HOW REAL IS NEO-ISOLATIONISM?

By John L. Steele

ISOLATIONISM, it would seem, is once again on the rise.

President Nixon has used the term neo-isolationist to describe certain of his senatorial critics who would alter U.S. foreign policy or who seek a greater role for the Congress in shaping it. Once the name of a popular and viable political doctrine, isolationism today--with or without "neo" attached to it--is a pejorative word. It has no real validity in a world of instant communications, internationally linked economies, and nuclear weapons that can bridge continents at Mach 23 speed. Properly speaking, the term suggests someone who would like to disengage the U.S. from the rest of the world and return to a 19th century insularity. No doubt some Americans are experiencing an emotional recoil from foreign commitments, as a result of Viet Nam and domestic troubles. But apart from a small group of myopic radicals totally obsessed with the need for revolution at home, there are hardly any real isolationists left.

The conflict between the President and an influential minority of the present Senate is real; but the heart of the dispute is not isolationism v. internationalism. At issue is a desire to put space and time limitations on the fighting in Indochina, to strike a new balance between the President and Congress in committing military forces to combat abroad, and to avoid further proliferation of U.S. commitments round the globe without congressional sanction. There is also a feeling that the nation's values should be re-examined so that more money will be spent on domestic priorities and less on extravagant weapons systems that may prove to be redundant, provocative or both.

However arguable their proposed alternatives may be, none of the leading Senate critics of the President's foreign policy can be fairly accused of being isolationist. Republican Jacob Javits of New York--the only Senator who has been cited by name in Nixon's attacks--wants to curb the President's war-making powers. But Javits sided with his party's leader last week in voting against Senator Mike Mansfield's amendment to reduce U.S. forces in Europe by half. John Stennis of Mississippi, who shares Javits' views on war powers, is generally the Senate's stoutest defender of Nixon's defense-budget and national-security policies. Mansfield, whose defeated amendment may have seemed isolationist, supports the President's effort to negotiate peace in the Middle East, an enterprise that certainly depends on U.S. power and willingness to use it. Even the most publicized of the Senate doves who want a speedy and definite end to the Viet Nam War--such men as John Sherman Cooper, William Fulbright and George McGovern--are not isolationist in any real sense of the word.

In fact, many of the proposals that White House officials have so casually referred to as neo-isolationist no more deserve that description than does the Nixon Doctrine. First enunciated by the President at Guam in July 1969, it was a major effort to rethink U.S. world policy and lower the American profile abroad. Quite rightly, Historian Manfred Jonas argues that applying the term isolationist to contemporary Senators tends to confuse rather than illuminate their stance. "They earnestly believe that there are limits to America's power," he writes in Isolationism in America, "and that to overstep these limits means courting failure and nuclear war. To call the course they propose isolationism is to misread both the history of the '30s and the record of American foreign policy prior to that time."

From the perspective of the '70s, it is all too easy to dismiss America's past isolationism as inevitably misguided and foolish. As Selig Adler points out in The Isolationist Impulse, the doctrine in many ways is "woven into the warp and woof of the American epic." From the very beginnings of the U.S., immigrants envisioned it as a way to a new existence. "They reasoned," Adler wrote of the colonists, "that God Himself had intended to divide the globe into separate spheres. America was the 'New Zion,' and Providence had severed this 'American Israel' from a timeworn, corrupt and warring continent."

Until the outbreak of World War I, the U.S. consistently followed a policy of isolationism--at least in the all-important sense of acting alone--even as its actual isolation from the rest of the world gradually disappeared. To be sure, the U.S. invaded Canada in 1812, and gradually eliminated the British, French, Spanish and Mexican presence from within its continental borders. It also fought Spain in Cuba and the Philippines. But in all these enterprises, the U.S. took a unilateral stance and confined most of its treaty obligations to such limited matters as fishing and sealing rights, immigration and trade.

These sporadic ventures into international affairs point to a basic ambiguity in American history. On the one hand, there was a desire to keep clear of other continents' internecine squabbles; on the other, an almost mystical sense that America had a mission to spread freedom and democracy everywhere. This evangelistic belief was strongly reinforced by the waves of immigrants, who periodically tried to involve the U.S. in the revolutionary movements of their homelands. By and large, political leaders of all parties did their best to cool this interventionist ardor. As early as 1821, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams was forced to counter a popular enthusiasm for Greece's struggle against Turkish overlordship. While the U.S. would always view sympathetically the struggles of foreign peoples against tyranny, he said, "she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy."

By the closing decades of the 19th century, time began to run out on the traditional faith. U.S. foreign trade doubled between 1870 and 1890. Navy Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, a visionary military strategist, saw the seas as an "open plain" and urged the country "to cast aside the policy of isolation which befitted her infancy." The isolationist past was decisively rejected by Woodrow Wilson's intervention on the Allied side in World War I, but it was revived by the disillusionment that followed his crusade to make the world safe for democracy. The anti-internationalist movement reached a peak of influence in the years just before World War II. Its primary goal was to prevent the U.S. from becoming entangled in the looming war in Europe. Hapless remnants of isolationism persisted for a decade after the war ended, as a score of Senators (most of them Midwestern Republicans) sought unavailingly to defeat such undertakings as the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan and NATO. But for all practical purposes, the doctrine died with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Senator Arthur Vandenberg wrote in his diary: "That day ended isolationism for any realist." The postwar efforts to keep the flame alive were merely, as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. put it, "the last convulsive outbreak of an old nostalgia."

