A New Isolationism: Threat or Promise?

by Robert W. Tucker

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• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0876631715
• ISBN13: 9780876631713
• Release Date: January 1972
• Publisher: Universe Publishing(NY)
• Length: 127 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Tuckerville versus Zombieland

Professor Robert W. Tucker's precisely written 1972 booklet "A New Isolationism - Threat or Promise?" opens with a defense of the word "isolationism", a term that not even isolationists like. Of course, it never meant completely cutting America off from all forms of foreign contact. It's best expression was, of course, Washington's Farewell Address. Tucker wants to reclaim the word. Even if "new isolationism" were not adopted tomorrow, it's return to the mainstream debate, Tucker maintains, would be an improvement. Tucker doesn't argue about the rights or wrongs of WW1 and WW2 interventions. He defuses these historical arguments by simply ceding them to interventionists. He accepts both as probably the correct action for their time. Or, at least, he doesn't "argue the toss", to use a cricketing expression. He's interested in the future, not the past. But his concession of this historical point has a sting. He observes that where 'the old isolationism' continued into the 1930s perhaps surviving as a prejudice that had "outlived it's usefulness". "Today", writing in 1972, Tucker remarks, and I paraphrase, "..it is interventionism that has "outlived it's usefulness"". Why is this so? He concedes that during WW2 the critics of the "old isolationism" may have been right. America's historical isolationism may indeed have been based on an unacknowledged European balance of power configuration that kept the Royal Navy in the cat bird seat. That, plus the impracticality to Britain of policing the long US-Canada border (and not just "anglo-American friendship") may have been the other even more rarely acknowledged leg of that old system. When the old system was seriously threatened, America abandoned 'the old isolationism' and intervened. But by the 1970s, Tucker argues this old conception a European Balance of Power, the common basis of both the old isolationism and 'new'interventionism was itself obsolete due to nuclear weapons and other regional developments in Europe and elsewhere. So post-Vietnam, it's time for a "new isolationism." Tucker argues that nuclear weapons enhance the physical security of the homeland and undermine the need for the old balance of power. The old strategy was a hangover from the pre-nuclear era when physical security depended on mass conventional forces. Worse yet, the hangover was the main source of nuclear risk. It was the combination of nuclear retaliatory forces and rival Eurasian interventionisms that greatly increased the doomsday risk in the Cold War. Tucker is no anti-nuke dove and sees the US campaign against nuclear proliferation, something that both liberals and conservatives agree on, as inherently interventionist and having more to do with the pursuit of world hegemony than world peace. With "nuclear proliferation" now being used as fighting words with Persia, this is timely. Tucker explicitly distinguishes physical security and "more than physical security". Some of the later simply reflects idealism an