>> Welcome to Conversations on the
Future of Democracy, a series sponsored
by the John W. Kluge Center
at the Library of Congress.
I'm John Haskell, director of the Kluge Center.
Today we are discussing Charles
Kupchan's recent book Isolationism:
A History of America's Efforts
to Shield Itself From the World.
Charles is senior fellow at the Council
on Foreign Relations and professor
of International Relations at Georgetown
University's Walsh School of Foreign Service.
He's also with the Government
Department at Georgetown.
He served as special assistant to the president
and senior director of European Affairs
at the National Security Council.
Prior to that, he worked on policy
planning at the State Department.
Charles is the author of several books and
articles on international and strategic affairs,
but perhaps most importantly, he was the
Kissinger Chair in International Relations
and Foreign Policy at the
Kluge Center in 2006 and 2007.
Charles, welcome back.
>> Very, very good to be with you, John.
Thanks for hosting this, and I'm always
happy to restore my ties to the Kluge Center.
>> Yes, and we're proud to have you back.
Now, as the bio suggests, very short bio of your
accomplished career to date, you're an academic,
and you've had experience in government.
What got you interested in looking at
the history of isolationism in the US?
>> You know, I think the idea began to percolate
in my head in the 1990s when I first served
on the National Security Council under
President Clinton, and I witnessed that coverage
of foreign affairs in the newspapers and
the broadcast media was falling off a cliff
that the US government was reluctant
to get involved in the Balkans,
and I began to ask myself is
the robust internationalism,
this readiness to project
power around the world,
hundreds of bases in all quarters,
is that potentially vulnerable?
Might we be going back to a situation
more similar to pre-World War II
to then post-World War II America in which
the American polity may want to ease off,
put on the brakes, begin to be less
involved in international affairs.
Then we get to 9/11, and that
inward turn stopped on a dime,
and everybody's focused on the Middle East.
Everybody is talking about violent extremism
and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
That proves to be a somewhat temporary
resurgence in internationalism
because those wars don't go so well,
and we begin to see by, you know,
the second term of George W. Bush a sense that
we may have bitten off more than we can chew.
And that's when I began to say you know what?
I think I do want to write a book about the long
history of American statecraft and spend a lot
of time thinking about the early era of American
statecraft and not just post-World War II,
and I have to say that when I began to go back
and look at the early years, the founding era,
the 19th century, the early 20th
century, my head kind of exploded.
I didn't recognize the nation that I
was reading about and that's because,
like you, I grew up in Cold War America.
I went to graduate school in the 1980s.
I started teaching and writing
before the Berlin Wall came down.
I grew up in a fish tank where the United
States essentially was running the world.
And so when I started to read about what
came before Pearl Harbor and I realize
that the United States more or less ran
away from the world, it was an eye-opener,
and that's when I really began to say
I'm going to delve into this history.
And then the final piece of the story
here would be Donald Trump's election
in which I'm already working on this book.
I started it before I went
into the Obama administration.
I'd probably written about three chapters.
Then I come out of the NSC.
I pick up the book again
right after Donald Trump says
in his inaugural address it's America first,
right out of the America First Committee
that was formed to block
American entry into World War II.
And so that just confirmed my
sense that a book about the history
of American isolationism is needed, and I would
also point out, John, especially since you're
at the Library of Congress, surprisingly enough,
there is no such book that exists on the shelf.
There is no assessment of American isolationism
across the long durée [assumed spelling].
There are books about the '30s.
There's books about 1898.
There's books about Washington's Farewell
Address, but this, as far as I know,
is the first book that looks at the
trajectory of American isolationism
from the founding era through Trump.
>> And, you know, and what you say
starting in the founding era is essentially
that isolationism had a lock on American
grand strategy for roughly 150 years.
What does that mean exactly, and why was that?
>> Well, you know, in the America that you and I
have been living in, internationalism has a lock
on American grand strategy, at
least until Trump came along.
And anybody who was an isolationist, you know,
Patrick Buchanan, Ron Paul, a few other voices,
they were treated as if they were whackos, and
they were marginalized in American politics.
And in many respects, prior to
1941, the opposite was the case.
