At the very moment President Obama is looking to thrust the United States ever more into global affairs, the American public is turning more isolationist and unilateralist than it has at any time in decades, a survey released yesterday said.
The Pew Research Center poll found that a plurality of Americans - 49 percent - think the United States should "mind its own business internationally" and leave it to other countries to fend for themselves.
It was the first time in more than 40 years of polling, Pew said, that the ranks of Americans with isolationist sentiment outnumbered those with a more international outlook.
First off, I want to correct a thing or two with article. This writer is using biased language. And any report based upon biased language can't be an even handed one.
The correct term is "Non-intervention", not "Isolation". For those of us who really do support a non-interventionist approach, isolation is the last thing on our mind.
The term "Isolationist" is really an epithet, coined by Alfred Mahan, an American imperialist who was also an advisor to one our most imperialistic presidents: Theodore Roosevelt.
The American imperialist just couldn't keep his mind off of other nation's business, and kinda liked the idea of kicking weaker nations around just because they could. The Spanish-American war was a prime example, and not one of America's finest achievements.
In contrast, the writer refers to the "Interventionist" mindset as "Internationalist". Sounds grandiose, don't it? (Hey, I'm an internationalist.) To me, that's almost like equating slavers to labor organisers. It's only a positive until you look into the details.
It doesn't matter who you voted for, you are still supporting an interventionist mindset. Both sides in this country do it while they cater to their interest groups or are just engaging in hubris.
I primarily consider myself a non-interventionist. Other nations troubles should remain their own troubles, and not our own. But it eventually happens every time we involve ourselves where we don't belong: it comes back to bite us in the ass in both money and blood.
Interventionism became the path of no return that led to the Spanish-American War, and every war since then. It has cost us gazillions of dollars that could have been better spent on more domestic pursuits. It
And it has cost us the little day to day freedoms we should be taking for granted, like the ability to board an airplane without submitting to a cavity search.
Personally, I don't think it's been worth it. And maybe, though I hold out little hope, enough of my people will see it this way as well, and some sanity just might prevail for a while.
4 comments:
Well stated.
I was just reminded the other day, and again reading this, of the rhetorical war the pro-abortion cadre won before the mainstream thinkers even realized there was an aggressive movement happening ... dehumanizing the child in the womb by removing all references to killing, baby, child, life, and casting "women's rights" as including "choice" and "freedom" as long as they had abortion ...
a sad day for feminism (many feminists spoke out early and vociferously against abortion "rights" activists at the turn of the last century) and humanity in general.
And yes, you have captured cleanly this additional frustrating change in the language children are now brought up with.
I don't think I'm expressing a position here, but the connection between non-interventionism and isolationism is simply this: If you don't intervene, your overseas commercial interests are at the mercy of enemies abroad, whether those enemies are states, state-supported, or increasingly ambiguous in their relation to states. To not intervene would be to discourage our commercial interests from spreading abroad. In effect the trend is both commercially and militarily towards isolation because both commerce and military action are restrained closer and closer to home (or, rather, the 'civilized world').
Do I understand the opposition clearly? Personally I can't say whether intervention actually encourages or discourages attacks on our commercial interests...
but intervention clearly encourages attacks on our citizenry.
Tully, that can (and does) go both ways. (Equitable) commercial interests abroad tend to discourage international belligerence. It is, for example, inconceivable that we would end up in a war with China, because our economies are so intimately intertwined at this point that neither nation could harm the other without doing grievous harm to itself. This is a good thing.
Even in the Middle East, if you look at the countries where oil revenues have actually filtered down and helped form a solid middle class (UAE, Qatar, Kuwait), you'll note that these generally aren't the incubators of violent radicalism in the area.
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