Far-right isolationism

Congressman Hamilton Fish, bitter opponent of Franklin Roosevelt's war-preparedness program and active enabler of far-right propagandists

Let me start this by saying as I've said in a number of posts before that most warnings about "isolationism" are fake, straw-man arguments. At least outside of Ron Paul's political corner, there are no actual isolationists in American politics. Categorizing these things by "schools" is tricky. But there are basically three broad categories of thinking on foreign policy which are dominant in actual policymaking: liberal internationalism (aka, Wilsonianism), realism, and neoconservatism/unilateralist nationalism.

I've linked some of my earlier posts on the whole appeasement issue in the 1930s at the end of this post. But I agree with Jeffrey Record of the Air War College that the appeasement/"Munich" analogy has been so overused and so overlaid with various flaky meanings that we're probably better off not using it any more. It leads to mindless threat inflation and false parallels.

The great Maverick McCain, who of course is a Very Serious Person, said during the Republican Presidential debate this past week, "We allowed Hitler to come to power with that kind of attitude of isolationism and appeasement." Invoking "appeasement" and "isolationism" as bogeymen has become so mindlessly routine that hardly anyone stops to notice how blatantly boneheaded such warnings often are. We allowed Hitler to come to power? The appeasement policy - it was actually called that, "appeasement" then being a synonym for concessions rather than a cuss word - was the policy pursued by France and England toward Germany when Hitler began his expansion beyond the limits allowed by Versailles Treaty, starting with the remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936. The 1934 coup attempt in Austria was so badly bungled it didn't really count, although they did manage to murder the Austrian dictator Dollfuss.

But some of our press corps might want to ask the great Maverick how he would suggest the United States might have gone about preventing Hitler from coming to power in 1933. I took on the notion of preventive pre-regime change in More daffy history from Bush 11/01/07, including the difficulty of foreseeing Hitler coming to power at the time.

I came across a good description of Old Right isolationism that defines the strange conceptual world in which their "antiwar" stance is articulated. This goes back a ways. But Harry and Bonaro Overstreet in their 1964 book The Strange Tactics of Extremism described the weird worldview of the John Birch Society and others in their political niche in this way:

Here, we discover the key to the Birch Society's - and, more broadly, the Radical Right's - brand of anti-Communism. It is a brand that presents as unnecessary, or downright harmful, most of America's around-the-world activities and involvements. It is an anti-Communism which contends that, if it were not for treason and conspiracy in high places, we could, on our own - without the high costs of entangling alliances and big defense systems - make things happen as they ought to happen, all around the world. We could do so by pulling back out of the world, as it were, and simply cleaning up the mess in Washington. What we might need to do abroad, in military terms, could be done by a well-placed bomb or a regiment of Marines.

Communism's advance would be stopped in its tracks - so the argument runs - and Communist regimes would be toppled by the uprisings of suppressed peoples, if our government, direct by "Communist bosses," could be forced to stop underwriting Lenin's grand strategy with our tremendous resources of materials and know-how. (my emphasis)

If you listen carefully to what Ron Paul and similar isolationist rightwingers are saying, their brand of nationalism is coming from a very similar place. They want to discard normal diplomacy, foreign aid, even the threat of economic and trade sanctions from the set of foreign policy tools available to the United States. They are not far from the neocons in that essential focus. As the Overstreets described the perspective 43 years ago, "What we might need to do abroad, in military terms, could be done by a well-placed bomb or a regiment of Marines."

Is that so different from Ron Paul's response to Maria Bartiromo's question on how he would deal with a challenge to the United States from Iran if Iran should "turn hostile"? "I'd treat them something like what we did with the Soviets" during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he told her.

Here's an interview with isolationist author Jim Powell with Scott Horton of Antiwar.com Radio. (This is not the Scott Horton with with an Atlantic Harper's Online blog.) For those of us who actually pay attention to history and think it may have some importance, claims like Powell's are fingernails-on-the-blackboard difficult to listen to. He chirps away with the bonehead rightwing claim that the postwar inflation through 1923 was what brought Hitler to power in 1933. Hitler's NSDAP (Nazi Party) was competing in free elections during that time. It wasn't until the Great Depression of 1929 that their electoral strength became anything but minor. It's a stretch to argue that inflation had any direct effect on Hitler's rise to power. But lots of people just make this stuff up to suit their own ideology of the moment. It did crack me up to hear him talk about Hitler's "Beer Hall Pooch"; I think he meant "Beer Hall Putsch", the "put" part being pronounced like the English word "put". This is a clean-shaven version of Old Right isolationism, and so some individual points sound perfectly sensible. But it uses their standard alternative history. And the core of Old Right isolationism is radical unilateralism.

Fritz Kuhn, center, leader of the German-American Bund (1939)

Justin Raimondo gives an Old Right isolationist response to McCain's criticism of Ron Paul in McCain's Mangled Metaphor Antiwar.com 11/30/07. Although it might not be instantly apparent to the casual reader, he uses the same fingernails-on-blackboard version of German history that Jim Powell uses:

Hitler came to power not due to any "appeasement" by the Western powers, but because of World War I. He was elected by the German people ... due to resentment of the Treaty of Versailles, and the heavy burden of reparations which unleashed inflation such as the world had never seen on the German economy. This created the conditions under which German national socialism flourished – and when Hitler was installed in the German Chancellory, it was long past the time when anyone in Europe's capitals or in Washington could do anything about it.

Short version of response: Hitler came to power in January 1933through a backroom political deal with conservatives; the NSDAP had actually lost representation in the last parliamentary election before that. And while the NSDAP used legal and democratic methods, they also had effective goon squads that busted heads. The violent methods were particularly effective against the Center Party. So you can't say that the NSDAP came to power through purely democratic means.

The "inflation caused Nazism" is just such a beloved argument for conservatives I'm not sure actual history can ever dislodge it.

Yes, the punitive elements of the Versailles Treaty are generally recognized as a major element in the rise of rightwing parties like the NSDAP in the 1920s. But it's also true that the democratic Weimar governments (I would say semi-democratic from 1931-33) had already negotiated modifications in the most onerous provisions.

Some of my earlier posts touching on the appeasement policy of the 1930s:

The Munich Agreement 10/02/03 (one of my earliest blog posts)

Jeffrey Record on appeasement 10/16/06

Review of The Specter of Munich by Jeffrey Record 01/02/07

Historical analogies and the people who analogize them 05/01/07

Tags: appeasement, authoritarianism, hitler, isolationism, mccain, munich agreement, ron paul