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Noninterventionist Thought in American History

By Mark Grueter

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This is Part One of a three-part series. 

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I open by offering a series of quotations from some famous (and often infamous) noninterventionist thinkers and leaders throughout American history, followed by remarks of my own that are intended to summarize, contextualize and elaborate upon each passage. The quotes are samples of some of the more salient arguments promoted in opposition to war and imperialism, beginning with the Spanish-American war and ending with the most recent war in Iraq:

The first passage is from Emma Goldman:

I had no faith whatever in the patriotic protestations of America as a disinterested and noble agency to help the Cubans. It did not require much political wisdom to see that America’s concern was a matter of sugar and had nothing to do with humanitarian feelings. Of course there were plenty of credulous people…who believed in America’s claim (qtd. in Z).

This is classic anti-imperial appeal. The message: America only intervenes in the affairs of others if there are financial gains to be had. “Sugar” interests drove American ambitions to invade Cuba; oil interests drive ambitions to invade Iraq and Afghanistan. This is the quintessential cynical critique of war and power – compelling, though not easy to prove and perhaps reductive in scope. Goldman seems to be leveling criticism at Bryan and the populists who came to believe that the invasion of Cuba would liberate the oppressed peoples.

Now, to look at the words of another critic of war and imperialism, this one of a completely different species, Patrick J. Buchanan compares Iraq to the Philippines:

Defeating Spain had been as easy as crushing Iraq. But holding the Philippines would require three years of Vietnam-style fighting against the guerrillas of Aquinaldo, which cost tens of thousands of Filipino lives. And many more Americans died fighting the Filipinos to keep the islands than had died fighting Spain to take them…Our new imperialists view Iraq much as McKinley's generation of imperialists saw the Philippines, as an outpost of empire and a strategic base-camp for the projection of American power…But has anyone consulted the Iraqis on whether they wish to play their assigned role in the Pentagon's script? Or will we have to first put down Iraqi resistance, as we did Filipino resistance, to pacify the country and convert it into a U.S. Middle Eastern bastion? (Crown Jewel).

Here is another standard case against war, and one which does not question the motives of our governors so much as it questions their wisdom, strategy and morals. Not that Buchanan is above questioning the motives of American statesmen. He regularly waxes lyrical on how politicians sell out the interests of Main Street to those of Wall Street. A cultural and social conservative, Buchanan surprisingly flirts with and adopts many left economic ideas, criticizing the American system because it “…generates anxiety, insecurity and disparities in income” (The Irreconcilable). He once wrote a book explaining how social justice was being sacrificed to “Gods” of global capitalism.

In Buchanan’s comparison between Iraq and the Philippines he assumes the word “imperialist” and employs it as a term of abuse (and as a statement of fact). This passage is effective, if only because it employs a debatably relevant, historical analogy.

Buchanan’s political and historical godfather is perhaps Charles A. Lindbergh, who in 1941 thundered,

The same groups who call on us to defend democracy and freedom abroad, demand that we kill democracy and freedom at home by forcing four-fifths of our people into war against their will. The one-fifth who are for war call the four-fifths who are against the war the “fifth-column.”… They know that the people of this country will not vote for war, and they therefore plan on involving us through subterfuge….Since this country will not enter war willingly, they plan on creating incidents and situations which will force us into it (qtd. in Cole 54-55).

Our governors will dupe the American people into war. It began with the sinking of the Maine and continues to this day, as our present administration “creates incidents” such as pretending to find WMD in Iraq or intelligence that connects Saddam Hussein with Osama bin Laden. The passage of UN resolution 1441 created a “situation” that forced us into war. This is another familiar trope - riddled with conspiratorial whispers as it is.

Was Lindbergh even more prescient than he could have known? Theories that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had advance warning of the attack on Pearl Harbor, but decided to let it happen anyway in order to drum up support for US involvement in the war, still pervade the thought processes of many serious critics of American power. A similar theory posits that President George W. Bush knew about the attacks on the World Trade Center ahead of time, could have stopped them, but allowed them to go forward in order to rally the American people behind war. Those who believe that the United States is capable of anything, no matter how insidious, study speculation as such seriously.

