In , the Monroe Doctrine boldly declared that the United States would consider the colonization of any independent nation in North or South America by a European nation to be an act of war. But by the mids, a combination of world events began to test the resolve of American isolationists:.
Within the United States itself, as industrialized mega-cities grew, small-town rural America — long the source of isolationist feelings — shrank. World War I to However, after the war, the United States returned to its isolationist roots by immediately ending all of its war-related European commitments. Against the recommendation of President Woodrow Wilson, the U. Senate rejected the war-ending Treaty of Versailles, because it would have required the U. To protect U. Between the pre-war years of and , the nation had admitted over After the passage of the Immigration Act of , fewer than , new immigrants had been allowed to enter the U.
World War II to While avoiding the conflict until , World War II marked a turning point for American isolationism.
By the end of , American public opinion had started to shift in favor of using U. Despite pressure from isolationists, President Franklin D. Even in the face of Axis successes, a majority of Americans continued to oppose actual U. That all changed on the morning of December 7, , when naval forces of Japan launched a sneak attack on the U. On December 8, , America declared war on Japan. Two days later, the America First Committee disbanded. At the same time, the emerging threat posed by Russia under Joseph Stalin and the specter of communism that would soon result in the Cold War effectively lowered the curtain on the golden age of American isolationism.
While the terrorist attacks of Sept 11, , initially spawned a spirit of nationalism unseen in America since World War II, the ensuing War on Terror may have resulted in the return of American isolationism. Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq claimed thousands of American lives.
At home, Americans fretted through a slow and fragile recovery from a Great Recession many economists compared to the Great Depression of Suffering from war abroad and a failing economy at home, America found itself in a situation very much like that of the late s when isolationist feelings prevailed.
Now as the threat of another war in Syria looms, a growing number of Americans, including some policymakers, are questioning the wisdom of further U. Alan Grayson D-Florida joining a bipartisan group of lawmakers arguing against U. Among the founding fathers, even George Washington admitted that his country might occasionally need temporary military alliances. American leaders were also obliged to pay some attention to their own neighborhood—if only to keep others out.
When President Theodore Roosevelt issued his corollary in , it became the justification for a series of military interventions in and around the Caribbean to protect American interests.
In , the opening of the Panama Canal served to intensify American interest in the whole region just south of its borders. Other forces impelled the U. The same spirit that took the pioneers westwards took Americans around the globe.
Sailing ships criss-crossed the Atlantic and ventured to the Far East looking for trade and profits. American missionaries, motivated to better the world, spread out in the 19th century to the Middle East, Africa, China and India.
And when they returned, they preached that the United States had a moral obligation to engage with the rest of the world. In the late 19th century the United States increasingly projected its growing power beyond its shores. The annexation of the Hawaiian Islands merely formally recognized what had long been American domination. Even more importantly, possession of the Philippines moved the sphere of interest of the United States far out into the Pacific. It took a world war, between and , to draw the United States into a deeper and more sustained relationship with the wider world.
President Woodrow Wilson , who had hoped to keep out of the war started in Europe, was by convinced that Germany was a menace to the future of world peace. The vehicle he hoped would bring nations together to make common cause for peace and prosperity was the League of Nations. The subsequent decades of the s and s are often seen as the triumph of American isolationism.
Congress raised tariffs to keep foreign goods out, limited immigration and, in the s, passed a series of neutrality acts to ensure that the U. Again, however, that was only part of the picture. American diplomats worked closely with the League of Nations.
The United States used its considerable influence to settle some of the outstanding issues left over from World War I, and Washington took the lead in negotiating naval limitations in the Pacific. As the world moved toward war again in the late s, the United States under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gradually tilted its financial and military support toward the democracies. When that great conflict ended, Americans again faced the choice between more or less engagement with the world.
President Roosevelt and many Americans, both Democrat and Republican, hoped to prevent a new wave of isolationism by ensuring that America joined the new United Nations. In any case the decision in favor of involvement in world affairs was effectively made for them by the aggressive moves of the Soviet Union in Europe and the Middle East.
The leaders of the isolationist movement drew upon history to bolster their position. Nevertheless, the American experience in that war served to bolster the arguments of isolationists; they argued that marginal U. Nye, a Republican from North Dakota, fed this belief by claiming that American bankers and arms manufacturers had pushed for U.
The publication of the book Merchants of Death by H. Engelbrecht and F. Butler both served to increase popular suspicions of wartime profiteering and influence public opinion in the direction of neutrality. Many Americans became determined not to be tricked by banks and industries into making such great sacrifices again.
The reality of a worldwide economic depression and the need for increased attention to domestic problems only served to bolster the idea that the United States should isolate itself from troubling events in Europe. During the interwar period, the U. Government repeatedly chose non-entanglement over participation or intervention as the appropriate response to international questions.
Some members of Congress opposed membership in the League out of concern that it would draw the United States into European conflicts, although ultimately the collective security clause sank the possibility of U. During the s, the League proved ineffectual in the face of growing militarism, partly due to the U.
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