Word: isolationist
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President Nixon has used the term neo-isolationist to describe certain of his senatorial critics who would alter U.S. foreign policy or who seek a greater role for the Congress in shaping it. Once the name of a popular and viable political doctrine, isolationism today-with or without "neo" attached to it-is a pejorative word. It has no real validity in a world of instant communications, internationally linked economies, and nuclear weapons that can bridge continents at Mach 23 speed. Properly speaking, the term suggests someone who would like to disengage the U.S. from the rest of the world...
However arguable their proposed alternatives may be, none of the leading Senate critics of the President's foreign policy can be fairly accused of being isolationist. Republican Jacob Javits of New York-the only Senator who has been cited by name in Nixon's attacks-wants to curb the President's war-making powers. But Javits sided with his party's leader last week in voting against Senator Mike Mansfield's amendment to reduce U.S. forces in Europe by half. John Stennis of Mississippi, who shares Javits' views on war powers, is generally...
...fact, many of the proposals that White House officials have so casually referred to as neo-isolationist no more deserve that description than does the Nixon Doctrine. First enunciated by the President at Guam in July 1969, it was a major effort to rethink U.S. world policy and lower the American profile abroad. Quite rightly, Historian Manfred Jonas argues that applying the term isolationist to contemporary Senators tends to confuse rather than illuminate their stance. "They earnestly believe that there are limits to America's power," he writes in Isolationism in America, "and that to overstep these limits means...
From the perspective of the '70s, it is all too easy to dismiss America's past isolationism as inevitably misguided and foolish. As Selig Adler points out in The Isolationist Impulse, the doctrine in many ways is "woven into the warp and woof of the American epic." From the very beginnings of the U.S., immigrants envisioned it as a way to a new existence. "They reasoned," Adler wrote of the colonists, "that God Himself had intended to divide the globe into separate spheres. America was the 'New Zion,' and Providence had severed this 'American Israel...
Strict Constructionism. While fighting off unacceptable amendments, the Administration had its hands full trying to salvage the draft bill itself. For the first time since 1940, when President Franklin Roosevelt persuaded an isolationist Congress to renew Selective Service, the Senate seriously considered whether to have a draft at all. Viet Nam, of course, was the reason. Some Senators argued that abolishing the draft would bring the war to a speedier conclusion...