Lastly, Lindbergh points out how wars that purport to promote democracy abroad, invariably “kill democracy and freedom at home.” This contention is easier to demonstrate in spite of the fact that the word “kill” is exaggerated metaphor. Civil liberties are restrained – to an extent - when America goes overseas looking for fiends to obliterate.
In 1917, radical critic Randolph Bourne weighed in on whether or not America should go to war in Europe:

…but if war comes it will not be Congress that will do the fighting. The editors will not do the fighting; nor will our bellicose lawyers, bankers, stock brokers and other prominent citizens, who mess at Delmonico’s, bivouac in club windows, and are at all times willing to give their country’s service the last full measure of conversation. No, the people themselves will do the fighting, and they will pay the bill. In death, in suffering, in sorrow, and in taxes to the third and fourth generations, the people who fight will pay (qtd. in Kazin 71).

Similar to Lindbergh’s construction in many ways, this is an even more direct appeal to “the people” against a financial, over-privileged and minority elite. ‘You will die for this war, and your kids will pay the bill!’

However, this last part about ‘war swelling government debt’, could contradict Emma Goldman’s stated argument against war and imperialism. For if commercial interests and riches are the real motives - and they are to be gained from involvement in war and imperialism - how is it that a monstrous debt will emerge from that process? Either imperialistic schemes via war bleed the American economy dry or they allow the economy to grow. Which is it? The rebuttal: the great majority of Americans never benefit from the wealth acquired through imperialism and/or war – only a small percentage of the landed elite and businessmen reap the spoils.

Historical novelist and essayist Gore Vidal provides us with a sweeping summary of many antiwar arguments:

The liberal majority of the country were painted as racist dullards who would not take part in profitable foreign adventures for fear of being killed. The word “isolationist” became synonymous with Southern racism and rural backwardness…Two deadly wars were fought. From the first we got, aside from the dead and wounded, fifteen years of the prohibition of alcohol…as well as an all-out assault on the Bill of Rights…From the Second War we got a permanently militarized economy… (America 11)

Included here is the point that democracy suffers at home as a result of war, similar to what Lindbergh argued prior to the Second World War. The ten-year imprisonment of Eugene Debs for violating The Sedition Act combined with the ruthless persecution of America First leaders after the Second World War began provides us with ample evidence to support this contention. Furthermore, Vidal challenges a couple of assumptions here in regards to terminology, specifically with two words, “liberalism” and “isolationism” – a crucial subject that I will grapple with shortly. An absence of a common understanding of the meaning of words, after all, renders most discourse fruitless.

The next noninterventionist argument involves a broader critique of our country – the effort to Americanize the rest of the world. Thomas Fleming - an influential, though not well known, right-wing critic of American power - quips, “This degraded Western Elite will not be satisfied until the entire world is a Disneyland replica of San Diego” (Hitchens and Caldwell 359). Many insist that America is attempting to remake the world in its own image. Fleming is an “isolationist” critic of war, but he makes the pacifist as well as the moral and cultural relativist case against intervention. Relativists and isolationists oppose any type of “meddling” in the affairs of other nations. Hostility from both the left and right to organizations like the United States Peace Corps and other “development” projects furnish testimony to this. Any exportation of western culture is viewed as imperialism. The exploration of American colonial studies in academia, where the disastrous effects of imperialism are exposed, has triggered a wave of relativist thought on relating to the rest of the world. But one need not subscribe outright to relativism in order to believe that America should mind its own business, anyway.

Of America’s most recent imperial enterprise, left scholar Noam Chomsky explains,

A massive assault on a Muslim population would be the answers to the prayers of bin Laden, and would lead the U.S. and its allies into a “diabolical trap” as the French foreign minister put it…Nothing can justify crimes such as those of September 11, but we can think of the United States as an “innocent victim” only if we adopt the convenient path of ignoring the record of its actions and those of its allies, which are, after all, hardly a secret (17 and 35).

And,

The fires had not yet gone out at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a year ago, before the War Party had introduced its revised plans for American Empire. What many saw as a tragedy, they saw instantly as an opportunity to achieve US hegemony over an alienated Islamic world.

