Internationalist & Isolationism
Internationalist liberals, Isolationism and the Balkan War, May 99
Budget politics: Triangulation revisited, By Dick Morris
As pressure to intervene mounts from the international
community for ground troops to intervene in Kosovo, American politicians would do well to
remember the depth and breath of isolationism in the United States. Never defeated
at the polls, it simply went out of fashion as a political movement, abandoned by
Democrats in the face of fascism, and by Republicans in the face of communism.
Intensive polling on the extent of isolationism shows its deep hold on much of
America. About 15 percent of our people are determined internationalists who follow
overseas developments carefully and are deeply committed to global justice. They are the
core constituency for deeper involvement in the Balkans.
Another 45 percent back foreign involvement as long as they do not entail
significant casualties or cost. But a full 40 percent of American voters want no overseas
commitments at all. Thus, any international action has the capacity for only the
slenderest of majorities — if all goes well.
Isolationism is divided roughly equally between the political parties. Among
Democrats, the isolationists tend to be Midwestern and Western liberals in the old school
of George Norris of Nebraska and Bob LaFollette of Wisconsin. Among the ranks of the GOP,
they are white ethnic reactionaries in the cast of Pat Buchanan who are only temporarily
liberated from America firsting by their fear of communism. Now that the threat from the
left has faded, their true isolationism is resurfacing.
During the Vietnam War, internationalist liberals, turned anti-war, comforted
themselves that they had a majority of Americans behind them. As Eugene McCarthy, Robert
Kennedy and, later, George McGovern rolled to victory after victory in Democratic
primaries, it seemed the nation had veered to the left. It hadn't, as Nixon showed. The
isolationists had come out of hiding and voted with the peace movement to end the war.
If the United States is taunted into ground involvement in Kosovo, it will unite
the Midwestern and Western left with the Catholic right against our intervention. The
legacy of LBJ will be repeated and another successful domestic presidency will be lured to
the rocks by its internationalist minority.
In World War II, Winston Churchill warned of a land war against Japan in Asia,
saying that it was the military equivalent of going into the water to fight the shark. He
could have had the Balkans in mind as easily.
In the Second World War, Hitler's invasion of Russia was postponed by two months
because he was mired deep in the Balkans chasing Tito around the mountains. The Balkans
swallowed up a score of German divisions before Hitler was finally able to attack Russia
in late June, rather than in April as he had hoped. The delay, of course, brought him
face-to-face with the Russian winter as he lost the race to Moscow.
There is an idealism and a spirituality afoot in America. Our prosperity is
leading us to look beyond our meal tickets and see the poverty and pain of the rest of the
globe. This hopeful humanism and applied spirituality is the world's best hope. The best
way to crush it would be to squander that idealism, as the optimism of the ‘60s was
dissipated, in a costly and pointless foreign war.
The message for Clinton — if the bombing doesn't work, go home and give up.
Dick Morris is a former political consultant to President Clinton, Sen.
Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and other political figures.
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- NATO's War of
Aggression Against Yugoslavia
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