DID ISOLATIONISM FAIL?
Chamberlin, William Henry
Did Isolationism Fail? By WILLIAM HENRY CHAMBERLIN EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the first of a series of articles by Mr. Chamberlin surveying the past and present of American foreign policy and charting...
...The Neutrality Act was perhaps an attempt to legislate America out of participation in overseas wars...
...China was a pretty remote country to figure in the calculations of an isolationist foreign policy...
...Chamberlin surveying the past and present of American foreign policy and charting a course for the future...
...Roosevelt, as reported in an Associated Press dispatch from Wellington, New Zealand, that "at the end of the last war the people of my nation thought they could withdraw from a united world, mind their own business and only have intercourse through trade with other nations...
...We Haven't Tried It The super-isolationists of history, I suppose, were the Japanese when they forbade any intercourse between their people and foreigners on pain of death until our own Commodore Perry insistently knocked at their door...
...It was an emphatic assertion of our right to be considered a major power in the Far East...
...Much loose thinking is attributable to the practice of throwing around words like "isolationist," "fascist," "appeaser," "radical," "communist," as terms of abuse, without any clear idea of what the words stand for...
...It is impossible to say how many Americans would have favored such a policy if it had ever been squarely put up to them by some Such device as a referendum vote...
...But it is absurd to describe as isolationist an economic policy that amounted to hawking our goods and capital in every market in the world...
...Most American politicians, bankers, and businessmen failed to recognize a proposition that should have been obvious to a freshman in Economics A: that international trade and investment must be a two-way street...
...Certainly the factual record of our Far Eastern policy flatly contradicts the statement by Mrs...
...These two efforts received American names: the Dawes Plan and the Young Plan...
...American experts played a leading, although unofficial part in the discussions that culminated in two efforts to place the reparations problem on a workable economic basis...
...This policy suffered from the same blind spot as the Anglo-French method of demanding huge reparations and yet excluding the German goods through which alone reparations could have been paid in any considerable amount...
...Now the maintenance of "orderly processes in international relationships" was certainly a phrase wide enough to cover intervention in many parts of the world during the present era of universal disorder and violence...
...The American people would have been better off if our foreign economic policy had been more intelligently isolationist than it actually was...
...Hull, "are not measured by the number of American citizens residing in a particular country at a particular moment, nor by the amount of investment by American citizens there, nor by the volume of trade...
...Isolationist might be used more reasonably as a term for those who believe that America's primary political and economic interests are in this hemisphere, that we have much to lose and little to gain by participation in the wars of Europe and Asia...
...But America did not stand aside from the effort to promote world economic reconstruction...
...We proceeded on the absurd assumption that we could indefinitely continue to do three incompatible things at the same time: (1) Maintain a favorable balance of trade by means of high tariffs...
...We played a leading part in the Washington Conference of 1922 and the London Conference of 1930, which fixed levels of limitation of naval building...
...NO LESS an authority on the subject than Adolf Hitler asserted in Mein Kampf that any falsehood will be believed, if it is only big enough and repeated with sufficient frequency...
...J. M. Keynes, who, in his Economic Consequences of the Peace, draws a caustic parallel between the practical humanity of the ARA and the futile wrangling over supposedly strategic borders that occupied much of the attention of the diplomats at Versailles...
...We lent money from China to Peru...
...Indeed Mr...
...Our consistent policy of maintaining troops in the foreign sections of Chinese cities and warships in Chinese waters was certainly not isolationist...
...The Pressures We Exerted We exerted quiet but effective pressure at this time to get the Japanese out of Eastern Siberia...
...Now irrespective of whether isolationism was worthy or unworthy, workable or-unworkable, the assertion that it failed does not correspond with the facts...
...American food, organization, and distribution saved millions of Russian lives during the great famine in that country in 1921-1922...
...Let's try to define "isolationist...
...Equally unjustified is Wendell Willkie's statement that after World War I "we retired into an era of strictest detachment from world affairs" and Sumner Welles' declaration that "the United States after the victory of 1918 withdrew from almost every form of practical cooperation with friendly nations in the reconstruction tasks and made no effort to win the peace...
...The second will appear in an early issue...
...I am reminded of this assertion when I notice the tremendous barrage of propaganda that is being laid down to convince Americans that they were as blind as bats or moles between the two World Wars, that isolationism governed all American foreign policy after the end of World War I, that this isolationism failed and even got us into World War II...
...But on Jan...
...It is important to remember that even when large numbers of individual Americans probably hoped that their country could and would disinterest itself in conflicts originating in European and Asiatic conditions, this view was never shared by the policymaking branches of the government...
...2) Lend money lavishly abroad, with the expectation of receiving back principal and interest...
...The Far Eastern settlement agreed on at Washington was shaken to its foundation by the Japanese seizure of Manchuria in 1931...
...10, 1938, the State Department released the text of a letter from Secretary Hull to Vice-President Garner which, by implication, completely repudiated any isolationist or regionalist restrictions as to the aims of American foreign policy...
...For instance, America played a leading role in promoting the Far Eastern settlement embodied in the Washington treaties of 1922...
...In 1927 we showed ourselves ready to cooperate with armed force in local intervention in China...
...Billions Wasted Abroad But this justified criticism has nothing to do with an imaginary isolationism in our economic relations with the outside world...
