![\"9194142_orig\"](\"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/9194142_orig-e1367515802449.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The Cato Institute’s Justin Logan at POLITICO<\/a>\u00a0argues “Washington\u2019s war hawks are gearing up to scare you with another phantom devil: isolationism.”<\/p>\n …\u201cisolationist\u201d was designed as a slur and remains one. No one calls himself an isolationist. It\u2019s always intended to link the target with the ignominious record of Americans in the 1930s who were slow to recognize the threat from Nazi Germany. But the term itself was coined around the turn of the 20th century by the imperialist A. T. Mahan to disparage opponents of American overseas expansion. As the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Walter McDougall\u00a0showed<\/a>, America\u2019s \u201cvaunted tradition of \u2018isolationism\u2019 is no tradition at all, but a dirty word that interventionists, especially since Pearl Harbor, hurl at anyone who questions their policies.\u201d<\/p>\n Coincidentally, perhaps, the third thing you should know is that the people trying to create anxiety about isolationism favor an interventionist military policy that has fallen out of favor with the public. After the twin disasters of Iraq and now Afghanistan, they are pawing the ground for more wars in Syria and Iran…<\/p>\n And that\u2019s what\u2019s really going on here \u2014 using rhetoric to remove any sensible alternative to America\u2019s expansive grand strategy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Here’s how you can tell the isolationist label is a slur and not descriptive: Washington’s war hawks have even called Obama an isolationist<\/em>! Well, sometimes they modify it\u00a0and choose “neo-isolationist.<\/a>” In that sense, the isolationist slander does not have anything to do with an ideology that favors pulling away from the world in foreign policy, commerce, culture, immigration and everything else. Instead, it means one who disagrees with the foreign policy prescriptions of the accuser.<\/p>\n As\u00a0Robert Golan-Vilella wrote at\u00a0The National Interest<\/em><\/a>, that label \u201conly begins to make sense if your default assumption is that the United States can and should be intervening everywhere, all the time.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe problem is the default assumption for many in our political elite,\u201d Matt Duss writes<\/a>, \u201cseems to be that the United States has the right\u2014nay,\u00a0the duty<\/em>\u2014to get into everyone\u2019s business, everywhere, all the time. Anything less represents an abdication.\u201d<\/p>\n But Logan makes perhaps a more important point here: the hawks who throw this label around at anyone who disagrees with their expansive foreign policies are trying to use this ad hominem rhetoric to promote more of their own reckless wars. Or, as Logan puts it, “to remove any sensible alternative to America\u2019s expansive grand strategy.”<\/p>\n