Modern psychology has taught us that the impulses and aims which determine an individual’s conduct are seldom revealed, even to him, by the words he uses taken at face value. A similar rule applies in trying to understand a political tendency; what its spokes men say, the explanations and arguments and Pro-grams they offer, must be related to wider patterns of social behavior.
It is at first sight puzzling that those who today urge isolationist arguments—often, like Walter Lippmann, publicly accepting the label—are in many cases the very same persons who have in the past been notably interventionist, and scornful of the older isolationist generation. Senator Fulbright is a perfect example, along with Lippmann himself and Hans Morgenthau, Chester Bowles, George Kennan and nearly any of the slew of professors from, or trained by, the big eastern universities, who have been so busy at teach-ins and open letters. These men are telling us that our nation has no business in Southeast Asia or anywhere else on the Asian continent, and that the struggle there, no matter what the outcome, affects neither our security nor our national interest. It all sounds terribly familiar to anyone acquainted with the isolationist rhetoric of the pre-1914 years and the period between the wars. The place names, however, have changed.
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