First as Tragedy, Then as Farce: The Return of the Internationalist-Isolationist Divide

[Celerity]

Why elite foreign policy debates of the future will resemble those of the distant past

https://theliberalpatriot.substack.com/p/first-as-tragedy-then-as-farce-the

Over the next decade, America’s foreign policy debate looks set to return to the contest between internationalism and isolationism that prevailed before World War II. That’s despite the otherwise strong and notably bipartisan support in Congress and among the American people for helping Ukraine defend itself against Russian aggression. Voices proclaiming themselves realists have very publicly worried about the possibility that Ukraine might beat back Moscow’s aggression and called on the Biden administration to hold Kyiv back while negotiating a settlement favorable to the Kremlin.

Never mind that these proposals misread the Putin regime’s goals, months after Putin and his cronies have made their war aims crystal clear in various public statements. These arguments and the generally respectful treatment they’ve received from most elite foreign policy quarters reflect the imminent return of the old division between internationalists and isolationists that roiled America’s foreign policy debates in the first half of the twentieth century. It’s important to remember that this divide doesn’t fall sharply along partisan or ideological lines; indeed, it’s not hard to find internationalists and isolationists among conservatives, moderates, and liberals and Democrats, Republicans, and independents.

Why has the debate between internationalists and isolationists reopened after nearly eighty years in abeyance? In part, the Cold War suppressed instincts toward isolationism on the far right – instincts that never truly went away and later bubbled up in the form of President Donald Trump. On the left, factions sympathetic to the Soviet Union were anathema to mainstream liberals until the Vietnam War; after, New Left isolationists made up an important but not terribly influential part of the Democratic Party’s coalition. The end of the Cold War did not lead to a resurgence of isolationism in the 1990s, nor did the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – at least initially.

It took until the mid-2010s for isolationism to reemerge on both left and right. President Obama had campaigned in part on his opposition to the Iraq war, and though very much willing to use force he only did so with extreme reluctance – to the point he congratulated himself for failing to respond against the Assad regime in Syria when it massacred thousands of Syrians with sarin nerve agent. Similarly, an exhausted and demoralized foreign policy establishment could see little in the way of positives from a decade and a half of intense exertion in the Middle East. When Donald Trump seized the Republican nomination for president in 2016, he vowed to pursue a belligerent, isolationist foreign policy under the slogan “America First.”

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