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Charles Beard, properly understood - isolationism

National Interest, The, Spring, 1994 by A.J. Bacevich

THE STORY OF how the United States emerged--reluctantly and belatedly--to lead the world has long since acquired the weight of a well-known parable. Like any good parable, this one aims chiefly to admonish, to warn against the recurrence of error, to suppress wayward and irresponsible urgings to which Americans are thought susceptible.

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It is a melodrama in two acts turning on the pivot of the Second World War. In Act I, encompassing the period from the founding of the republic until the onset of World War II, internal and hemispheric matters preoccupied the United States. American diplomacy was "immature." Although the United States early on acquired immense wealth and possessed the potential to be a great power, it played a role in world affairs that was fitful, if not capricious. From time to time, rising out of the vagaries of politics, a prophet --most famously Woodrow Wilson--might rouse his countrymen, stirring up their yearnings to save the world and exhorting them to assume responsibilities commensurate with their power and moral pretensions. Yet, although not above flirting with such notions, Americans rejected both prophet and summons and--apart from a pronounced tendency to issue unsolicited moralizing advice--turned their backs on the wider world.

Events of the 1930s changed all that. Faced with the rise of Nazism and Japanese militarism, the American people struggled throughout much of that decade first to ignore and then to insulate themselves from the dual threat. But the enormity of the danger posed by Germany and Japan defeated that effort. Swept into war, Americans were likewise swept to the forefront of world leadership and the curtain dropped on Act I.

Well before that war ended, Americans had internalized an important lesson: never again would the United States hesitate to resist aggression; never again would the United States stand idly by, allowing other nations to drift, quibble, and appease. Yet from the very outset, Act II involved more than the negative aim of resisting aggression. At stake were the prospects for World Peace and the well-being of all humanity, both tied directly to the willingness of the United States to lead. Act II, in short, marked the triumphant rebirth of the ideals that Woodrow Wilson had espoused. In predicting that his Four Freedoms would prevail "everywhere in the world," Franklin Roosevelt in 1941 anticipated and dismissed out of hand the criticism that he was conjuring up a utopian dream. "That is no vision of a distant millennium," he assured his listeners. "It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation."(1)

Similarly, the Cold War policies of Roosevelt's successors did not aim merely to overcome an adversary. America's true aim was Peace, which in this context meant far more than the absence of war. Peace implied the alleviation of evils that had beset humanity throughout ages past. Moreover Peace was indivisible, a blessing that none truly possessed unless all enjoyed its fruits. Although far from unique in its sentiments, President Harry S Truman's State of the Union Address of January 1947 made the point well. "Our goal is collective security for all mankind," said Truman. "The spirit of the American people can set the course of world history. If we maintain and strengthen our cherished ideals..., then the faith of our citizens in freedom and democracy will be spread over the whole world...." But it was not only a case of political rhetoric. Even NSC 68, the highly classified 1950 blueprint for building up American military power, emphasized that "it was not an adequate objective" for American policy "merely to seek to check the Kremlin design...." Rather, the United States needed "an affirmative program," one that would "light the path of peace and order among nations," leading to the creation of "a system based on freedom and justice."

The Good War

THE ELITES WHO shaped opinion and crafted national policy were none too confident as to the steadfastness of popular support for internationalism. Persuading the American people to don the mantle of World Leadership would require something of a hard sell. Among the resources exploited to make that sell was the record of the past. In particular, the history of World War II and the events preceding it became a weapon. Sustaining popular support for a struggle of indeterminate duration required popular acceptance of World War II--the event that propelled the United States onto the center of the world stage--as very much the "Good War."

Proponents of internationalism were well aware of the fact that Americans had considered their one previous foray to the battlefields of Europe to be a worthy undertaking, but only so long as it remained in progress. Hardly had the Armistice of 1918 taken effect than the so-called Great War became the target of fierce historical revisionism. The result had been to sour a generation of Americans on Wilsonianism. Preventing a recurrence of that catastrophe required that later generations not have comparable second-thoughts about the Second World War.

Charles Beard, properly understood - isolationism

National Interest, The, Spring, 1994 by A.J. Bacevich

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