3 ms·

When you say isolationist, do you mean in terms of projecting force through military means, or by promoting and upholding trade liberalization?

• SllX 7y ago
  Military. Americans generally had a distaste for foreign wars until about the 20th Century. Arguably still do. Arguably there has also been a rather bloodthirsty contingent among us that once we ran out of Indians to kill, started wanting to get involved in foreign wars. We got our first real taste of being a Maritime Empire after the Spanish-American War, but that same contingent brought us into two World Wars and just kept on going until we had invaded Asia no less than 6 times, and I’m probably missing a few. We’ve always favored free trade, but that was as much a consequence of being cut out of the British mercantile system post Independence as it was just a nice idea. Generally when opportunities came up to assert more sway on the global stage, by which of course what I really mean is get involved in European affairs, we balked all the way till 1917, and mostly kept trying to balk even after until 1942. The isolationist segment of society has been out of power for a long time now, but it has never truly gone away, and arguably they are gaining power. Clinton was a Hawk, Biden might be Hawkish relative to his contemporaries, but Trump is definitely an isolationist and there’s a decent chance the Democratic Party is going to nominate one as well.