Those people who counseled American detachment
from geopolitics abroad ruled the roost,
and those people that were arguing
for expansionism were the ones
who were seen as wack jobs.
Now, let me just define what
I mean by isolationism.
The US was from the get-go very
interested in international trade.
Its economy was depending
upon international trade.
It was culturally engaged.
Our diplomats were wandering around the country.
Our missionaries were very active, especially
over the course of the 19th century,
but the one thing that the
United States didn't do
until 1898 was extend its strategic
reach beyond North America.
Yes, we grabbed a bunch of land from Mexico.
We tried several times to take over
Canada unsuccessfully, I might add.
But we did listen to what George Washington
said in 1796 in the farewell address,
and that was we want commercial connections with
everyone, political connections with no one.
And so over the course of the 19th century,
we did basically bat down one proposal
after another to take over
islands in the Caribbean,
to expand into Latin America,
to expand in the Pacific.
This was out of bounds.
We then, in 1898, temporarily acquire
a host of overseas territories.
We go to war in 1917.
Wilson took us into World War I.
Neither of those events went over very well.
There was a backlash against an American
decision to forsake geopolitical detachment.
And that backlash set the stage for the '20s and
the '30s when the United States retreated back
to Western Hemispheric isolationism, and
that's why I argue that the first long period
of American grand strategy really runs from
1789 to 1941, and it comes to a screeching halt
when Japan bombs Pearl Harbor,
but it's important to keep in mind
that Roosevelt didn't take the country to war.
It was Japan that took the country to
war by leaving Roosevelt with no choice.
>> Yeah, and before we get to
that huge turning point, you know,
I think you're perhaps implying --
and certainly a lot of people think
that to call someone an isolationist
is an epithet,
and are you trying to rehabilitate the concept?
You've been criticized for that to some degree.
How do you respond?
>> You know, I'm not an isolationist.
I don't believe that the United States
should come home and pull its troops
out of its major foreign commitments
although I do think we need
to downsize the military footprint in the Middle
East where a series of wars in Afghanistan,
Iraq, Syria, Libya have not gone
particularly well, but I would stay firmly put
in the major strategic theaters
of Europe and the Asia-Pacific.
But I do think that it's important
to rehabilitate isolationism
to restore a measured debate
in the United States.
I think we need a searching debate about
American foreign policy moving forward
because I do believe that our foreign
commitments, the nature of our forum
and ambition is now out of kilter with our
political will, with our means and purposes,
and I think Donald Trump recognized that.
I think he basically sensed that for
many Americans, not just Republicans,
Democrats alike, they felt there was too much
world and not enough America, too many wars,
too much free trade, too many immigrants,
too many international pacts and commitments,
and Trump said, okay, I'm
going to fix that problem.
I'm going to pull back.
In my personal assessment, he went way too far.
He didn't just pull back.
He took a wrecking ball to
the world that America made.
But one of the things I try to do in the
book is say, hey, let's not see everyone
who counsels restraint, or pulling back,
or tending our own garden before we tend the
gardens of others -- Let's not call them some,
you know, isolationist as a dirty word.
Let's remember that for much
of American history,
avoiding geopolitical commitments
abroad served the country well.
We rose rapidly during the
second half of the 19th century.
We became a global power after the
Civil War largely because we invested
in domestic development:
canals, ports, railroads.
We weren't building battleships.
We weren't taking over colonies.
We were focusing on the home
front, and in that respect,
isolationism did allow us to
rise in unmolested fashion.
So what I'm trying to do
in the book is to say, hey,
let's not throw out the baby
with the bath water.
Isolationism in the 1930s was a
big mistake, but at other times,
staying out of trouble abroad makes good sense.
And so one of the punchlines of the
book is let's draw the right lessons
from both the isolationist era of American
statecraft and the internationalist era
of American statecraft to
find that middle ground,
that sweet spot between doing too little, which
is where we certainly were in the interwar era
and doing too much, which is where I think
we've been for the last couple of decades,
and it's precisely why a lot of Americans
are saying, hey, it's time to focus more
on the home front, and I think that's
exactly what Joe Biden is going to do.