No serious political figure now suggests that the U.S. could or should put aside the burden of global responsibilities it has assumed through necessity and moral conviction. But just how large that burden should be and how it should be borne obviously needs reappraisal. This quest for reappraisal was inspired by Viet Nam. But other factors would have brought it about even without the Indochina conflict.

During World War II, the U.S. acquired a mental habit of considering itself nearly omnipotent and the defender of freedom all over the globe. This self-image carried over into the cold war, when U.S. power was needed to halt Communist expansionism. That stance is no longer possible because reality has changed; the U.S. no longer has a nuclear monopoly, its economic resources have limits, and other nations do not necessarily agree with the U.S. definition of freedom or the good life. Moreover, Communism has become fissiparous and more amenable to negotiated detente.

In this new situation, which has actually existed for at least a decade but which the U.S. is not yet really accustomed to, foreign policy will have to depend less on military force and direct Marshall Plan-style economic heft and more on diplomacy, trade and political maneuvering. French Journalist-Politician Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, among others, has argued that the U.S. will have to choose between continued international power and the building of "an ambitious civilization" at home. For the foreseeable future, the U.S. will obviously insist on both, but Servan-Schreiber is right in asserting that the U.S. will have to rely more on sheer intelligence than sheer force. Secretary of State William Rogers puts it another way; he says that "there are lots of ways to influence people. The force of reasoning and the force of public opinion have a lot to do with influencing nations."

Though Japan and China are bound to play a growing role, for a long time to come the position of the U.S. and the Soviet Union as the world's two nuclear supernations will remain intact. Widely held ideas that emergent or neutralist nations can "soften" or replace the two-power role have proved illusory, as even India learned when Peking's 1962 strikes across the northern mountains brought Indian pleas for military aid from any quarter. East-West ideological battles are bound to continue, though perhaps in abated form, and so will jockeying for political and military advantage. But the two superpowers will carry on laborious negotiations: the Berlin meetings, the SALT talks and the anticipated discussions of mutual force reductions in Europe are examples. This delicate diplomatic work is not helped by Senate efforts to mandate U.S. troop reductions in Europe--or by a hard-nosed presidential response that finds "unacceptable" even a congressional request that negotiations be speeded up.

Most Americans, including most Congressmen, want to prevent American entanglement in future Indochinas. To accomplish that, it is not necessary--or wise--to impose overly stringent and sweeping limitations on U.S. influence abroad. But the nature of that influence must evolve in new ways. Viet Nam should teach us--as it did the French --that modern armies and industrial strength are not effective in all regions of the world or the automatic answer to wars of "national liberation" (even those backed by other nations). Both Congress and the President should jointly re-examine the security treaties and agreements that now bind the U.S. to more than 40 countries.

Many of these "commitments" are more apparent than real, since they cannot be carried out without the approval of Congress. The purpose of these agreements, as the late Senator Walter George once noted, was to deter potential aggressors "from reckless conduct by a clear-cut declaration of our intentions." Often it has been shown that intentions cannot be made all that clear--resulting in misunderstanding by friend and foe alike.

Rather than bog the nation down in the cement of firm treaties, President and Congress might explore less formal but more flexible commitments in the form of diplomatic notes or presidential statements.

As for the nation's military presence, there is no question that the U.S. today has too many troops scattered about in too many places. Even apart from the dollar drain, it is hard to justify the 375 major foreign military bases and 3,000 minor military facilities that the U.S. has positioned all over the globe in recent years. The White House has talked about "reducing our presence," while maintaining our commitments abroad--and Congress should be clued in more to discussions of how this can be done. One specific proposal: Congress could establish a small, select "National Security Committee," composed of members with expertise in military and foreign affairs, that would periodically discuss diplomatic problems with the President on a secret but utterly frank basis. Both Congress and the President can move away from an inflationary, supercostly military procurement policy that seems, at times, aimed more at breaking the Soviets by outspending them than by providing the U.S. with what it really needs for deterrence and defense. Unless this is done, says former Under Secretary of State George Ball, the U.S. economy is in danger of becoming "a Strasbourg goose with an overdeveloped liver."

These problems, as well as such lesser matters as reorganizing foreign aid and restoring the stature and influence of the State Department, require creativity on the part of Congress and the President. The prickly members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee are not alone in thinking that the balance in U.S. diplomatic decision making has tilted too far in the direction of the Chief Executive. Fortunately, there is a fairly recent example of the kind of cooperation needed: the historic postwar collaboration between President and Congress that established the policy of containment against Soviet aggression, the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. Then, as now, the White House and the Congress were controlled by opposing parties. Nonetheless, an exceptionally fruitful relationship developed between Democratic President Harry Truman and a Republican-controlled Congress in which Arthur Vandenberg was the foreign relations leader. Why should any less be expected from a Republican White House and a Democratic Congress?

Isolationism carried into the 20th century is essentially a flight from reality. To label the critics and reappraisers of U.S. foreign policy neo-isolationists is equally escapist. Few things threaten U.S. power more seriously than excessive or misguided intervention; the Viet Nam War has done more than any other factor in recent years to reduce U.S. global influence. Seeking to rationalize U.S. commitments abroad is the very opposite of isolationism, because only such rationalization can restore and maintain the U.S. position in the world.

John L. Steele

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