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Nothing New in Foreign Fights
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Even Pat Buchanan, the three-time presidential candidate most often identified as a contemporary advocate of “isolationism,” rejects the idea that the nation ever cowered behind its Atlantic and Pacific “water walls.” In his provocative, beautifully written book A Republic, Not an Empire (1999), Buchanan argues:
The idea that America was ever an isolationist nation is a myth, a useful myth to be sure, but nonetheless a malevolent myth that approaches the status of a big lie… What is derided today as isolationism was the foreign policy under which the Republic grew from thirteen states on the Atlantic into a continent-wide nation that dominated the hemisphere and whose power reached to Peking… To call the foreign policy that produced this result ‘isolationist’ is absurd. Americans were willing to go to war with the greatest powers in Europe, but only for American interests. They had no wish to take sides in European wars in which America had no stake.
Donald Kagan makes a similar case in Dangerous Nation (2006), insisting that many Americans remain misled or ill-informed about our purportedly isolationist past:
This gap between Americans’ self-perception and the perceptions of others has endured throughout the nation’s history. Americans have cherished the image of themselves as by nature inward-looking and aloof, only sporadically and spasmodically venturing forth into the world, usually in response to external attack or perceived threats. This self-image survives, despite four hundred years of steady expansion and an ever-deepening involvement in world affairs, and despite innumerable wars, interventions and prolonged occupations in foreign lands… Even as the United States has risen to a position of global hegemony, expanding its reach and purview and involvement across the continent and then across the ocean, Americans still believe their nation’s tendencies are toward passivity, indifference and insularity.
This misconception helped to produce one of the common (and ignorant) indictments of the Iraq war, with angry critics of Bush’s policy emphatically insisting: “This is the first time in history we ever attacked any country that hadn’t attacked us first.” In fact, virtually all our major wars began without some clear-cut enemy attack on American soil: the French and Indian War, the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, Korea, Vietnam, and the First Gulf War engaged the armed might of the nation based on incidents or interests, but not in response to sneak attack or mass assault. In 230 years of history only the Civil War (where Lincoln cleverly lured southern forces into the initial bombardment of federal property at Fort Sumter) and World War II (where Japan struck at precisely one of those outposts of empire in distant Hawaii that anti-imperialists often decry) brought our forces into battle in response to blatant enemy strikes.
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The Bedford Falls Experiment
After the Cold War, American power represents the one indispensable element in sustaining hopes for an ordered and peaceful world. Christopher Hitchens writes:
The plain fact remains that when the rest of the world wants anything done in a hurry, it applies to American power. If the “Europeans” or the United Nations had been left with the task, the European provinces of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo would now be howling wildernesses, Kuwait would be the 19th province of a Greater Iraq, and Afghanistan might still be under Taliban rule. In at least the first two of the above cases, it can’t even be argued that American imperialism was the problem in the first place. This makes many of the critics of this imposing new order sound like the whimpering, resentful Judean subversives in The Life of Brian, squabbling among themselves about “What have the Romans ever done for us?”
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The best way to put America’s place in the world in proper context is to call to mind a famous sequence from the most beloved Hollywood movie of them all.
In It’s a Wonderful Life, small-town banker George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) contemplates a Christmas Eve suicide before guardian angel Clarence provides the ultimate life-affirming vision. He provides the disheartened hero with a dark, dysfunctional view of the town of Bedford Falls as it would have been if he’d never drawn breath, the community taking shape without his good deeds and benevolent influence. With that sharper perspective, George can go home to his loving family to celebrate the holiday with gratitude and joy.
Those who condemn the United States should perform a thought experiment involving a global “Bedford Falls vision.”
Imagine that the United States had never become a world power, or never existed at all.
Would the ideals of democracy and free markets wield the same power in the world?
Would murderous dictatorships have claimed more victims, or fewer?
Would the community of nations strain under the lash of Nazism, Communism, or some vicious combination of both?
Would multiethnic, multireligious democracy flourish anywhere on earth without inspiration from the groundbreaking example of the USA?
Would the threat of jihadist violence and resurgent Islamic fundamentalism menace humanity more grievously, or not at all?
No one can provide definitive, authoritative answers to such hypothetical questions, but merely confronting the questions should help put the American role in more complete perspective. Just as George Bailey’s view of an alternative reality convinced him that “it’s a wonderful life,” even the briefest contemplation of the world without America should persuade us that “it’s a wonderful nation” — and an indispensable boon to all of humanity.
Michael Medved
“America is an Imperialist Nation”
The 10 Big Lies About America