At least through the first
year of his presidency,
he will focus like a laser
on domestic priorities.
>> You know, and one thing that strikes me
as, you know, you brought up that somebody
like Pat Buchanan was regarded as a --
or is regarded as an isolationist
and some other politicians.
Some would regard it as somewhat ironic that
the slogan that George McGovern used when he ran
for president in '72, which was come home
America was borrowed in part by Buchanan,
you know, McGovern being on the -- what was
then the far left and Buchanan being considered
on the far right and that used
essentially the same slogan.
Now, there were differences perhaps in nuance,
but it's not like isolationism or a tendency
to retrench is necessarily a
province of the right, right?
Isn't that correct?
>> Yes, for sure.
And I think it's important to distinguish
between the debate that we had in the '70s
and the debate about isolation and
retrenchment that we had prior to the Cold War
because there was a kind of swing back in the
isolationist direction in the early Cold War.
Senator Taft and a few others really began
to put the brakes on as the Cold War heated
up as we entered the Korean War,
as Truman decided to deploy a large
number of American troops in Europe.
There was a senator named Bricker, who
tried to pass a constitutional amendment
that would have tied the
hands of the administration,
the executive branch in conducting
foreign policy.
And they got traction in the early 1950s, but
they were basically silenced by 1953, 1954.
That's, I think, effectively when one can say
that the hardcore traditional isolationists were
effectively marginalized in American politics.
The next time you see the return of a serious
call for easing off on foreign engagement is
after the Vietnam War and, yes, George
McGovern talked about come home America.
There were others who were saying it's time to
avoid the kinds of overreach and overextension
that we see in Southeast Asia, but they
weren't really saying let's cut and run.
They weren't saying let's go back to either
North American or Hemispheric isolation partly
because the Cold War was still going on.
And in many respects, you see Richard Nixon and
Kissinger adopt that strategy by relying more
on our partners abroad to do the
fighting, by pursuing détente
with the Soviet Union, to
try to ratchet down tension.
So this was what I would call a
retrenchment, a pullback, not a serious move
for the United States to pull out
of its major strategic commitment.
>> So as we became internationalist, as
some would say, liberal internationalists,
post-World War II, and this continued through
the Cold War and, you know, our involvement all
over the world for all kinds of reasons.
You know, in reading reviews of your
book, sometimes people make a distinction
between liberal internationalism
and imperialism.
Where is the line between those two?
Is that a reasonable way to
think about these things?
>> Well, imperialism, to me, means formal
rule over the territories of other peoples,
and imperialism was in vogue until World War II,
and the United States, really, from the get-go,
going back to the founding era, committed
itself to an anti-imperial strategy.
After all, we began life as a colony.
We were part of the British Empire.
We fought a war in the 1770s to break away
from Great Britain, and thanks to the French,
we succeeded in doing so, and over the course
of the 19th century and end of the 20th century,
we did try to defeat imperialism by pushing
the British, and the French, and the Russians,
and the Spanish out of the Western Hemisphere,
and we largely succeeded in doing so.
We did then flirt with becoming
an empire ourselves in 1898.
We kicked the Spanish out of Cuba, and we went
on to effectively establish military occupation
of Cuba, and Puerto Rico, the
Philippines, Hawaii, Guam, and Samoa,
and the Wake Islands, and it didn't go well.
It was a big anti-imperial movement.
The United States doesn't have imperialism
in its DNA, so I reject the idea
that the United States has been imperial.
I guess you could -- You know, we could have
an argument here about Western expansion.
The US did expand westward in an ambitious and
ruthless way, and it pushed Native Americans
onto reservations, in some
cases eradicated them, so that,
to me, is a separate conversation.
But when it comes to the internationalism
of the post-World War II era,
I see it as American hegemony, as American --
what we call Pax Americana
-- but not imperialism.
That really was more or less
delegitimated at the end of World War II,
and I think one of the magical
moments in American history is
that Roosevelt took the realist
traditions of American foreign policy,
i.e. let's project power on
the basis of national interest
and the idealist traditions coming out
of Woodrow Wilson, anti-imperialism,
self-determination, spreading
democracy and married those two.
