Go Forth, America, and Withdraw
A Note by Brian Lehrer on #30Issues Week 9
The framing of last week’s issue, “How Isolationist Should the United States Be?” was inspired by the thinking that has landed Trump supporters and Bernie Sanders supporters on the same side against Hillary Clinton.
The liberal version of isolationism comes from the belief that the U.S. throws its military around the world like a bull in a china shop, killing millions of Vietnamese here, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis there, in pursuit of total safety from indirect threats, out of a grotesque feeling of entitlement and a highly inflated belief that we are always on the side of right — not to mention how we use war to prop up our affluent lifestyles through economic domination.
The conservative version of isolationism comes from the belief that the U.S. is too naively altruistic in our foreign policy. So we don’t go to war just to protect and promote our interests (those would be the good wars), we go to war to remake countries around the world in our image. These would be the Bill Clinton era wars, like to stop genocide in the Balkans, overturn a coup in Haiti, and couple emergency famine relief in Somalia with democratic nation-building. And it’s the Obama-Clinton intervention in Libya. This view sees Americans dying for the cultural shortcomings of other peoples — not our responsibility.
The Iraq War scrambled these two camps’ brains and, for now, united them against the liberal and conservative hawks. Conservative hawks who backed the war saw it as well within our rights after 9/11 to preventively topple Saddam Hussein just in case he really developed nuclear weapons, just in case he might have someday shared them with Al Qaeda, and just in case Al Qaeda could have then used them against us. Never mind that Saddam’s relationship with Al Qaeda was slim to hostile.
It’s too easy to forget that there were liberal hawks who supported the war too and that President Bush wooed them aggressively. Liberal hawks saw the Arab world as the last bastion of sclerotic dictatorship and if we could “take out” one big dictator who was truly a danger to “his own people”, play midwife to the birth of a democracy, then benignly get out of their way, all sides would be winners, and democracy would be contagious elsewhere in the Arab (and Iranian) world.
Hillary Clinton had a foot in each camp.
As everyone knows now, the intervention failed miserably on both liberal and conservative grounds. Democracy did not take hold, disproving the liberal rationale for the war. Rather, small-minded sectarians rose to power, the worst being Isis, which has turned out to be even more virulent than Al Qaeda, disproving the conservative rationale for the war.
This is the historical opposite of World War II, in which the U.S. intervened to help save the world, and hung around to help plant some of the world’s most highly-functioning democracies in, of all places, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. But history doesn’t always repeat itself. Sometimes the lessons we think we’ve learned from one big episode of human conflict are not the ones we need for the next. Iraq is a set of new lessons learned, the hard way.
Trump’s “America First” foreign policy echoes the isolationists who wanted to stay out of World War II, who used that same phrase, which came to be discredited when they wound up on the wrong side of history. In the post-Vietnam post-Iraq era, maybe there’s more logic to it. But this is where he parts company with (and squanders a chance to win the votes of) Bernie Sanders progressives. “America First” is a small-minded conservative attitude that positions the U.S. as at once the world’s only superpower and having no responsibility for the well-being of people of other countries who we insist on dominating. Trump’s version of America First isolationism also closes the door on so many people from other countries seeking to come here. His response to the Orlando massacre included a renewed call for a Muslim immigration ban on the grounds that we can’t “prevent the second generation from radicalizing.”
Progressives often believe that the hyper-powerful U.S. should leave everyone else alone. That’s where they overlap with America Firsters. But progressives also think that with great strength and wealth come great responsibility. They believe it matters that the U.S. has five percent of the world’s population and about 30 percent of its wealth, plus about half the world’s military power. It’s an unresolved tension that Sanders himself never clearly defined his position on. The history of both Clintons is of trying to walk that line as President and Secretary of State, often being too restrained for the most hawkish hawks, too aggressive for the doviest doves.
The Trump contradiction is the opposite of the progressive one. He looks past our wealth and power to conclude that the rest of the world is getting over on us and that we’re the bullied underdogs. He wants to build up the military and bomb Isis into oblivion, but rejects the longterm presence and society-building most experts think are required to prevent its return. He has that aversion to long term nation-building in common with President Obama, if for different reasons. But he also thinks the world’s only superpower can run its foreign policy only in its own interest and somehow make more friends than enemies. It’s an illusion many anxious Americans find it comforting to share. But it loudly asserts that we should withdraw and be aggressive at the same time. No wonder we don’t have a clear answer to how isolationist the United States should be.
If you only have 17 minutes, click below to hear a history of the politics of isolationism:
