POLITICS

After Election Day, the Isolationists Will Be Back

They took cover before the vote, but let’s not kid ourselves: Americans are sick of the world.
By NICHOLAS WAPSHOTT
 
Last November, Pew Research recorded a startling finding: More than half of Americans believed the United States should “mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own,” the highest figure opposed to foreign intervention for at least 50 years, when the question was first asked.
In addition, 51 percent thought the United States “does too much in helping solve problems” abroad, with just 17 percent thinking it does too little and only 28 percent thinking the approach “just right.” Nearly half believed that “problems at home, including the economy, should get more attention” than intervening abroad.
The figures are much the same today. While Pew reports that just over a half of Americans back Obama’s anti-ISIL airstrikes, half also expressed concern that the United States “would go too far in getting involved militarily in the conflict” with ISIL. While the number now thinking the United States “should mind its own business internationally” has slipped to 39 percent, a third of Obama’s own party still think he is doing “too much” to help solve world problems. CBS News found that 30 percent of Republicans and just 15 percent of Democrats favor using ground troops to defeat ISIL.
Nothing reflects these changes more than the fractious debate inside the Republican Party, which once presented a unified face in support of strong defense and the projection of American power around the world. Whereas not long ago isolationism in the GOP was restricted to defunct volcanoes like the former presidential wannabe Pat Buchanan, now it is out in the open. As the libertarian Republican congressman Thomas Massie of Kentucky put it, “Constituents in my district are very war weary, and I’m war weary.” There are plainly a lot of votes to be won by appearing skeptical about America’s involvement abroad. And there are votes to be had, too, from urging the Obama administration to tread warily when it comes to aiding the rebels in Syria.
Enter Rand Paul, now the top target of his fellow 2016 aspirants, who have sought relentlessly to paint him as weak—a line of attack usually reserved for Democrats. Paul has trimmed his sails accordingly, tacking right on Russia and ISIL as the politics of national security have shifted over the last few months.
Other pols, anxious not to be labeled isolationist for fear of being thought unpatriotic, send dog-whistle signals to their isolationist voters by urging sharp reductions in America’s foreign aid budget, among them Republican congressmen Steve Chabot, Ted Poe and Andy Harris. Like many, Harris couched the cutting of foreign aid in terms of reducing the deficit. “It’s time we start focusing American’s hard-earned tax dollars here at home on projects like building the Keystone XL pipeline instead of throwing them away in foreign lands,” he wrote. (Never mind that the pipeline would be built with private money.)
But the presidential campaign spotlight is far harsher, and Paul, who has gone further than any plausible Republican presidential candidate since the late 1930s in questioning the wisdom of any U.S. intervention abroad, will find it hard to stray too far away from his record. The Kentucky senator has advocated doing away with foreign aid altogether, and in 2011 he offered an alternative federal budget that would have cut defense spending by 30 percent. His tactical adjustments since then have been minor. Earlier this month, Paul declared that “my predisposition is to less intervention” and “there’s no point in taking military action just for the sake of it, something Washington leaders can’t seem to understand.” And even in September, after finally backing airstrikes against ISIL, he was still arguing, “It’s time to put a stop to this madness and take a good hard look at what our foreign policy has done.” He blames George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney for disrupting the Middle East hornets’ nest by launching the Iraq war.
Paul is gambling, in effect, that the thesis of this article is right—that support for aggressive action against ISIL will fade before long, and that he will be able to point to his early skepticism while highlighting his rivals’ over-the-top hawkishness. Paul might hope to be rewarded in the 2016 Republican primaries in the same way Obama reaped the benefit of his opposition to the Iraq war when confronting the more bellicose Hillary Clinton in 2008.
Paul says he would like to see “any [war] strategy … presented to the American people through Congress,” but he knows that the Republican leadership in the House has persistently resisted a vote in the House that would allow its Tea Party rump to place the GOP in an unpatriotic light ahead of the midterms. A year ago, Obama called Congress’s bluff when he asked them to approve airstrikes against the Syrian despot Bashar al-Assad for using chemical weapons against his own people. Even then, the GOP-led House, aware of the public mood hostile to any more American police actions around the world, showed no interest in taking a vote on the issue.
The wave of revulsion created by the beheading of the two American journalists has allowed Obama to ignore new calls for a congressional vote and launch airstrikes. But it will probably not take much—a plane downed, a pilot captured—for opinion to switch, and for the neo-isolationists to come out of hiding.
And as soon as the midterms are out of the way, dovish Democrats and libertarian Republicans will feel free once again to express their reluctance to continue to support military action abroad. There are votes to be had for those who dare criticize the president’s war policy from the left—even while the war is going on.
Conservatives branded opponents of the Iraq war on the left who protested against George W. Bush’s invasion as un-American and unpatriotic. But those on the right who oppose Obama’s return to war in Iraq and Syria are likely to style themselves as strict constitutionalists. Joined by the rise of Democratic pacifists, they make up a powerful new force in American politics that will be here for a long time to come.
In the fall of 1937, as Roosevelt began the slow process of persuading the American people they should prepare to fight against fascism, he confided to his speechwriter, Samuel I. Rosenman, “It’s a terrible thing to look over your shoulder when you are trying to lead and find no one there.” Barack Obama must be feeling much the same right now.