'Isolationism!' They cried: mainstream journalists misunderstand conservatives (big surprise).

IT was a typical New York Times article. Among the themes: Iraq is a disaster; it's the neocons' fault; the GOP is flirting once more with its dark addiction to "isolationism"; proof that George W. Bush is growing in office can be found in his realization that Bill Clinton's policies were right; and so on. There was only one problem with the page-one story by David E. Sanger titled "A Bush Alarm: Shun Isolation": It was a pile of nonsense.

According to Sanger, Bush has been blindsided by an "unexpected uprising" among newly isolationist neoconservatives. This "rising chorus of neo-conservatives, who urged Mr. Bush to topple Mr. Hussein, say that, having liberated Iraq, the rest is up to the Iraqis." What neoconservatives did Sanger have in mind? Well, he names only one, presumably the ringleader: William F. Buckley Jr. But the inconvenient fact is that WFB isn't a neoconservative and never urged Bush to topple Saddam Hussein. Moreover, there is no "uprising." Of the major neoconservatives who "urged" the Iraq war--Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, Reuel Mark Gerecht, Robert Kagan, Eliot Cohen, Paul Wolfowitz, Fouad Ajami--none has called for bugging out. They've offered criticisms, to be sure, but not of an isolationist flavor. Nor have the more traditional or mainstream conservative outlets, including this magazine, offered such an opinion. In other words, WFB was ascribed to a rebellious movement he never belonged to--and which isn't rebelling. But other than that Sanger got it just right.

Well, not really. The flaw in Sanger's analysis runs deeper than an error in ideological taxonomy. Here's a rule of thumb to keep in mind when studying the history of American foreign-policy debates in the 20th and 21st centuries. When liberals don't want to do something on the international scene that conservatives favor, it's because liberals are any of the following: prudent, pragmatic, realistic, idealistic, peace-loving, clear-eyed, moral, restrained, or all of the above. When conservatives don't want to commit to a liberal foreign-policy agenda, there's one catchall word: isolationist. And even when conservatives subscribe to the same foreign-policy agenda as liberals, they're doing it for isolationist reasons.

For example, in 2004, Franklin Foer, then a senior editor of The New Republic (he's now editor), wrote a long essay on conservatives and isolationism for the New York Times. It began by noting that conservative columnist George Will had recently voiced some second thoughts about the Iraq War. Will's reservations, according to Foer, were "hardly surprising" given the conservative movement's isolationist history. Of course, The New Republic had itself supported the Iraq invasion as much as Will had, if not more so, in 2002 and 2003, and had subsequently come to have grave and strident second thoughts. But no one would suggest--least of all The New Republic's editors--that they were retreating into isolationism. George Will's second thoughts are apparently driven by whispers from the America First Committee, while The New Republic's doubts are the stuff of wisdom and clear thinking.

This nasty idea, a defining theme of elite conventional wisdom, works its way into everything from popular culture to highbrow political commentary. And it's a lie. Or, more accurately, it's a half-truth, which is the most pernicious kind of lie. Of course there were, are, and always will be isolationists on the American right. But isolationism isn't a uniquely conservative phenomenon, nor is it written into conservative DNA. If anything, isolationism's natural home is within the mainstream of the Democratic party and New Republic liberalism.

1920 AND ALL THAT

It all begins with the Treaty of Versailles and the Republicanled refusal to ratify it. It should be remembered that the Republican party was not then a "conservative" party as we understand that term today. It was Republican Teddy Roosevelt who launched the Progressive party, and the GOP was on the whole more interventionist than the Democrats during that era. Woodrow Wilson promised to keep America at peace and insisted--correctly--that a vote for the GOP was a vote for getting entangled in a foreign war. Wilson eventually dragged America into that war, justifying it on absurdly idealistic grounds (far more idealistic than anything George W. Bush, super-democrat, has said). When Republicans, led by their Senate leader Henry Cabot Lodge, opposed the treaty, critics assailed them as "isolationists." But what usually gets omitted from the story, as David Frum has noted, is that Lodge had agreed to ratify Wilson's other treaty. This treaty would have committed the United States to defending France if she were attacked by Germany. In the end, Wilson refused to submit it to the Senate because a) he was a feckless, egocentric crybaby and b) he feared it would lead to America's getting too involved in European affairs.