Actually, Buchanan is responsible for this last passage, but is it difficult for anyone to imagine Chomsky sending the same message, if in somewhat less dramatic language? (The War). There are two points made here: blowback and opportunism - the latest left-right critique of war. America will exploit September 11 to justify the bombing of Muslim countries in what amounts to a merciless pursuit of its own perceived national interests. But this will only have the effect of exacerbating terrorism and violence on a global scale. Americans will become less safe as a result of heightened threats and retaliation - now more inevitable than ever. Buchanan invokes the phrase “War Party” - first used by Philip LaFollette, the son of progressive, independent presidential candidate Robert La Follette who received 17% of the national vote in 1924. It is now a common term of description employed in both “right” and “left” antiwar circles.

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The Trouble with Isolationism and Pacifism

I am reluctant to use the words “isolationist” and/or “pacifist” to describe anti-war and anti-imperial resistance in any serious manner. The former has been mangled and mistreated to the point that it no longer has a comprehensible or consistent meaning, and the latter does not accurately characterize most American left – especially the populist left - opposition to military endeavors. I still use the terms, but only as frames of reference.

It seems that the word “isolationist” first appeared in the American lexicon during the war with Spain, when Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan dubbed anti-imperial critics of the war as “isolationists.” In 1901, the Oxford English Dictionary defined the word as “one who favors or advocates isolation. In U.S. politics one who thinks the Republic ought to pursue a policy of political isolation” (qtd. in Buchanan, A Republic 161).

If one interprets the word “isolation” literally, it can easily be argued that almost nobody has ever supported “isolationism” in any aspect of social or political life, including the domain of foreign affairs. Even if one accepts the term to mean relative isolation, historians such as Bill Williams and others have demonstrated that the American government has never pursued a foreign policy that could be considered isolationist in any absolute or relative sense. And, dissent to American expansionism and/or interventionism almost never manifests itself as advocacy for political, cultural and/or economic isolation. This includes the nineteenth-century, when America quadrupled in size, and the 1920s and 30s, when opposition to the League of Nations was falsely viewed as isolationism (Williams, The Tragedy 111).

“Isolationist” is a term of derision used to subdue complaints about an interventionist or claimed “internationalist” foreign policy. Dissent is dehumanized, as it is branded with this pejorative title and other insulting labels like xenophobe, nativist, peacenik or anti-American dupe. The word “isolationism” is employed to dismiss opposition to war as mere ignorance and naivete. Very often, any perceived non-liberal ideas – sometimes associated with noninterventionism in the realm of foreign policy – are often portrayed as a threat to the liberal ethos and the American way of life. Louis Hartz and Richard Hofstadter wrote about how Americans have developed a paranoid and vindictive streak, which acts irrationally in the face of imagined threats. For Hartz, Americans lash out severely at any ideas suspected of being “illiberal.” For Hofstadter, it is the populist impulse that is the most irrational force within the context of this liberal ethos. This irrational force can emerge as both pro- and anti-war.

To complicate matters further, “isolationism” takes on multiple, contradictory meanings. It is now used to describe belligerent and stubborn administrations, such as the obvious example of President George W. Bush. The current administration refused to sign international agreements like the Kyoto Protocol, while rejecting the establishment of the International Criminal Court, believing that American interests would be adversely affected by these institutions. Bush also invaded the sovereign nation of Iraq without approval from the United Nations - another sign of the administration’s inclination to buck the international community. Yet, America and Bush are clearly not politically isolated; rather, our government is quite possibly more engaged and entangled in the affairs of other nations than it has ever been. More fitting descriptions of the type of behavior practiced under Bush might refer to ‘hubris’ and ‘unilateralism’. The administration might also be said to be involved in exploiting populist sentiment to pursue an elite agenda. Politically successful elitists usually pretend that they are actually populists.

This relates to American exceptionalism, which makes great allowances for seemingly hypocritical or duplicitous behavior as conducted by our leaders. Actions are rationalized on the basis that the ends justify the means. The American cause is too important to worry about annoying details. Pseudo-populism underpins all this. Americans are allowed to have it both ways because, “we were meant to transform history,” gloats John McCain, a popular senator and Bush ally, in reflecting the popular legend that America is both unique and superior to other nations.

