The non-interventionist school of foreign policy in America gets quite a bad rap. It is perceived as the foreign policy of the coward or of the selfish American that does not want to spread the blessings of democracy across the world because of the cost. Until recently I was a non-interventionist; now, apart from wishful thinking, I no longer hold such a view. And not because I think the problem with non-interventionism is the perceived wrongs as noted above. Rather, I believe that in an evermore-interconnected world the USA must play an active role at promoting stability. However, how we promote international stability must be clearly defined and parameters set, less the American government take too much license and exert too much control over the affairs of the world.
First I wish to address exactly what non-interventionism is not. Contrary to right wing propaganda, non-interventionism is not isolationism. Isolationism is the belief that the USA must avoid foreign alliances and wars and must promote an economic policy of protectionism, limiting foreign business ability to sell goods in America. In contrast, non-interventionism, while firmly believing in the avoidance of entangling foreign alliances and becoming involved militarily in overseas problems, does not support the protectionism of the isolationist. Non-interventionism is strictly a belief addressing the issue of foreign policy, and, often as not, those who support non-interventionism praise free-trade and diplomatic engagement with other countries as well.
The ideal model for the non-interventionist would be the tiny country of Switzerland. Centuries have trudged by without the Swiss being at war with anyone. However, they have continued to be active members on the world economic playing field, becoming one of the most prestigious, if not the most prestigious, banking location in the world. Ideally, non-interventionist would want to follow the Swiss model. And yet, justification for this system does not stop with the Swiss. Indeed, it starts with the founding fathers.
The founding fathers of America were strong non-interventionist to one degree or another. As Thomas Jefferson once proclaimed, “Commerce with all nations, alliance with none, should be our motto." Washington, in the same vein declared, “The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations, is, in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible.” Thomas Paine also stated, “Not a place on earth might be so happy as America. Her situation is remote from all the wrangling world, and she has nothing to do but to trade with them.” Astutely observing the history of Europe, the founding fathers were all too aware of the war and destruction that sprung from military and political alliances. America also found herself in a unique position to fulfill this foreign policy philosophy as well: she was separated from the other European empires by the Atlantic Ocean that acted as a massive moat; she was essentially unassailable. The philosophy espoused by the founding fathers was supported by the conduciveness of geography. America’s first foreign policy was one of non-interventionism.
However, as the world has changed, so has America’s foreign policy. No longer is the giant moat, the Atlantic, the pond as the British call it, an impervious defense against attack. If September 11th has demonstrated anything it is this. Less the fear monger grab hold of this new reality and run with it, though, I will point out that America’s moat is still formidable. Any sort of military invasion of the USA is still an absurdity. Yet while America’s geographical and subsequent strategic reality has changed, its power and standing in the world has grown vastly as well. Because of this reality one may be rest assured that under no circumstances are we going to see a military invasion of the USA. But there is an implication to this reality. If I may use Spiderman’s life purpose line (yes I know its a cliche): with great power comes great responsibility. Being the world’s sole superpower has flung America into the role of being the world’s central bastion of strength for freedom. This is an important responsibility that must be taken seriously. We find ourselves compelled to not only encourage freedom and democracy, but also resist the expansion of forces hostile to freedom. And yet America must be wary in allowing itself to succumb to a Sovieteseque domination of the world by enforcing our system of government upon the nations of the world; we must resist forcing freedom upon the hapless people of the globe no matter how noble that may sound. This is the fine line: supporting freedom around the world while at the same time not becoming a hostile and dominating country in turn.
After America’s involvement in WWI, thanks in large part to the idealism of Woodrow Wilson who wished to bless the world with American democracy, the precedent for further excursions back into the entangling alliances of Europe and the world was set. No longer would the non-interventionism of the founding fathers be the rule of the day. If WWI was the initial force that broke down the original American foreign policy, it was WWII that sealed the fate of the non-interventionist. After WWII there was no question that America had become a world power, and that it was willing to get it hands dirty in foreign affairs. Following directly on the heels of WWII, the Cold War would become the new preoccupation of American foreign policy, as America would take on the Soviet Union, the other world super-power. How should the USA deal with this new threat? Some hot-heads suggested that once the USA had beat the Germans and the Japanese that they should just keep on rolling and take out the Soviets, who they accurately anticipated as the next big threat to the USA. If the USA’s marriage to the Soviet Union during WWII had been a marriage of necessity to beat Hitler, the subsequent divorce was because they simply could not live in the same house. The hot-heads wanted to see their once dear mate, the Soviets, expelled from the premises, ground into the dust; however, they did not win out. Instead, a man by the name of George Kennan would set forth the foreign policy of post-WWII. America’s position in the world had changed and its new guiding light in the realm of foreign policy would be George Kennan’s strategy of containment.
George Kennan was an American adviser, diplomat and political scientist. As WWII came to a close he wrote the famous “Long Telegram” from Moscow in 1947, which was followed by another article “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” in 1947. In these two articles Kennan correctly identified the very real reality that America and the Soviet Union could not coexist; they were at irreconcilable odds; success for the Soviet was the destruction of the West’s way of life and the implementation of Communism across the globe. He also correctly identified the inherent weaknesses within the Soviet system. Economically and politically, the Soviets were on a path that would lead them to defeat not victory. An economically and politically free society would outperform and outlast any totalitarian micromanaging system. Time was in the American’s favor. Consequently, Kennan proposed that, instead of a grand cataclysmic battle, the Americans aught to wage a protracted, sophisticated, and less heated war against the Soviets in order to contain their ambitions and wait for them to die of their own internal conflictions; America would wage a cold war and wait for the inevitable demise of the debunk Soviet system. Advising his way into history, Kennan would set America’s post-WWII foreign policy.