Confused? It gets worse. Consider the muckraking journalist John T. Flynn, widely seen as the heart and soul of right-wing isolationism in the 1930s. The head of the New York chapter of the America First Committee, Flynn was a tireless and ubiquitous champion of non-intervention abroad and a relentless critic of Wall Street and big business at home. Guess where Flynn made his name? At The American Mercury? The Freeman? Some other oracle of the imagined paleoconservative past? Nope. The New Republic. He wrote a column there for nearly a decade called "Other People's Money." Flynn left The New Republic because of his opposition to FDR and his advocacy of non-interventionism. And while it's true that in the 1930s "rightwing" was often defined as "anti-FDR," serious observers would hardly claim that Flynn moved unambiguously to the right.

Indeed, throughout the 1930s, The New Republic had subscribed to that "enlightened" form of isolationism we call "pacifism," and to people like Flynn it was The New Republic that moved right by embracing militarism. Before Flynn broke with The New Republic, it had ridiculed those who thought you could "end war by waging war." "On the contrary," it editorialized in 1937, "nothing is more likely than that the United States would go fascist through the very process of organizing to defeat the fascist nations." This was the heart and soul of Flynn's opposition to intervention. Not surprisingly, his allies in the isolationist cause were other liberals who thought they were staying loyal to liberal principles. This group included American Socialist party leader Norman Thomas, longtime Nation editor Oswald Garrison Villard, Charles Beard, John Dewey, Joseph Kennedy, Bernard Baruch, and Progressive hero Robert La Follette.

In fairness, isolationism, or non-interventionism, was a defensible position before Pearl Harbor, and before it became clear that isolationism would lead to the triumph of Hitler. The memory of the transcendentally stupid First World War was still fresh in American minds. There was an enlightened bipartisan consensus that such hell should not be revisited, and isolationism was the smart stance among politically ambitious liberals. John F. Kennedy, who was a junior member of the America First Committee when at Choate, sent the AFC $100 while he was at Harvard with a note saying, "What you are all doing is vital." Kennedy's older brother Joe was the head of the isolationist group at Harvard. Sargent Shriver--who would become JFK's brother-in-law, the founder of the Peace Corps, and George McGovern's running mate--was a member of an AFC-affiliated youth group. Gore Vidal headed up the AFC youth chapter at Exeter.

The Left relentlessly throws Charles Lindbergh in conservative faces as proof of the Right's supposed isolationist--and anti-Semitic--heritage. Much of this involves shabby historical analysis: Lindbergh's acclaimed biographer, Scott Berg, couldn't find any evidence that Lindy was a virulent anti-Semite. Claims otherwise rest almost entirely on one lamentable but brief passage in one speech, in which Lindbergh alleged that Jews, capitalists, and British sympathizers were pushing America into war. His final trip to Germany in the 1930s was in behalf of German Jewry: He hoped to persuade Hermann Goering to let the Jews emigrate. As for Lucky Lindy's isolationism, his arguments were based on the prevailing liberal arguments at the time, as well as a fondness for Germany and its culture that was hardly unique, let alone "right-wing." Lindbergh's faith in the reasonableness of Nazis was surely foolish, but, again, such faith was not "right-wing" in any meaningful sense. But even if we were to accept the conventional view of Lindbergh as bogeyman, what of it? Lindbergh's contribution to conservative thought amounts to exactly nil. One can hardly say the same thing of Messrs. Beard, Dewey, La Follette, and Kennedy, not to mention The New Republic. More important, isolationism has always flourished openly on the left, particularly since the dawn of the Cold War. Even many of the leading Republican isolationists--William Borah and Hiram Johnson, for example--were in fact progressive populists who mostly voted with the New Deal. The current refrain about Bush's "lying" us into a "war for oil" has its roots in the writings of Charles Beard, who was convinced that FDR had orchestrated the war and even Pearl Harbor. In 1965, the dean of Big Brain Liberalism, Walter Lippmann, argued that "our true vital interests" were at home. Anticipating his critics, Lippmann proclaimed, "If it is said that this is isolationism, I would say yes. It is isolationism if the study of our own vital interests and a realization of the limitations of our own power is isolationism. It is isolationism as compared with the globalism which became fashionable after the Second World War."

