Isolationism
From Wikinfo
Isolationism in general is a national foreign policy of detachment from other nations, as opposed to interventionism. Most often it refers to what is popularly believed to have been the foreign policy of the United States of America from the formation of the Monroe Doctrine to about World War II. During this time, U.S. policymakers refrained from actively engaging in the affairs of other major powers, particularly those in Europe, to the point that U.S. entry into both World Wars occurred long after each war began. However, because the United States had been actively interventionist in the affairs of its Latin American neighbors and had acquired a colonial empire in East Asia during this period, the term "isolationist" misleading.
In the years immediately before the Second World War the organizers of the America First Committee sought to exploit the irresponsibility at the core of isolationist sentiment. Following that war, American policymakers assumed a much larger role in managing the planet's or the least the West's interests and took an active interest in global foreign affairs, becoming heavily interventionist in parts of the world outside of its traditional involvement in the Western Hemisphere and East Asia.
The isolationist policy of the United States has been widely criticized by other countries such as France and Germany, while an interventionist policy by the United States has also been criticized particularly by highly populated Muslim countries such as those in the Middle East.
The conservative Republican commitment to continuing United States involvement in the Vietnam War under Richard Nixon has been explained as, in part, a reaction to the failures of the Midwestern isolationist wing of the Republican Party to anticipate the necessity for American involvement in the Second Wolrd War.
Many historians today believe that the view of the U.S. as isolationist is exagerated. There is a long list of treaties and agreements sigend with powers around the world. The United States also had some of the world's most extensive global economic ties long before the Second World War.
Further reading
- Robert Mann (historian). 2001. "A Grand Delusion: America's Descent into Vietnam." New York: Basic Books. ISBN 0465043690.
References
- Adapted from the Wikipedia article, "Isolationism" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isolationism, used under the GNU Free Documentation License
