Is the U.S. becoming more isolationist?

The Associated Press

Withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq would be just the beginning.

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Is the U.S. becoming more isolationist?

Has the war in Iraq inspired a new isolationism in the United States? "America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy," John Quincy Adams famously said. "She is the well-wisher to freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own." After five years of hard fighting, some Americans are looking to Adams again as a guiding light.

The bottom line may be that today many in the United States view the Iraq invasion as a mistake they don't want to see repeated. Troubles in Iraq appear to have fed a desire on the part of some ordinary Americans for disengagement with the world. "We are in a period of rising isolationism, just as we saw a bump in isolationism after the war in Vietnam in the '70s," said Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center.

Is isolationism good for America? Is non-interventionism possible in a globalized economy? Should the United States adopt a more "humble" foreign policy? Or does the world's superpower have obligations that are simply too difficult to let go?

Ben likes: That old isolationist tug

Victor Davis Hanson/The American

In the heart of the most ardent internationalist there now grows the feeling that it might just be good for Europe or South Korea to defend itself -- and for once take the flak that concrete action, not armchair moralizing, invites. Americans of every persuasion are beginning to think that a reduction in our global profile might be both profitable for ourselves and also good medicine for our friends -- like when 30-something-year-old children are finally asked to move out of the house and make their own car payments.

Still, the new isolationists and protectionists do not answer how the Westernized world would deal with China without American leadership and power. Who would contain lunatic regimes rising in South America, or Islamic terrorism, or petro-rich Middle Eastern autocracies seeking the bomb? What would be the global consequences of curtailing the lucrative, wide-open American market for India, China, and other emerging powers?

But then isolationism and protectionism never do evoke such long-term worries. They have always followed short-term outbursts of emotion that may feel good in the here and now but are sorely regretted later.

Joel likes: McCain versus the isolationists

Matt Yglesias/The Atlantic

As anyone familiar with George W. Bush's 2006 State of the Union Address knows, "isolationist" means "anyone who doesn't favor repeating the enormous blunders of the past six years." In that sense, the forces of isolationism really are growing, and one could even have imagined a President Romney or a President Huckabee turning out to be a closet "isolationist" once in office. But John McCain wanted a pointless and counterproductive policy of rogue state rollback before it was cool.