Bill Clinton's execrable mentor, Sen. William J. Fulbright, was an unapologetic isolationist who found America to blame for every international problem. He sought to de-fund Radio Free Europe on the grounds that it was too unsettling to the Soviets. In 1969, when Richard Nixon said that Fulbright represented the rise of the "new isolationists," the senator didn't deny it, but responded that "the greatest threat to peace and domestic tranquility is not in Hanoi, Moscow, or Peking, but in our colleges and in the ghettos of cities throughout the land."

It was George McGovern who ran on the explicitly isolationist mantra "Come Home, America." And it was Democratic senator Frank Church, inspired by his role model and fellow Idahoan William Borah, who joined with Fulbright to put that slogan into action. The Democrats routinely opposed international assertiveness. They voted to abandon the South Vietnamese (Church cosponsored that legislation), they hobbled the CIA (again, thank you, Senator Church), they opposed Reagan's arms buildup (though not Carter's), and they turned a blind eye to Communist incursions in Nicaragua. It was the Democratic party that stood opposed to the first Gulf War. In the 1990s, Democrats picked up Church's torch, further hamstringing the CIA and the FBI in ways made apparent in the 9/11 Commission hearings. In 2004, it was John Kerry who pounded a lectern because we were opening firehouses in Iraq and closing them in America.

A DEMOCRATIC REFRAIN

"Come Home, America" has not always described post-Vietnam liberalism, but it has always--always--received a respectful hearing on the left. The notion that "we've got bigger priorities at home" is perfectly consistent with the logic of an activist welfare state. And whenever Republicans have been in power and have acted assertively in America's interests, "Come Home, America" has become the Left's dominant rhetorical refrain. But none dare call it isolationism.

Again and again, the story of Republican and conservative foreign policy isn't one of isolationism and retreat, but of selfconfidence in America's ability to determine its own course. Meanwhile, many liberals persist in their infuriating tendency to confuse, often deliberately, unilateralism with isolationism. Liberals like to define "internationalism" as subordinating American interests to those of international organizations like the U.N., and "isolationism" as disagreeing with liberals. For example, Sanger approvingly quotes liberal foreign-policy guru David J. Rothkopf as saying that "Bush came [into office] with a philosophy that was almost neo-isolationist. When they dealt with Iraq, they did it alone--outside the context of what globalization implies."

Consider some of Bill Clinton's major international forays. Clinton pushed for the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and intervention in Yugoslavia. Some Republicans opposed the Yugoslavia campaigns and the CTBT on the grounds that they were not in America's interests. The liberal establishment, including Bill Clinton, immediately dubbed this opposition proof positive of resurgent conservative isolationism. The New York Times denounced the "smug and shortsighted isolationism of the Republican Congressional leadership." For the record, conservatives opposed the CTBT not out of isolationism, but from a desire to keep all of our options open in world affairs--which makes us "isolationist" just as much as target practice makes a sheriff a hermit. The intervention in Yugoslavia was a complicated issue, dividing many conservatives and liberals--The Nation opposed intervention, NATIONAL REVIEW supported it--but only the conservative opponents were called "isolationists." And as for NAFTA, 75 percent of Republicans allied themselves with Clinton while 60 percent of Democrats voted against it. But despite Democratic dependence on protectionist labor unions and other groups opposed to free trade, it is the GOP that supposedly smolders with isolationist aims.

The same nonsense pervades David Sanger's unfortunate article. He cites President Bush's dismay that he had to rely on "arm-twisting" to bring a few wayward Republicans "back into the fold" to win passage of the Central American Free Trade Agreement. This, according to Sanger, "jolted Mr. Bush into recognizing a new retreat from the world by his own party." For the record, only 15 of 202 House Democrats voted in favor of CAFTA--as compared with 205 of 232 Republicans. But, yes, we must keep a weather eye open for isolationism on the rightward horizon.