Isolationism as Rhizome

Narratives justifying the formation and continuation of global American imperial hegemony in the twentieth century required a villain, as do all compelling stories. Isolationists were ideal for this purpose. They were easily cartooned as provincial and partisan reactionaries clinging to the shibboleths of Washington and Jefferson and preventing the United States from attaining its ordained place in global affairs after World War I. But this characterization was long ago demolished as “legend” and “the folklore of American foreign relations” by William Appleman Williams.¹ The nuanced reality that isolationists readily forged accommodations between the blessings of liberty and the opportunities of empire has been illuminated and massively documented by subsequent scholarship.

Promise and Peril joins this well-established historiographical tradition to present what Christopher McKnight Nichols believes are overlooked subtleties and continuities in isolationism during the 1890s imperialism debates, the conflict over entry into World War I, and the postwar efforts to make a lasting peace. He argues that there was a key “intellectual transition” during this period that historians have missed (p. 322). “Modern isolationist ideas were central in determining outcomes of these events,” he asserts (p. 7). Nichols emphasizes complexity, hybridity, and connection in the isolationist tradition, and he links domestic approaches to social reform with concerns over foreign power projection. He argues that “the cluster of isolationist ideas—opposing colonialism and entangling alliances, while advocating neutrality and minimizing wars—set the ideological parameters for those on all sides of the debates over America’s global involvement” (p. 7). Nichols sees “a barely visible ‘soft’ power form of international engagement” that contained also an “undoubtedly coercive element to nonmilitaristic American imperial economic and cultural engagement” (p. 11).

At the start, Nichols provides a confusing array of arguments for the significance of the project that, in the conclusion, he finally distills into four major assertions. The first is that the “modern, refined form of American isolationist thought” must be seen as originating in the debates over imperialism in the 1890s. In an odd use of scare quotes, Nichols writes that “new isolationist perspectives developed out of debates over American ‘empire’” (p. 322). The second argument of the book is to recognize and understand “isolationist concepts as intellectual and cultural phenomena” and to link domestic intellectual and reform currents with foreign policy. Nichols sees isolationist ideas “embedded in the arguments and actions of radical reformers and even some of the most internationalist-minded thinkers and activists from the 1890s through the 1930s” (p. 322). Third, Nichols argues that isolationism reveals “fascinating hybrid beliefs” linking “isolation to a wide range of social, economic, philosophical, and political positions.” He finds that “frequently imperial and anti-imperial, interventionist and anti-interventionist, reform and status quo arguments coexisted in the hearts and minds of the same person” (p. 323). Finally, Nichols argues that studying “the developing power, appeal, and widely varying influence of modern isolationism” demonstrates why “interventionist paths” were “restricted” even if “isolationist paths were not taken in the end.” He believes the isolationist intellectual tradition “served to curb the impulses for audacious, usually unilateralist international action, supported a domestic focus, and reinforced a new rendering of the tradition for ‘nonentangled’ commitments and informal or ‘soft’ modes of international relations” (p. 323).

These are all appropriate, if oft-told, points to make. Nichols is sensitive to many of the inbuilt contradictions of American engagement with the world in the intellectual tradition he surveys. It is certainly valuable to highlight the anti-imperial and non-interventionist traditions in the American past. Nichols has done solid historical work, supporting his argument with archival examples and engagement with primary and secondary works. There are passages in this book with memorable characterizations. For example, William Borah is described as having held to the idea “that large ‘remorseless and soulless’ entities should be kept from domineering over a man’s personal liberty” (p 313).

But overall, this reading of isolationism is not especially original or counter to numerous works on the...