And it was that marriage of power and
partnership of realism and idealism
that I think was the key ingredient of the
bipartisan consensus behind internationalism
that emerged in the 1940s and that really
ran through the era of Barack Obama.
>> So earlier, you talked about, you know, one
of the inspirations for your book was that,
you know, you see that there's been a public
reaction against overreach, and, in fact,
you agree that we may have
overreached internationally.
In the book, you talk about -- and I
want to get you to develop that thought
because the book you advocate a judicious
retrenchment from the kind of level --
the level of liberal internationalism
that we've been engaged in.
Why don't you develop that a little bit?
>> Sure. Let me back up for a second and talk
a little bit about American exceptionalism
because American exceptionalism
is a big part of the story.
And one of the things that I found
as I began to research the book
that I found very surprising is that
until the 1940s and really World War II,
American exceptionalism was on balance, the
unifying theme buttressing isolationism,
and that's because going
back to the founding era,
the narrative was that the United States
could protect its unique experiment in liberty
and prosperity only if it
stayed out of trouble abroad.
It didn't want to repeat the mistakes
of Europeans and become an empire.
It didn't want to rule over others.
The founders feared that if we
built a large army and navy,
it would come at the expense
of American liberty.
It would threaten tyranny.
They believed that high levels of taxation would
come at the expense of American prosperity.
Another element of exceptionalism
was a racial element.
One of the reasons that we did not expand
into the Caribbean, into Latin America,
into the Pacific was that there was a
sense that American exceptionalism stemmed
from our exceptional people, and those
people were Anglo-Saxon Christians,
and there was reluctance to bring into the body
politic more non-whites and more non-Christians.
Now, that notion of American
exceptionalism really flipped
to the opposite extreme in World War II.
It begins to change in 1898, and I would point
out that when President McKinley took the nation
to war in 1898, he said we are doing this
to spread the American experiment abroad.
We are doing this in the name of humanity.
He said the annexation of
Hawaii was Manifest Destiny
and that we were occupying the
Philippines to save the Filipinos
and convert them to Western Christendom.
So the move from inward focus to
outward focus, exceptionalism,
began in 1989, but it didn't stick.
It does stick in 1941, and
really ever since then,
the notion of American exceptionalism has
justified ambition abroad, justified going out
and trying to change the world and
bring our republican institutions
and republican values to everyone else.
I think that in -- There were some areas
of overreach, areas of doing too much
in the Cold War, but in my mind, this narrative
of exceptionalism really began to lead us astray
after the Berlin Wall came
down, and I think it's in part
because American power was unchecked.
It's in part because there was a sense that
history was ending, that the founders' ambition
of spreading republican values
had finally arrived.
We could complete that mission, and we therefore
went riding off into the sunset to bring China
into the WTO, Russia into the G8.
We expanded NATO and the European Union.
We went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq thinking
we could turn them into Ohio, and, John,
a lot of those efforts didn't pan out, and so
it's my sense that it's really in the 1990s
that our ideological ambition
began to lead to overreach,
and that's why I think today what
we need is a judicious retrenchment.
We need to focus more on our core interests, in
the heartland of Eurasia, Europe, and East Asia.
We need to stop wars of choice in the
Middle East, which have not gone very well,
and importantly, we need to reclaim
the American experiment at home.
One of my takeaways from the Trump era is there
a lot of unhappy Americans in this country.
There a lot of people who are
uncomfortable with their economic plight.
They're uncomfortable with other aspects
of American politics, and I think we need
to go back to the notion that
foreign policy begins at home
and that repairing American foreign policy
requires repairing American democracy.
And in many respects, that will
require investment, not in Afghanistan,
but investment in Arkansas,
schools, infrastructure,
worker retraining, pandemic,
vaccines, healthcare.
These, to me, are the overriding
priorities even as we need to keep a hand
in the global governance and in
shaping the balance of power abroad.
But right now, I think our first, second,
and third priorities are all at home,
and that's why I think the United States needs
to ease off on foreign ambition as a means
of getting our grand strategy back into
equilibrium with our means and purposes.
>> What do you expect of the Biden
administration along these lines?
