Charles Beard, properly understood.

• Author: Bacevich, A.J.
• Position: Isolationism

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.

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.

Facts that did not fit well with the image of the Good War were invariably discounted as irrelevant or insignificant, if not ignored altogether. That Britain was not a frail island democracy but an empire created by conquest and maintained by force; that the Allies had turned a blind eye to the plight of European Jewry until the horror became impossible to ignore; that in aligning themselves with Stalin the Allies made common cause with a tyrant every bit as vile as Hitler and his henchmen; that the "strategic bombing" campaign--culminating in the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki--entailed the wanton slaughter of noncombatants; that the involuntary repatriation after V-E Day of as many as two million Russian POWs back to the Soviet Union consigned them to death or the Gulag: these and other uncomfortable facts--not hidden away in secret archives but known to all who cared to contemplate them--never dented the integrity of the story-line that portrayed the war of 1939-1945 as a Manichean struggle fought for the sake of democracy, decency, and respect for human rights.(2) Now, if the revival of internationalism which entry into World War II ignited was right, then opposition to internationalism was wrong. Thus, one adjunct of efforts to draw the proper "lessons" from World War II was a campaign to discredit those who in the years leading up to the war not only questioned the wisdom of American involvement in Asian and European quarrels but, more fundamentally, presumed to question the very premises of internationalism itself.

During the 1930s, such skeptics had been reviled as "isolationists."(3) According to their detractors, isolationists came in two variants. They were either un-American radicals or ignorant provincials. In the words used by Roosevelt in one of his radio fireside chats, they were "the enemies of democracy in our midst--the Bundists and Fascists and Communists and every other group devoted to bigotry and racial and religious intolerance."(4) Or they were rubes and crackpots, clinging to an outmoded belief that the United States could cut itself off from the rest of the world. By extension, and quite quickly, isolationism became a codeword summarizing the central theme and fundamental defect of all American foreign policy prior to 1941. To the heirs of Woodrow Wilson, those who had been oblivious to the spread of evil and indifferent to moral and humanitarian calamity in the 1930s represented everything that was deficient about traditional American diplomacy.

Only by the loosest conceivable definition of the term, however, could "isolation" be said to represent the reality of United States policy during the first century-and-a-half of American independence. A nation that by 1900 had quadrupled its land mass at the expense of other claimants, engaged in multiple wars of conquest, vigorously pursued access to markets in every quarter of the globe, and acquired by force an overseas empire could hardly be said to have been "isolated" in any meaningful sense. As the historian Albert K. Weinberg observed as early as 1940, isolationism "was the coinage, not of advocates of reserve, but of opponents seeking to discredit them by exaggeration."(5)

During and after World War II, the historiography of American diplomacy became a literature of...