This policy would become the cornerstone of the Truman Doctrine. Essentially, the Truman doctrine propagated the strategy of backing both financially, and at times militarily, free democratic nations against potential communist subversion. As Truman stated himself, the purpose of his doctrine was to “support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” [wiki par. 1 ]The initial manifestation of this strategy occurred when the USA funded and gave military support to both Greece and Turkey in the immediate post-war days in order to keep them from falling into the Soviet sphere of influence as the rest of Eastern Europe had. As time progressed, however, further strategic actions consistent with Kennan’s containment policy were taken. While the USA was supporting Greece and Turkey, it was also engaged in what would become known as The Marshall Plan. Torn and bloodied by the Second World War, Western Europe was in a less than desirable post war situation and was frail. A Soviet takeover was a very real possibility. As a result, the USA began pouring in the cash. It was bad enough that Eastern Europe resided under the jackboot of the Soviet, if Western Europe fell to the Soviet menace than America would be left alone to face the red threat of an expansion-minded enemy. The cash helped prop up Western Europe, particular Berlin which had been subjected to a Soviet embargo. The Marshall Plan became instrumental in containing Soviet ambitions in Europe.
It is one thing to feed resources into a potentially threatened country, it is another when the enemy proactively invades another country. In the summer of 1950, North Korea, a proxy the Soviets and Communist Chinese, invaded South Korea. The casus bel: North Korea did not like the results of South Korea’s democratic election. Becoming involved on the principle of containment, and backing their own proxy South Korea, the USA actively engaged in its first conventional war since World War II. Lasting three years, the American managed to push the North Koreans back to the forty-ninth parallel. Kennan wrote in his “Long Telegram” that the Soviet Union was “Impervious to logic of reason, [but] highly sensitive to logic of force.” [Long Telegram par. Containment] In North Korea, the USA waged a war and used the logic of force to expel the Communists and upheld South Korea’s right to national self determination which did not consist of a communist system of government.
Deft diplomacy is also a vital element to the theory of containment. Unfortunately, during the cold war, the Right Wing of American politics, in the euphoria of their fear of the Soviets, often conflated world wide communism into one threat —particularly China and Russia, the two largest communist nations. But what they so importantly misunderstood was that the communist nations of the world were not a homogenous group. They were not in allegiance. Indeed, it was China that christened the Soviet Union with disdain as The Great Bear. China’s ancient distrust of Russia did not melt away simply because both nations happened to share the same form of government. Indeed, communist nations are and were just as subject to inter-ideological competition as capitalistic nations. When President Nixon went and visited China a huge breakthrough was achieved, one that utilized the idea of containment by amplifying the separation between the Soviet Union and China.
The brilliance of Kennan’s system was that it refrained from doing the very thing that the Soviets were doing, spreading their ideology by force, while at the same time keeping the Soviets under wraps and thwarting them at every turn and letting their own debunk economic and political system kill them in the process. The Marshall Plan and similar actions was a cornerstone of this strategy by backing democratic and free nations against the menacing Soviet threat. Using military force in South Korea was also in line with the philosophy of containment as it protected South Korea from the blatant invasion of Communist North Korea, thus protecting the integrity of free South Korea against the tyranny of North Korea. Last but not least, the use of diplomacy to drive wedges between communist nations (as opposed to lumping them into one big “bad guy” category) helped keep the two largest Communist powers from sorting out their differences. Another side-affect of this global geopolitical strategy is that it limits the actions of the government. Nation invasion and rebuilding, by far the most costly foreign policy adventure, is cut out in favor of less obtrusive, low profile wars. This in-of-itself is worth notice.
At the beginning of this article I stated my desire to find a principle of limitation on the America governments license to exert control and power over the world. There must be a philosophy that allows us to determine what we should do in the face of a given situation. Obviously, we cannot treat every threat that has a 1% chance of happening as a certainty. We simply cannot economically handle such a policy. While a whole other paper could be written to address the current foreign policy of America, suffice it to say that we have diverged from Kennan’s foreign policy quite a bit in principle. Nation invasion and reconstruction, in the vein that North Korea wished to invade South Korea is now the rule of the day. Make no mistake communism versus democracy is not a relativistic critique. Democracy and freedom is far more preferable to totalitarianism. However, that matters very little in a world that is hostile to invasions and the use of force to place democracy on an unassuming nation. This idealistic strategy of nation building harkens back to the foreign policies of both Woodrow Wilson and FDR in an idealistic vision to recreate the world, to recreate it, essentially, in the imagine of America. The cost of this idea, as championed by the current administration, is that we have become economically depleted and globally disliked. Two invasions latter, we are no longer in a position to offer a viable military threat to Iran and our standing in the world has taken a great blow. Consequently, the idea of Kennan’s containment is coming back into vogue, if only because the current geopolitical strategy is untenable economically and diplomatically speaking.
Non-interventionism is not coming back. It is dead. America is no longer in a position to ignore the going ons of the world, and like it or not, we have become active participants in the geopolitical world. The current idealistic foreign policy is in it’s death throes as it can no longer sustain the cost in blood and treasure that its philosophy requires. We can look for a new way or we can use the philosophy of containment which brought to an end the Soviet Union. Some suggest that such a strategy is no longer viable because terrorists and rogue regimes are uncontainable. Much could be said about this, but let me finish with what has already been stated in this paper by Kennan: “[The enemy is] Impervious to logic of reason, [but] highly sensitive to logic of force.” If there is one thing that everyone on this planet understand it is the logic of force, the threat of death and loss of life. America’s power is real and potent, it would do us well not to forget this, for we can be sure, the enemy has not.
