Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

This group, to whom we often give the name “neo-isolationist,” knew nothing of the world outside the United States, and generally despised it. Thus, they gave no consideration to our allies or neutrals, and saw no reason to know or to study Russia, since it could be hated completely without need for accurate knowledge. All foreigners were regarded as unprincipled, weak, poor, ignorant, and evil, with only one aim in life, namely, to prey on the United States. These neo-isolationists and unilateralists were equally filled with suspicion or hatred of any American intellectuals, including scientists, because they had no conception of any man who placed objective truth higher than subjective interests, since such an attitude was a complete challenge to the American businessman’s assumption that all men are and should be concerned with the pursuit of self-interest and profit.

At the end of the war, it was but natural that many Americans should seek to return from foreign and incomprehensible matters, including countries, peoples, and problems which were a standing refutation of the American neo-isolationist’s ideas of human nature, of social structure, and of proper motivations.

Neo-isolationism had a series of assumptions which explain their statements and actions and which could not possibly be held by anyone who had any knowledge of the world outside American lower-middle-class business circles. These beliefs were at least seven in number:

1. Unilateralism: the belief that the United States should and could act by itself without need to consider allies, neutrals, or the Soviet Union.

2. National omnipotence: the belief that the United States is so rich and powerful that no one else counts and that there is, accordingly, no need to study foreign areas, customs, or policies, since America’s policies an be based exclusively on its own power and its own high moral principles (which have no real meaning to anyone else).

3. Unlimited goals (or utopianism): the belief that there are final solutions to the world’s problems. This assumes that American power permits it to do what it wishes and that demonstration of this power to troublemaking foreigners will make them leave the United States alone and secure forever. This idea was reflected in its crudest form in the belief that America’s power could be applied to the world in one final smash after which everything would be settled forever. Upholders of this view refused to accept that America’s security in the nineteenth century had been an untypical and temporary condition and that constant danger and constant problems were a perpetual condition of human life except in brief and unusual circumstances. This kind of impatience with foreign problems and danger was clearly stated by Dulles in his article “A Policy of Boldness” in Life magazine, May 19, 1952. There he insisted that the Truman policy of containment must be replaced by a policy of “liberation,” since the former was based on “treadmill policies which at best might perhaps keep us in the same place until we drop exhausted.” These policies, he argued, would lead to financial collapse and loss of civil liberties, were “not designed to win victory conclusively,” and did not seek to solve the problem of the Soviet Union but to live with it, “presumably forever.” His solution was to refuse to recognize Communist control either in the European satellites or in China, to deny the existence of the Iron Curtain, and to free millions enslaved by Communism. Although the only way these millions could be freed was by war, Dulles refused to advocate preventive war, and established no method of achieving his goals except his belief that, if he refused to face reality, reality would change. However, he did accept preventive war in the form of massive retaliation if the Communists made any further advances, and he established the argument that the Truman policy of containing the Communists was a policy of refusing to defeat them, from softness or fear or sympathy. This became the basis for future partisan Republican charges that Democratic administrations were “soft on Communism” and pursued “no-win” policies.

4. The neo-isolationist belief in American omnipotence and foreign inferiority led, almost at once, to the conclusion that continuance of the Soviet threat arose from internal treason within America and that the Russian nuclear successes must be based on treason and espionage and could not possibly be based on foreign science or Soviet industrial capability. The neo-isolationists were convinced that the only threat to America came from internal subversion, from Communist sympathizers and “fellow travelers,” since no foreign threat could harm our omnipotence. All opposition to neo-isolationist views was branded as “un-American,” and was traced to low motivations or corruption of American life by such non-American innovations as economic planning, social welfare, or concern for foreigners. Henry Wallace and Mrs. Roosevelt, who were the special targets of these isolationists, were accused of conspiring to give away America’s wealth (in order to weaken it): “a quart of milk to every Hottentot.”

5. Since the chief “high moral principle” which motivated the neo-isolationists was their own economic self-interest, they were especially agitated by high taxes, and insisted that Soviet Russia and the Democrats were engaged in a joint tacit conspiracy to destroy America by high taxes by using Cold War crisis to tax America into bankruptcy.

6. Since the neo-isolationists rejected all partial solutions or limited goals, and were unwilling to pay to increase America’s military power (since they insisted it was already overwhelmingly powerful), there was little they could do in foreign affairs except to talk loudly and sign anti-Communist pacts and manifestos. This explains Dulles’s verbal bluster and “missile rattling” and his pactomania which kept him running about the world signing documents which bound people to pursue anti-Communist policies.

7. The unrealistic and unhistoric nature of neo-isolationism meant that it could not actually be pursued as a policy. It was pursued by John Foster Dulles, with permanent injury to our allies, the neutrals, and the personnel of American government, but it was not followed in the Pentagon and was followed only halfheartedly by Eisenhower in the White House. The President sought to keep the moderate middle group of voters in his camp by radiating his personal charm around the country, but the Pentagon refused to follow Dulles’s tactics of appeasing the neo-isolationists by refusing to defend their departmental employees. When Senator McCarthy turned his extravagant charges of subversion and treason from the State Department to the army, the employees of the latter were defended by Secretary Robert Stevens, and McCarthy’s downfall began. The neo-isolationist forces, although defeated at the ballot box in 1960 and 1964, still continue in an increasingly irresponsible form under a variety of names, including John Birch Society members, or, more generally, as the “Radical Right.”

Much less obvious to the public eye than neo-isolationism, but equally influential in creating the history of 1945-1963, was the struggle within the American defense services as to what use would be made of the nuclear weapon. In 1945 the atom bomb was at once hailed as the “absolute weapon” against which there was “no defense.” If true, this would have meant the end of the army and navy, since the existing bomb, shaped like a hen’s egg, 10 feet 8 inches long, 5 feet in diameter, and weighing 10,000 pounds, could be handled in the B-29 only by modifying its bomb drop to widen the opening, and could not be handled by the ground forces or by navy guns or carrier planes. Moreover, the range and intensity of its destruction gave rise to immediate claims from the advocates of air power that massed ground forces, slow-moving armored equipment, and all naval vessels, especially the expensive carriers and capital ships, were made obsolete by the new weapon. These extravagant claims were made more critical in their impact by the Strategic Bombing Surveys of World War II and the demobilization problems at the war’s end.