Once-distinct camps on the left and right are starting to sound similar.
Once-distinct camps on the left and right are starting to sound similar.
W ith House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s recent visit to Taiwan in the face of threats from China and the Senate’s voting overwhelmingly to support NATO expansion for Sweden and Finland, it would appear that there is bipartisan agreement that America needs to take an active role on the global stage.
But that consensus may be a bit of a mirage, as there are ideological forces on the edges of both sides of the ideological divide that would rather the United States influence no place beyond its waters. Perhaps this desire comes from recency bias, isolationists having seen the suffering in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past two decades.
Still, there are those who have longer memories, among them Carrie Filipetti, executive director of the Vandenberg Coalition, a nonpartisan foreign-policy think tank. It takes its name and mission from Senator Arthur Vandenberg, who represented Michigan for over two decades. An isolationist in his early years, Vandenberg was mugged by reality with the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, after which he would work across the aisle to create policies to bolster a strong national defense.
“Politics stops at the water’s edge,” he would famously say.
The Pearl Harbor attack lived in the mind of the generation that would take up arms to fight the Japanese across the Pacific and the Nazis across the Atlantic. Sixty years later, a new enemy would unleash the might of the American military with the September 11 attacks, which Filipetti, then a preteen living in the New York suburbs, told National Review was a formative experience.
“I remember being in middle school at the time and seeing my peers getting pulled out of class with no real explanation,” she said. “We could see the fear on the teachers’ faces, but nobody really described what was going on.”
Filipetti knew, then, that she “wanted to be committed to helping the United States, and most importantly, helping the people of the United States to prevent something like this from happening in the future.”
After graduating from college, she worked at several Israel-centered organizations, eventually securing jobs in the Trump administration in its delegation to the United Nations and later as the deputy assistant secretary for Cuba and Venezuela. Now, only in her thirties, she has recently received the distinct honor of being denounced by the Venezuelan government.
After she did an interview with BBC Mundo in which she “spoke very candidly about our attempts to bring constitutional leadership back to Venezuela,” the Venezuelan government took exception. Deputy Pedro Infante addressed the National Assembly on July 14 and repudiated Filipetti and former national-security adviser John Bolton as “fascist war hawks, equal to rats.”
“I think it’s important that we stand up for what we believe in,” Filipetti said, “that we stand up for democracy and the rights of the people. It’s something that I take a lot of pride in.”
Isolationist tendencies toward Venezuela and other tyrannical countries have historically taken different ideological inspirations on the left and the right. For the former, reluctance to intervene has been driven by a belief that America is an evil force in the world, imposing its will on weaker countries through imperialist practices. The Students for a Democratic Society’s 1962 Port Huron Statement condemned the United States for having “looked calumniously on those who would not try ‘our way’” and for aiding “the old colonialists, who now are trying to take credit for ‘giving’ all the freedom that has been wrested from them.”
The Right had its main isolationist phase in the era between World War I and World War II, arguing that an energetic presence abroad, while necessary if the country is existentially threatened, can distract from issues at home. The 1920 Republican Party platform called for the United States to “leave our country free to develop its civilization along lines most conducive to the happiness and welfare of its people, and to cast its influence on the side of justice and right should occasion require.”
During the Cold War, the likes of William F. Buckley Jr. and President Ronald Reagan successfully encouraged America to exercise its strength in foreign affairs. The result was the collapse of the Soviet Union. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, however, interventionism began to go out of style, and its decline in popularity accelerated in the years following the second Bush administration.
Right-wing isolationists lately have adopted from the Left “this idea that, actually, America’s role is fundamentally negative,” Filipetti said. “That is very new to conservative isolationism. That is something that’s very concerning.”
One issue that has illustrated the similarities between the two camps is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. When the invasion first happened, the Democratic Socialists of America reaffirmed “our call for the US to withdraw from NATO and to end the imperialist expansionism that set the stage for this conflict.”
Anti-Americanism from that group is expected, but seeing it also from our right flank is surprising. The latest issue of NR slammed intellectual Jordan Peterson for his insinuation that America’s moral degeneracy at the hands of progressivism is “serious enough to increase the probability that Russia, say, will be motivated to invade and potentially incapacitate Ukraine merely to keep the pathological West out of that country, which is a key part of the historically Russian sphere of influence.”
Though their positions may not be as accepted as they once were, conservatives who support the policy of “peace through strength” are not deterred in their efforts, nor are they any less confident that their opponents will once again see the need to reject isolation.
“It’s not that I believe that America will become an isolationist country,” Filipetti told NR, “because we have enough enemies that will not allow that to be the case.” At the same time, we must not “wait until those enemies murder hundreds or thousands of Americans before we realize that American leadership is necessary.”
With hostile nations such as Russia and China becoming ever more aggressive, isolationists will soon realize that their positions are untenable. We should hope that we do not need another rude awakening in order to come to a true consensus on a strong foreign policy.