...But the events of the past should be, although they seldom are, guides to intelligent action in the future...
...America To The Rescue No people in the world rivalled the American contribution in money, food, clothing, and the technical organization of relief work for Chinese famine and flood sufferers, uprooted Armenians, transplanted Greeks and other groups that experienced special disasters during the aftermath of the war...
...Neither were we indifferent, as Mr...
...Welles, or "strictly detached," to quote Mr...
...American observers attended all the League conferences on disarmament and economics and constructive American proposals were put forward at these gatherings...
...While the United States did not resort to war at this time, its policy was no more isolationist than that of European powers with important interests in the Orient, such as Great Britain and France...
...The immense humanitarian value of the work rendered by the ARA (American Relief Administration) in the immediate postwar period is generously recognized by a competent British observer, Mr...
...The vast sums lent abroad and largely lost by default could have financed scores of useful public improvements in the United States, more and better rural schools, slum clearance efforts, large electric power facilities, soil and forest conservation projects...
...The interests and concern of the United States in the Far Eastern situation, in the European situation, and in situations on this continent," wrote Mr...
...The period of Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover is often referred to as a high point in American isolationism...
...There is a broader and more fundamental interest, which is that orderly processes in international relationships be maintained...
...No one would seriously maintain that we practiced isolationism to this degree...
...3) Collect a large part of our war debts...
...No doubt America's gifts were only in proportion to American wealth...
...As regards disarmament, the record shows that we were anything but "indifferent," to use the word of Mr...
...Stimson's diplomatic language was considerably stronger than Sir John Simon's although British stakes in the Far East, whether measured by investments in China or by the colonial empire which was threatened by an expansionist Japan, were incomparably larger than our own...
...But what is important, from the standpoint of determining whether isolationism failed, is that no such policy ever commanded the support of the policymaking leaders of our government...
...Many of these loans were granted hastily and improvidently and a considerable part of this money, along with the greater part of our 10 billion dollar war loans, had to be finally written off as uncollectible...
...Especially in the closely interrelated question of tariffs and war debts we were short-sightedly selfish, although no more so than other peoples before and during the Great Depression...
...These statements reflect a complete misconception, extraordinary in view of the eminence of their authors, of our role in Europe, as well as in the Far East after the last war...
...But the Neutrality Act depended for effectiveness on a sympathetic interpretation which the present Administration was certainly not inclined to give it...
...Besides the ARA, the Red Cross, the American Friends Service Committee, the Near East Relief, the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, stepped into the breach to give help in many emergencies in foreign countries...
...It is certainly far from my purpose to defend every detail of American foreign policy in that period...
...When Chinese nationalist troops got out of hand after occupying Nanking in the Spring of 1927 and commenced to massacre foreigners, the American Admiral Williams gave orders to bombard a part of the city in order to cover the evacuation of foreign residents...
...Will-kie...
...After the adoption of the Dawes Plan, American capital poured into Germany and facilitated economic recovery...
...The logical implications of this belief would have been to cut loose from the Philippines, to withdraw token military and naval forces from China, to refrain from diplomatic intervention in European disputes, to concentrate on the defense of this hemisphere...
...We committed ourselves to the proposition that the administrative sovereignty and territorial integrity of China should be maintained...
...One of our first very practical ventures in cooperation with the nations of Europe was to save Central and Eastern Europeans from dying of disease and starvation...
...Except for a negligible minority of absolute pacifists and a still smaller minority of Axis sympathizers, Americans are generally agreed that the attack on Pearl Harbor and the German and Italian declarations of war left us no choice except to fight the war through to victory...
...If this proposition is incorrect, we may draw other conclusions...
...At first sight it may seem fruitless to discuss whether isolationism failed or not at a time when we are engaged with men, money, and supplies in combat theatres all over the world...
...American foreign investments between 1915 and 1930 leaped from $2,600,000,000 to $15,675,000,000...
...Welles suggests, to the great international postwar problems of economic reconstruction and disarmament...
...It is true that the Young Plan foundered on the rocks of the Great Depression, which made the transfer problem, always difficult, completely insoluble...
...Hull States Our Policy It is now fashionable to represent the 1930's as a period of craven isolationism in American foreign policy...
...I believe any candid study of the record will prove this thesis inaccurate from beginning to end...
...But a people that had slammed its doors on the outside world and thought only in selfish and non-cooperative terms would never have set in motion so many benevolent enterprises in remote corners of the world...
...This economic policy is indeed subject to just and severe criticism on other grounds...
...The implication of this settlement was that we were very seriously concerned over the maintenance of the status quo in China...
...Even when American bellicose sentiment was at a low ebb one can find no diplomatic document reflecting American acquiescence in the idea of withdrawing politically from the Orient and leaving the Japanese, the Chinese, the British, the Russians, and other peoples in that part of the world to fight out their quarrels among themselves...
...If the proposition that isolationism was our government policy and failed to keep us out of war is correct we are entitled to draw certain conclusions...
...For it was never tried, least of all in the period, decisive for our participation in the present war, between the outbreak of hostilities in Europe and Pearl Harbor...
...Yet each of these Administrations took steps that could not be reconciled with a genuinely isolationist foreign policy...
Vol. 7 • November 1943 • No. 47
