminished..

During the war a few far right wingers complained that we were getting too close to the USSR and Stalin. Now Stalin and the Soviet Union were , indeed, to be feared and despised. But when we were struggling together against the curse of Nazism was not the time for it. But this thought began to erupt among a few people in politics about the time the war ended and it led to a not judicious or even judgmental, but an hysterical fear/loathing of communism or anything that was or seemed even close to it. I have already noted this a few paragraphs above. And there was enough of it in 1946 to pressure Harry Truman into what was almost his only foreign policy mistake. Given the opportunity of making an ally of Ho Chi Min, the Communist leader of the anti-French Vietnamese rebels, he chose to make them enemies, which led to one of the great American Tragedies about 20 years later–the Viet Nam War.

More immediately, this strain of thought also got itself involved in the Chinese civil war which it would exploit against the Roosevelt tradition and Truman and to the idea that anyone who favored international cooperation of nearly any kind was a commie or at least “pink.” Incredibly, a few moderate to liberal Senators who supported the NATO alliance were denounced as “pink” for doing any thing so internationalist, never mind that it was an anti-Communist alliance. Irrationality, you see, is not an invention of the 1990’s, when it comes to conservative politics in the US.

During most of the 1950’s Dwight Eisenhower was President. Ike was what today would be considered a moderate Republican(Trump would likely say “RINO”)and because he was a Republican General it was difficult for the right to attack him much. The fact that he had a firm but not hysterical policy toward the Soviets helped too. Not that it kept all the extreme right bizarre people out of the limelight. There was, after all, the John Birch Society and a few others, but they were widely(and very correctly)regrading as nut cases by nearly everyone.

During this time there was fairly broad agreement between the two parties about foreign policy. We should oppose the spread of communism(George Kennan’s “containment”)but do it peaceably as far as possible and avoid a direct confrontation with the USSR. There were a few dissenters, right and left, but not very many who got real attention.

The 1960’s saw a change. The US commitment in Vietnam changed from a pledge of support and supply and advice, to a military commitment to South Vietnam and finally to what amounted to an American War on the Asian continent with 5000 plus mile supply lines and questionable support at home. And here something happened that seems strange, but has a perverted logic–if not much common sense–to it. The far right conservatives, hitherto the only group that accepted isolationists among its members, suddenly became interventionist . Their extreme anti-communism suddenly had switched from leaving the rest of the world alone to supporting anti-communists everywhere, no matter how brutal and stupid they were or how doomed and hopeless their cause.

Conversely, some liberals slipped toward less anti-Communism, possibly a good thing in some cases, but easy to take too far. Some of them may have questioned the overall internationalism of the US. In any event there was a turnaround. Largely Republicans supported the US participation in Vietnam more than the Democrats; particularly the left wing of the party, opposed it. This led to a sort of showdown in the 1972 Presidential election when war-President Richard Nixon trounced peace advocate Democrat George McGovern. This, however, is a very complex issue which I am not inclined to pursue. Suffice it to say there was a sort of turnaround.

The turn around, however, was not extreme and once the Vietnam War ended there was again a fair amount of agreement between the right and the left on foreign policy. With some exceptions this agreement lasted for quite awhile. If you look at the personalities of prominent Secretaries of State from each side, say Henry Kissinger and Hillary Clinton, you will not see a lot of difference. And with the Soviet Union gone and its successor state, the Russian Republic replacing it, there was not quite so much too fight about–for awhile.

But the rise of Islamic violence and terrorism provided a new enemy. After 9/11 almost everybody in the US was(understandably) strong for punishing Al Qaeda and other such groups, mostly to protect our national security, but also to exact vengeance. There was not a great deal of difference between Dems and Reps on this at first, but as the George W Bush Administration became more and more warlike some of the old discord again appeared. Again, with some exceptions, Republicans were way more enthusiastic about using military actions to repress the terrorists than Democrats. Sometimes, for example in stopping ISIS, there was fairly broad agreement, but the old divisions remained. It was in some sense the cold war attitudes all over again.

This situation lasted until–well, just a few years ago. But with the rise of Donald J Trump, his MAGA Republicans and a whole new look to the Republican Party appeared. Or a very old one was reconstructed. While nearly everyone was shocked by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the only opposition to our support of that beleaguered country came from the very far right. And there weren’t many for awhile. But as time moved along and Ukrainian victory drives stalled, patience ran thin and the Republican right, particularly in the House of Representatives, began to question the whole commitment.

I suggest you look at statements of isolationists from the 1930’s and some from contemporary isolationists. They are frequently remarkably similar. Both question the correctness of the US assuming serious connections to the rest of the world. Each believes that foreign villains should be left alone, Well, of course, they’re right to the extent that we can’t and shouldn’t go after every villainous leader in the world, but there are some so evil and dangerous to our allies and therefore ultimately to us that we must act on them.

This was what the FDR era isolationists never seemed to get, that Hitler and Mussolini were not just a threat to other continental European countries. They were a threat to Western Civilization and hence to us. So was the USSR in the long run, but the short run had to be handled first or there wouldn’t have been a long run to worry about. Today we hear very similar arguments. No one would argue against foreign trade, but the voices of some of the Republican, isolationist right today suggest that the US need not worry about tactical and strategic matters in Europe or elsewhere and that we can turn our back on the troubles of the rest of the world when it comes to people like Putin, But we can’t and most of us know that, by knowledge or by instinct or by both.

The tragic war in Gaza has made this worse by giving the right wingers a war of obvious horror and of some clearly questionable reactions by our ally Israel to use as an example of foreign involvement. So some of them are demagoging this and implying that this is the same thing we’re facing with Putin and Ukraine. But it’s not and it won’t be.

I have likely said enough on this matter to wear out my welcome, but I will add one thing. It almost looks as if there is some tendency in the minds(not the brains, I won’t make this biological)of those who have extreme right inclinations that pulls them to this kind of thought. It’s a tendency to want to make America “first” and to take America first. Of course it is natural to take you home, the place where you were born or have chosen to be, first in your heart. But this cannot be done by pretending that other people and countries don’t matter. The fact that the US has a 2 century plus history of being “protected” by two of the largest oceans in the world has added to this feeling and made it more profound a part of our belief structure here than, I think, anywhere else. Unfortunately the facts are that it just won’t work, for reasons stated previously in this blog. I hope the Republicans will figure this out and get back on the ship of state that sails toward friendship and cooperation with others, particularly those who honor freedom. If they get back into power without some of them changing their minds they will invite something no one wants to see.