>> Well, you know, I guess I'd put it
in broad historical terms in this way.
You know, as you and I have been discussing,
1789 to 1941 was the sort
of era of isolationism.
Forty-one through Barack Obama was the era of
internationalism, liberal internationalism.
Trump, I think, marks a turning point.
He goes back to America first of the 1940s, but
as I mentioned earlier, he vastly overcorrects,
and, yes, the isolationism, the unilateralism,
the protectionism, the racism that he exhibited,
they were all part of America's
earlier statecraft.
He was not so much a bolt from the blue
as he was a return to earlier traditions,
but I think he went way, way, way too far,
and so I expect the Biden administration,
number one, to restore the United States as a
team player, which is critical because many,
many, many of our challenges today are global
in nature: climate change, global health
and the pandemic, cybersecurity,
nuclear proliferation.
We can't solve those problems by going it alone,
by withdrawing from the Paris Climate
Agreement, by withdrawing from the WHO.
And Joe Biden has already reversed
course on those important issues,
and he stated he will again go back to
being a reliable ally and a team player.
Another key -- and we talked
about this just a minute ago --
restoring faith in American democracy and
restoring the United States as an exemplar.
As Biden likes to say, "We'll lead
not just by the example of our power,
but by the power of our example."
And, you know, for me, it has been more
than distressing and upsetting to be living
in the United States for the last four years at
a time when the President did not really abide
by the traditions of republican
government of the rule of law
of treating issues on the basis of fact.
So I think we're going to go back
to that tradition that really began
in the earliest days of the republic.
I do see some areas where there
will be more continuity than change.
One, I believe that Biden will continue to
pull back from the Middle East, in part,
because Republicans and Democrats
alike agree that it's time
to end the forever wars and
downsize the footprint.
Let's do more diplomacy, but
less fighting of land wars.
Two, I think you'll see continuity on China,
where I think the Biden administration will
focus on Chinese behavior, on its expansionism
in the Asia-Pacific, and also on trade, where I
think Biden is right to try to form an alliance
of democratic states to stand
up to China on trade
because there has not been
a level playing field,
and China's entry into the WTO has cost millions
of manufacturing jobs across
the Democratic west.
And then finally, I think
there will be a continued focus
on making American foreign policy work better
for average Americans, and
that is in part about trade.
It is also part about lightening the
load and getting allies to do more.
And so in that respect, I think what Biden is
doing is not turning his back on the Trump era,
but learning lessons from the Trump era,
and recognizing that the country does have
important domestic challenges ahead to focus
on resolving those domestic challenges
because our foreign policy
depends upon our domestic strength,
depends upon a bipartisan willingness
to engage in foreign affairs.
And so I think he's right to say let's
start refurbishing our foreign policy
by building from the inside out.
>> So the last thing I wanted to ask you is to
give an elevator pitch on why our viewers need
to read your book to understand the
current state of American foreign policy.
What's your short version?
>> You know, the short version is that
I think Americans need to know more
about American history from 1789 to the
present and not just from 1941 to the present.
When I look at the debates that we are
having today about foreign engagement,
about the Middle East, about trade, about
the relationship between immigration
and national identity, I see so
many parallels to the big debates
that the country has had from the get-go.
And so in addition to reading my own book, if I
were to encourage readers to try to get smarter
on where we are as a nation today, I
would say go read the Federalist Papers.
Read Washington's Farewell Address.
Read the big debates that
we had in 1919 and 1920
about whether to enter the League of Nations.
They're enormously, enormously instructive about
the current predicament of the United States,
and what I've tried to do in isolationism
is to pull together those historical stories
and link them to the present day because
I do think it's important to have a volume
that is accessible, that is there for
Americans and also others to read.
And I think it's important not just
for Americans given the outsized role
that Americans play in the world, I think we
all need to know more about American history
and how the nation's past is
likely to inform its future.
>> That's all the time we have today, Charles.
Thank you for joining us.
It was great to have you
back with us at the Library.
>> John, thank you very much for hosting me,
and I appreciate your interest
very much in the book.
>> Yep, we'll see you soon.
Thanks.