Mechanism—or Policy?

In an age of rockets, Sputniks and imminent space platforms there will be few to argue with the main contention of Professor Selig Adler’s The Isolationist Impulse: Its Twentieth-Century Reaction (Abelard-Schuman, $6.75), that “isolationism” as a viable policy is dead. But when did it die? In 1917? In 1933? In 1941? Or on that momentous day when a U.S. bombing plane bearing the incongruous pin-up name of Enola Gay deposited the first atomic egg on hapless Hiroshima? Since foreign policies are supposed to be relevant to time, place, power and the level of the arts of warfare, the date of the demise would seem to be an important item of our twentieth-century history.

It could be that we were wrong to enter World War I, that we blundered when we got ourselves into a two-front battle in World War II, and that we have made at least forty errors in failing to halt the Soviet expansion after 1945. The date of “isolationism’s” demise is important to a judgment on all these issues. But Professor Adler’s shotgun method of attack makes it impossible even to discuss the problem with any attention to the lights and shades of the matter.

JC

About the Author

John Chamberlain

John Chamberlain (1903–1995) was an American writer.

Featured Tags

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Calvin Coolidge

In an age of rockets, Sputniks and imminent space platforms there will be few to argue with the main contention of Professor Selig Adler’s The Isolationist Impulse: Its Twentieth-Century Reaction (Abelard-Schuman, $6.75), that “isolationism” as a viable policy is dead. But when did it die? In 1917? In 1933? In 1941? Or on that momentous day when a U.S. bombing plane bearing the incongruous pin-up name of Enola Gay deposited the first atomic egg on hapless Hiroshima? Since foreign policies are supposed to be relevant to time, place, power and the level of the arts of warfare, the date of the demise would seem to be an important item of our twentieth-century history.

It could be that we were wrong to enter World War I, that we blundered when we got ourselves into a two-front battle in World War II, and that we have made at least forty errors in failing to halt the Soviet expansion after 1945. The date of “isolationism’s” demise is important to a judgment on all these issues. But Professor Adler’s shotgun method of attack makes it impossible even to discuss the problem with any attention to the lights and shades of the matter.