I happened upon this article in a 1949 issue of International Conciliation (sorry, didn’t note which issue, the name of the article, the author):
The North Atlantic Pact is a peacetime alliance for mutual defense against armed attack in Europe or North America. For some of the signatories such alliances have been a common tool of diplomacy. For the United States, however, it marks a distinct innovation. In the entire stretch of our history from the Declaration of Independence to the present, an American government has signed only one defensive alliance with a European government, that of 1778 with France.
Let that sink in: between 1778 and 1949, a span of 171 years, the United States stood aside from all the foment happening in Europe. For better or worse. Ignore the Napoleonic wars. No choosing of sides after the Congress of Vienna. Not following the complex web of treaties that broke down when Bismark left office, ultimately leading to World War I.
Woodrow Wilson hoped – assumed – that the US’s involvement in World War I would lead towards involvement in world affairs, starting with the League of Nations. However, Heather Cox Richardson‘s post shows otherwise:
But Wilson was disappointed that the soldiers’ sacrifices had not changed the nation’s approach to international affairs. The Senate, under the leadership of Republican Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts—who had been determined to weaken Wilson as soon as the imperatives of the war had fallen away—refused to permit the United States to join the League of Nations, Wilson’s brainchild: a forum for countries to work out their differences with diplomacy, rather than resorting to bloodshed.
It’s difficult to say whether the US joining the League of Nations would have changed the path leading to World War II – the Great Depression and German hyperinflation would likely be unaffected by military alliances – and the United States was not yet a world power. Regardless, Americans still preferred isolationism, even after World War II, and isolationism was definitely front-and-center after World War I.
However, the world was dramatically altered after World War II, as explained in International Concilliation:
During the nineteen century we could afford to remain aloof from such formal alliances. Our ocean cushioned us comfortably from a continent whose interests did not for the most part strike close to basic American needs. Approaching the mid-mark of the twentieth century, however, Americans look back on two world wars in which the United States became involved and from which no fence of neutrality could protect them. The United States has itself become one of the two major weights in the balance of power. The world’s problems and American problems have become inextricably intertwined. Since the defeat of Hitler the United States has slowly been clearing its way to a peacetime world policy, most of it in the context of severe dissension with the Soviet Union. For some time American policy has foreshadowed, though it not inevitably indicate, a commitment like the North Atlantic Pact.
And now? President Trump seemingly wants to be a global bully while also trying to pull the country into selective isolationism, to cancel signed treaties and ignore global problems that previously would directly involve the United States. He wants to claim responsibility for stopping international wars while also contemplating leaving NATO or the United Nations. In his first term he pulled out the Iran nuclear deal which, hopefully, would return Iran to the global community. What’s next? It’s definitely unclear where the United States will be at the end of his current term, but so far his position appears to favor isolationism, for better or worse.
