Political Ideologies Resulted In the Transition from an Isolationist Foreign Policy in America

Political Ideologies Resulted In the Transition from an Isolationist Foreign Policy in America

Introduction

Isolationism, in diplomacy, is a policy of maintaining a nation's rights and interests without alliances. When a nation's geopolitical position is such that it can do so, it is in a fortunate situation, because alliances always involve one in the diplomatic liabilities of one's allies and have to be paid for with diplomatic equivalents. Japan, before its pact with Great Britain in 1902, lived without allies for a thousand years, during the last half century of which it grew to world power. Great Britain lived from 1822 to 1902 in "splendid isolation" with only ad hoc (temporary) allies, except for a dormant traditional alliance with Portugal. The United States dwelt successfully in diplomatic isolation from 1800 to 1917 if not, indeed, to 1941. Its experience is an example of some of the national isolationist trends of the 19th century Chalberg, 2005).

American Isolationism: 1776-1900. Up to the time of the American Revolution the English colonists in North America, remote though they were from England, had no concept of isolation. They regarded involvement in Great Britain's wars with European states and colonies as an inevitable dispensation of fate, never to be questioned. It took Tom Paine, a liberal English isolationist and recent immigrant to the colonies, to awaken them to the idea that one of the advantages of independence was separation from Britain's wars and quarrels with other peoples. "Any submission to or dependence upon Great Britain," Paine reminded his American readers in Common Sense (1776), "tends directly to involve this country in European wars and quarrels and sets us at variance with nations who would otherwise seek our friendship and against whom we have neither anger nor complaint Chalberg, 2005)."

American diplomacy at the outset of the Revolution was so set against alliances that the Continental Congress resisted any commitment to France binding the two nations not to make a separate peace. Nevertheless, the need for military assistance overcame the revulsion to an alliance, without which the War of Independence would not have succeeded. The Franco-American alliance of 1778 entangled the United States in France's commitments with other alh'es (notably Spain, Convention of Aranjuez, 1779) during both the peace negotiations of 1782 and the wars of the French Revolution, and this experience disillusioned American statesmen after independence had been achieved.

The United States had considered its neutral rights invaded by France in 1796-1798 and had prepared for defense to the extent of a quasi war with that former ally; but it is noteworthy that in that emergency both Congress and President John Adams rejected any idea of an alliance with France's enemy Great Britain. In the years 1806-1812 the United States had considered its sovereign rights invaded by British maritime measures and the practice of impressing seamen, and had gone to war finally in the hope of conquering Canada, and also Florida which belonged to Britain's ally ...