When the term “isolationism” is applied with equal fervor to Bush and someone like Pat Buchanan, a leading critic of Bush’s military endeavors, one becomes even more skeptical of the term’s utility. Like leftists Chomsky and Vidal, Buchanan has opposed every US military intervention since the end of the Cold War. Certainly, Bush and Buchanan cannot both fit the “isolationist” handle, as if it were some all-encompassing term used to describe every configuration of a disagreeable foreign policy. However, Buchanan’s current views do mirror those of the individuals that were labeled isolationists throughout the twentieth century, both left and right, and this is the aspect of the discussion I find most engaging.

The term was actually accepted for a while because its negative connotations were not yet universally affirmed. Gore Vidal explains:

The word “isolationist” has been revived to describe those who would like to put an end to the national security state that replaced our republic a half-century ago while extending the American military empire far beyond our capacity to pay for it. The word “isolationist” also has very sinister overtones. In the late ‘30s and ‘40s, many Americans – and I was one – were isolationist…There is now a myth that isolationists were pro-Hitler and anti-Semitic. This is nonsense. Practically every socialist in the country, starting with Norman Thomas, was an isolationist, while agrarian populists, like Senators Wheeler and Nye, tended to be weary of foreign wars and entanglements (America First?).

Hofstadter, very critical of Bryan and populist “opposition” to war, would agree with Vidal’s assessment. Hofstadter adds that the only authentic opposition to the First World War came from “isolationists” and “pacifists,” not the populists (The Age 272).

Because it is so commonly misused to assassinate character, historians and social scientists should consider discarding any further use of the term “isolationist.” Applying the word liberally or haphazardly, without regard to its historical significance, is either an act of carelessness or an act of outright deception.

“Pacifism” is another problematic term. An Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines pacifism as, “the theory that peaceful rather than violent or belligerent relations should govern human intercourse and that arbitration, surrender, or migration should be used to resolve disputes” (Moseley) (emphasis added). This paints too broad and fuzzy a stroke, as almost all non-pacifists and pacifists alike would agree with this ideal. Regardless, it is doubtful that the bulk of leftist protest against war and imperialism emanates from people who consider themselves pacifists in any real sense. Marxists, socialists, Trotskyites, anarchists or simply republican, anti-imperialists are more prevalent than, or at least more vocal than, the American Ghandis.

As a subject of inquiry, several distinct categories have been formulated to describe pacifism as a doctrine. For our purposes, there are two main categories – absolute and conditional pacifism. Essentially, one can conservatively interpret ‘absolute pacifism’ to mean that no State-run war can ever be justified, even in cases of self-defense. Whereas, conditional pacifists are willing to support State-run defensive but not offensive wars. Then, it all becomes a matter of perception, as the conditional pacifist embraces virtually the same position as the so-called isolationist.

Former Senator Rush D. Holt of West Virginia is a paragon for the convergence of left and right noninterventionism. Holt was elected in 1934 as a Democrat, best described as both an isolationist and a pacifist. He was neither a literal isolationist nor an absolute pacifist; he believed in fighting only when directly attacked on the homeland. And “His isolationism was determined chiefly by his abhorrence of war” (Coffey 2). Holt collaborated and mingled with socialist Norman Thomas, but opposed the New Deal because it ignored individual liberties in favor of “autocratic” social programs. In 1942, Holt lamented,

If this country is committed to the policy of forever policing the world, we have lost the war. To win this war does not require us to follow Roosevelt and Wilkie into internationalism. The international crowd is a motley group. It contains New Dealers, communists, anglophiles, bankers, and all these individuals can control. They are coordinating their program to silence any opposition (qtd. in Coffey 8).

(Of course today, the word “international” has an almost universally agreeable ring to it, regardless of where one stands on matters of war and peace).

Because of the nebulous and conflicting nature of the two terms - isolationism and pacifism - I prefer the broader, more accurate term “noninterventionism” as a tool to analyze opposition to American aggression abroad, even if it is itself imperfect. Now, I can turn to the history of noninterventionist thinking in American life.

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Part Two of this series will appear on Friday, June 13th. Click here for a list of sources.

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Mark Grueter lives in New York City, where he is pursuing his master's in Liberal Studies at the New School University's Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science.  He can be contacted at grueter4@yahoo.com.

© 2003 Me Three