Isolationism

From the opening vignette of “America first” in Donald J. Trump's January 2017 inaugural address to early American republican expressions urging “nonentanglement” in European and world affairs through debates over Cold War liberal internationalism and the unilateralist U.S. responses to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Charles A. Kupchan's Isolationism firmly establishes the importance of isolationism and isolationist ideas throughout U.S. history. Written by a renowned political scientist with policy-making expertise, the book unabashedly rejects the analysis of those who object to the “isolationist moniker” (p. 30). Kupchan's analysis covers the breadth of American history and relies on a synthesis of current scholarship along with fresh insights drawn from across history, political science, and primary sources. Central to his traditional guiding definition of isolationism, Kupchan hearkens back to George Washington's “great rule” (of nonentanglement and neutrality) to guide U.S. foreign relations. The “book defines isolationism as a grand strategy aimed at disengagement with foreign powers and the avoidance of enduring strategic commitments beyond the North American homeland” (p. 6). No recent historian has attempted to cover the sweep of U.S. history with such a focus, though many have explored isolationism over the past few decades. Christopher McKnight Nichols's Promise and Peril (2011) and Justus D. Doenecke's Storm on the Horizon (2000) build on pathbreaking 1960s and 1970s scholarship by Selig Adler, Wayne S. Cole, John Milton Cooper Jr., and Ernest R. May. Other historians, such as William Appleman Williams, have depicted isolationism as more myth or legend than reality

Foreign policy · International relations · Interventionism (politics · Isolationism · Multilateralism · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Terrorism · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · History · Law