Isolationists are missing the point

President Biden’s speech of unwavering support for the Ukraine and Israel has caused great enthusiasm in both countries and among their supporters.

Within America, however, the cheering was less universal. Large swathes of the population don’t think America has a dog in either fight.

Hence they don’t understand why American taxpayers have to dump billions into other people’s wars. They also justifiably fear that, should push come to nuclear shove, America’s activism may make her the principal target.

Though expressed in an up-to-date context, this current resistance to US internationalism is par for the historical course, as is its opposite. Isolationism is one of the two principal trends of American exceptionalism; proselytism is the other.

Both are rooted in the doctrine of manifest destiny cogently enunciated when the first batch of English settlers created the Massachusetts Bay colony. In 1630 their leader, John Winthrop, delivered an oration in which he alluded to Matthew 5: 14 by describing the new community as a “city upon a hill”.

He didn’t have to complete the quotation. His Puritan listeners knew the rest by heart. Hence they grasped the implication: “Ye are the light of this world.”

Both the isolationists and the proselytisers share this messianic vision of America. The difference is that, while the former believe America should shine her lantern mainly on herself, leading the world by example, the proselytisers also think she should be more hands-on in helping the outside world see the light.

Isolationism is more apparent within the ranks of the Republican Party, proselytism among the Democrats, although the overlap is significant. Thus it’s no historical accident that it was under Democratic administrations that America entered both world wars.

Here I must remark that people and governments tend to feel about wars differently. Most people don’t like them, but most governments do. This isn’t hard to understand: war is the ultimate expression of the innate statism of modern states, the sustenance on which they build up their muscle mass.

Like babies, all modern states were born covered in blood. No modern state, whenever it came to life, was delivered without the midwifery of a formative war.

In the USA, it was the Civil War – more so even than the Revolutionary War. In Russia, ditto. In Spain, ditto. In France, the post-revolutionary Napoleonic wars. In Germany, the Franco-Prussian War. In Italy, the war of liberation from Austria.

And collectively, modern statism vanquished finally and irreversibly as a result of what was perhaps the greatest, and definitely stupidest, crime in modern history: the First World War. In all instances, people died so that the modern state might be born and then grow, weaned on the congealing red liquor.

Yet the old adage says there is an opportunity in every crisis. Two democratic presidents a generation apart saw in the two world wars an opportunity for America to fulfil her messianic mission,

Woodrow Wilson knew America wouldn’t become the world’s dominant empire after the war unless she flexed her muscles during it. But he also knew that he could never get a declaration of war through Congress, however pliant, without risking a backlash from the largely isolationist electorate.

Wilson’s better bet was to provoke Germany into precipitous action, so that the people would feel they were the wronged party. That purpose was achieved by encouraging the House of Morgan to float war loans for Britain and by sending a steady flow of supplies across the Atlantic, which left the Kaiser’s Germany no choice but to launch unrestricted submarine warfare. Wilson got what he wanted.

After the war America was rewarded with the intoxication of the Roaring Twenties at home and the status of a burgeoning global power abroad. But then came the hangover of the Great Depression treated with the poisoned tonic of the New Deal.

After Roosevelt’s hasty and ill-advised statist measures had run out of steam, trouble came back in force. By 1938 unemployment was again nearing 20 percent, recession returned, and suddenly even the intellectually challenged realised that the depression had not really gone away. It had merely been camouflaged, and confirmation of this came from unexpected quarters.

Henry Morgenthau, Roosevelt’s Treasury Secretary and one of the principal architects of the New Deal, admitted before the House Ways and Means Committee that the New Deal had failed: “We have tried spending money,” he commiserated.

“We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. I say after eight years of this administration, we have just as much unemployment as when we started… And an enormous debt to boot!”

With the precedent set by Wilson to learn from, Roosevelt knew exactly how to manage a similar situation. The country needed to enter the on-going world war. And if the people and their representatives were likely to prefer peace to war, they had to be left with no choice.

To that end Roosevelt desperately hoped that either Germany or Japan would launch a pre-emptive strike, the sooner the better. Yet Germany wouldn’t come out and play. However, Japan, being starved of essential raw materials by the American blockade, would.

In one fell swoop all America’s problems were solved. Massive production of armaments put paid to unemployment, GDP went up 72 per cent between 1940 and 1945. Perhaps most important, by default the dollar became the world’s reserve currency, which enabled the Federal Reserve to play fast and loose with money supply without suffering unduly painful consequences.

Above all, the US became the unchallenged leader of the Free World, supplanting the British Empire. So were isolationists proved wrong?

Yes and – possibly – no. The two big wars gave America a shortcut to greatness, defined in the crudest terms. She became a superpower able to extend her will to much of the world. She also emerged with the world’s largest and most robust economy, having soared Phoenix-like out of the ashes of the depression. Such was the country’s ascending road charted by two Democratic presidents.

However, that ascendancy was bought at the cost of inordinate centralism, a move towards practically unchecked growth in the power of the central government. Another word for this process is socialism, and America’s body got a large dose of that poison.

Had she stayed out of the two world wars, as so many Americans wanted, she could conceivably have emerged better – if not necessarily greater, as that dread term is understood these days. Here we are entering the valid but speculative area of the ‘What if…”  school of history, which is a journey without an obvious end.

So let’s get back to today’s situation and remark that, for better or for worse, American isolationists have lost the debate. The country can no longer concentrate on her own virtues while looking at the outside world with detached avuncular condescension.

The choices made yesterday determined the choices available today. A great power doesn’t have the luxury of deciding to swap some of its greatness for peace and quiet. Trying to do so would make America part with her superpower status, a craving for which entered the country’s DNA back in the 17^th century, when she wasn’t even a country yet.

Looking on the bright side, those Americans who begrudge the Ukraine and Israel a few billion here and there should brush up on both their history and their economics. They would only have a point if aid were provided in cash. But it isn’t.

Most of it comes as war materiel produced in the US, and the more of it is produced there, the higher America’s GDP, the greater the number of new jobs created, the more voracious the ensuing consumer demand.

Economically speaking, the US has much to gain and nothing to lose by throwing her full weight behind her two allies fighting for their lives against pure evil. She could also improve her moral standing in the world, which is another aspect of global power to keep in mind.

However, the risks involved can’t be gainsaid either. One of them is the possibility of another world war, this time offering few chances for any party to emerge better off. However, even though the history teacher has been made redundant, the lessons are still with us.

The most important one is that appeasement is more likely to cause a war than thwart it. This simple observation applies at all levels, from schoolyard bully to global aggressor. Still, the argument from world war is worth discussing.

Crying over a few spilled billions isn’t. That argument is so inane that one has to wonder if perhaps it’s just shorthand for something else. But we’ll leave this for another time.