Like all good lefties, I cut my teeth in progressive politics learning all about the horrors of America’s massive military industrial complex.
In one of my very first college classes ever at the local community college, a passionate instructor who spent his spare time organizing peace marches against the Iraq War made sure each of his students left his class well-versed in America’s overinvestment in defense spending and underinvestment in well, everything else.
20 years ago I had zero appreciation for the reasons why America had amassed such tremendous military might. Like everyone else, I found America’s disproportioned military budget to be one of our country’s greatest sins.
It was only 18 years later, after I undertook my exhaustive study of world history that I came to fully understand the antecedents that led American presidents of both parties to leave something called isolationism behind and lead America into creating by far the world’s most powerful military.
Instead, administration by administration, America fully embraced the concept of internationalism by building and continually reinforcing a military apparatus larger than the next ten countries combined. One large enough to “police” the entire world.
So, before before you dig into this incredible conversation with Politico national security reporter Alexander Ward about his new book The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore American Foreign Policy After Trump I want to be sure you have a solid working definition of both these concepts:
Isolationism: a policy of remaining apart from the affairs or interests of other groups, especially the political affairs of other countries.
Interventionism: Interventionism is characterized by the use or threat of force or coercion to alter a political or cultural situation nominally outside the intervenor's moral or political jurisdiction.
In short, in the early 20th century, isolationism became the dominant attitude among Americans who came to believe U.S. involvement in World War I was unnecessary, a product of messing in affairs isolationists believed had no impact on Americans and killed thousands of American men.
The use of the word ‘believed’ here is intentional because as appeasement (isolationism) failed to stop Hitler’s aggressive plans to occupy and rule Europe it became obvious how war and turmoil abroad impacts Americans. Then the surprise attack by Japan on Pearl Harbor put a finer point on it: America ignores the rest of the world at its own peril.
The rest, as they say, is history.
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