Professor Robert W. Tucker's precisely written 1972 booklet "A New Isolationism - Threat or Promise?" opens with a defense of the word "isolationism", a term that not even isolationists like. Of course, it never meant completely cutting America off from all forms of foreign contact. It's best expression was, of course, Washington's Farewell Address. Tucker wants to reclaim the word. Even if "new isolationism" were not adopted tomorrow, it's return to the mainstream debate, Tucker maintains, would be an improvement.
Tucker doesn't argue about the rights or wrongs of WW1 and WW2 interventions. He defuses these historical arguments by simply ceding them to interventionists. He accepts both as probably the correct action for their time. Or, at least, he doesn't "argue the toss", to use a cricketing expression. He's interested in the future, not the past. But his concession of this historical point has a sting. He observes that where 'the old isolationism' continued into the 1930s perhaps surviving as a prejudice that had "outlived it's usefulness". "Today", writing in 1972, Tucker remarks, and I paraphrase, "..it is interventionism that has "outlived it's usefulness"".
Why is this so? He concedes that during WW2 the critics of the "old isolationism" may have been right. America's historical isolationism may indeed have been based on an unacknowledged European balance of power configuration that kept the Royal Navy in the cat bird seat. That, plus the impracticality to Britain of policing the long US-Canada border (and not just "anglo-American friendship") may have been the other even more rarely acknowledged leg of that old system. When the old system was seriously threatened, America abandoned 'the old isolationism' and intervened. But by the 1970s, Tucker argues this old conception a European Balance of Power, the common basis of both the old isolationism and 'new'interventionism was itself obsolete due to nuclear weapons and other regional developments in Europe and elsewhere. So post-Vietnam, it's time for a "new isolationism."
Tucker argues that nuclear weapons enhance the physical security of the homeland and undermine the need for the old balance of power. The old strategy was a hangover from the pre-nuclear era when physical security depended on mass conventional forces. Worse yet, the hangover was the main source of nuclear risk. It was the combination of nuclear retaliatory forces and rival Eurasian interventionisms that greatly increased the doomsday risk in the Cold War. Tucker is no anti-nuke dove and sees the US campaign against nuclear proliferation, something that both liberals and conservatives agree on, as inherently interventionist and having more to do with the pursuit of world hegemony than world peace. With "nuclear proliferation" now being used as fighting words with Persia, this is timely.
Tucker explicitly distinguishes physical security and "more than physical security". Some of the later simply reflects idealism and self image. This is a perceptive distinction and thoroughly confused in most debates. Arguments based on "more than physical security" were often used by interventionists to argue that even an isolated but secure America would eventually succumb to some totalitarian darkness from abroad. This contrasted to the more immediate and direct argument of the isolationists that war itself contained even more aggressive seeds of repression. It would seem to me in historical hindsight that while both arguments were overly pessimistic, the isolationist case does present with the more accurate description of actual symptoms, if the disease did present in somewhat more attenuated form than when originally diagnosed.
Tucker briefly, but effectively, debunks the argument (made by pro- and anti-interventionists alike) that US interventionism is driven by "economic necessity". His examines the numbers for foreign trade and investment during the peak year of the Vietnam war and just demolishes the necessity argument. It just doesn't add up, at least when cast in "macro-economic" terms. If anything Tucker's main weakness here is his failure to fully account for the costs of maintaining an global military posture and the associated "civilian" expenditures. He undestates his case. The dollar cost of interventionism is much higher. Tucker's decisive use of quantitative economic arguments is not matched by an "economics of politics" or "public choice" analysis of how commercial considerations influence interventionist policy making. Democratic politics, like economic decision making, is often driven by "micro-economic" decisions made on the margins with well oiled interests able to exert leverage greater than the unorganised mass. This confusion between micro and macro considerations often gives a half credibility to the "radical critique".
Some years after this book was produced Tucker seemed to forget his own good advice. During the "oil crisis" of the seventies Tucker shocked fellow neo-isolationists and urged a US invasion of the Arabian coast as a response to the OPEC ban. Tucker saw petroleum as a "vital strategic resource" and thus beyond the workings of the normal laws of markets. Luckily Tucker's poor advice was then ignored, market forces broke the the OPEC ban and petroleum blackmail remained more a phantom of strategic nightmare than a daytime reality. Unfortunately with the US currently involved in what looks suspiciously like a Tuckerite occupation of Iraq, it is not clear this poor advice hasn't been stuck in some Pentagon in-tray for forty years.
Tucker also briefly but effectively debunks the anti-interventionist bona fides of radical left critics of US world power. This group opposed the program of the current "power elite" but their main domestic goal was to replace that power elite. Tucker sees their apparent isolationism as merely provisional and tactical. Tucker argued that presumably they would support invasions to their of their own liking, presumably once they had fired the power elite. This argument ties in with his critques of New Left foreign policy published elsewhere. Again this strikes me as somewhat prescient. Many Vietnik leftists have gone on to join the formerly despised power elite. And not all were merely co-opted. What have they delivered us? Not a new isolationism but a new interventionism. "Humanitarian intervention". It's using stealth bombers to enforce multiculturalism in Kosovo and predator drones for feminism in the Hindu Kush.
Tucker's volume is compact. A mere 125 pages of well written, well thought out argument. If "interventionism" had outlived it's usefulness by 1972, before Nixon's detente, it's a frankenstein zombie in post-Soviet 2009. A fascinating book for those interested in understanding the roots of the current predicament.
- Hardcover: 127 pages
- Publisher: Universe Books; 1st edition (1972)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0876631715
- ISBN-13: 978-0876631713
- Package Dimensions: 7.7 x 5.2 x 0.4 inches
- Shipping Weight: 4 ounces
- Customer Reviews: 2 customer reviews
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,026,908 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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