The myth of the new isolationism.

• Author: Heilbrunn, Jacob
• Position: The Realist - Report

Since September 11, 2001, the United States has damaged its reputation and national security by lurching from one war to the next. Afghanistan, which began triumphantly for the Bush administration, has devolved into a protracted and inconclusive war in which the Taliban is making fresh inroads as American and allied forces hand over security to the Afghan army. Then there is Iraq. It was purveyed by the Bush administration to the American public as a mission that could be accomplished swiftly and smoothly. Neither occurred. Since then, President Obama's self-styled humanitarian intervention in Libya has led to instability, allowing local militias, among other things, to pretty much bring the oil industry to a standstill by disrupting major export terminals. Most recently, it looked as though Syria might be Libya all over again--an American president embarks on an uncertain crusade, and Britain and France join to provide the necessary diplomatic persiflage for justifying a bombing campaign.

But this time a funny thing happened on the familiar path to war. The British parliament, scarred by memories of Tony Blair's bogus campaign for war in Iraq, just said no. A similar development occurred on Capitol Hill. Though Secretary of State John Kerry declared that this was a "Munich moment," no conversion on the road to Damascus took place in the House and Senate. Instead, antiwar Democrats and conservative Republicans made common cause. Faced with a congressional vote in the House and Senate that likely would have been the most humiliating presidential rebuff since Woodrow Wilson lost the League of Nations vote in 1919, Obama pivoted. He acceded to a Russian proposal for a diplomatic solution that may have preserved not only the peace, but also his presidency.

So habituated have America's media and foreign-affairs elites become to intervening abroad, however, that a chorus of liberal hawks and neoconservatives is decrying what it sees as a resurgence of nasty isolationist sentiments. The New York Times' Bill Keller, who previously championed the Iraq War, wrote, "America is again in a deep isolationist mood." After Obama signed off on the agreement with Russia, Richard Cohen fumed in the Washington Post, "Because of Obama's fecklessness--abetted by a Congress that has turned darkly isolationist--the world is now a less safe place." And in the Wall Street Journal, the neoconservative columnist Bret Stephens wrote: "The Syria debate is also exposing...