Foreign Policy : The 'Isolationist' Slur - Brief Article

* In the weeks since the Senate rejected the test-ban treaty, the Clinton administration has escalated its campaign to portray Republicans as isolationists. National security adviser Samuel Berger gave a big speech on "the new isolationists," who "believe in a survivalist foreign policy- build a fortified fence around America and retreat behind it." These are curious charges. To judge by their records during the Cold War and Gulf War, the opponents of the test-ban treaty had more internationalist vigor than the supporters. The grounds of the opposition to the treaty, moreover, were hardly isolationist. Opponents worried that the treaty would have lessened America's role in the world by undermining our ability to defend ourselves or our allies. To accuse those of us who opposed the test-ban treaty of wanting to retreat behind our borders is needlessly to alarm our allies.

So Clinton and his appointees must be using the term "isolationist" in novel fashion. At times, they seem to use it to mean nothing more than opposition to their policies. Thus, anyone who questions the merit of the International Monetary Fund, or who considers Kosovo marginal to the national interest, or who thinks our "strategic partnership" with China unwise-is an "isolationist." This reflex of the administration appears not to be an opportunistic polemical tactic but a genuine inability to conceive of an internationalism that is not liberal. It is of a piece with modern liberalism's tendency to see itself as the exclusive embodiment of open-mindedness, enlightenment, and progress.

This is why the administration's attack on "isolationism" has now come to include an attack on "unilateralism" as well. Unilateralism would at first glance seem to be the very opposite of isolationism: How can Republicans reasonably be accused of bullying the world and withdrawing from it simultaneously? For liberals, however, both foreign-policy impulses involve a chauvinistic concern for America's interests and freedom of action-as The Nation's editorial on the subject puts it, for "discredited notions like . . . U.S. exceptionalism." From the liberal perspective, a unilateralist is simply an isolationist away from home.

Neither label fits most Republicans. The GOP has been more mindful of America's allies than the unilateralist caricature would suggest. The last Republican president moved with care and skill to forge an international coalition against Iraq; the current Republican Congress is more determined to protect Taiwan than is the administration. What Republicans will not do is forswear, by treaty or habit, the possibility of acting alone in extremis. They will not trust in some fictive "international community" to keep the peace, insist on its blessing for any American policy, or attempt to create it through paper declarations.

The administration would prefer to live in a dream world where the example of American pledges of self-restraint will cause North Korea to follow suit. To the extent the administration inhabits that world, it has withdrawn from the world around us. The current attack on the GOP exhibits the same strange isolation from reality. It is hard to believe that the Democrats can win the debate they have opened. If they continue in this vein, they may find themselves isolated from the public as well.

COPYRIGHT 1999 National Review, Inc.
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