The alternative to isolationism is intrusionism" the commandeering of independent states and of individual freedoms by self-appointed prophets who know better" than the rest of us. Viewed against that arrogant polarity isolationism is a moral imperative.
I dont like the word isolationism" because it is inaccurate. The idea behind minding your own business isnt to ignore your neighbors need or misery but rather to give disease a chance to heal itself. First do no harm" warns the Hippocratic Oath. The unpleasant aspects of illness like fever and vomiting are Natures way of curing the body. The physician who rushes in with symptom-suppressing miracle-drugs may actually facilitate the diseases spread or at least slow its eradication by mitigating painful but necessary side-effects with concoctions that imbalance the metabolism.
So for the tampering well-meaning intruder in foreign affairs. Does it benefit a society in the throes of civil war for an outsider to invade with massive force and declare a victor? Did it work in Iraq? Is it working in Libya or Afghanistan? Did the Brits make it work in northern India when they created East and West Pakistan a nation whose halves were separated by a thousand miles? Are we helping our next-door neighbor Mexico to solve her many and enduring problems by receiving millions of her poor into our welfare state and pouring millions of dollars out of our economyin the form of illegally earned wagesback into the corrupt legal and political status quo down south?
If you hear your neighbors arguing through an open kitchen window do you charge over with a baseball bat and demand that they make it up? If you see your neighbor spanking his child and you are convinced of corporal punishments brutality do you rush in and grab the offending hand from behind? Or do you report the brute perhaps to child services? Are you happy with the odds of a foster-home relocations producing a good outcome for the little tyke? Are you sureare you really surethat a spanking is all that bad? Are you as confident as Moses with the Tablets that your way is right and the other way wrong?
Of course the slaughter of children is hardly comparable to a spanking; but then we were told (falsely as it turned out) that tens of thousands of innocents were being ethnically purged in Bosnia as the Clinton Administration sought to wade through a morass of scandals... and we ended up destroying the electrical supply to several hospitals whose patients in some cases died as a result. How many children have been caught in the crossfire of weapons distributed by us to Syrian rebels? (Vladimir Putin beat me to the publisher with this observation by the way: I have not borrowed it from him.) How many children for that matter have been killed by guns that our all-knowing elite supplied to Mexican cartels?
The isolationist (if I must use that word: I would prefer responsible adult") doesnt sit on his hands in such circumstancesbut neither does he rush in with drawn sixguns like a drunken cowboy. He clears and cultivates his own garden so that it offers a stark contrast with the misery reigning elsewhere in the world. Then he offers seed and fertilizer and perhaps a marketplace to those who would like to replicate his setting (on terms that benefit his peace and security naturally). His entire approach is pursued in utter transparency and punctilious probity: his does not double-deal or pass cards under the table. Immanuel Kant was once mocked by Benjamin Constant for claiming that deception is wrong in all circumstances. Constant scoffed that Kant would tell the truth even if having granted shelter to a frantic suppliant he then opened his door to a crazed murderer chasing the poor wretch and demanding to know whether his quarry had fled into the house. Kant could not recall having ever made any such remark but he accepted its premise and defended the position that yes lies are lies and are always wrong. His case is but half-made in a famous little essay: I have often wondered why he didnt point out that the yes" answer need not be accompanied by yielding the doorway and that indeed we cannot know in real life just which stranger at the door is the dangerous lunatic. What he stresses instead is that the liar owns all the consequences of his lies. If the refugee for instance should slip out the back door while you are urging the murderer to look elsewhere then the two may meet just in time for one to finish off the otherand the crime in some measure will be on your head.
So for foreign adventurism: the do-gooder the child-saver who thrusts himself into a quarrel unrelated to his vital interests is responsible for all the ripple-effects of that intrusion. This crusader can scarcely know how many innocents might have died if he had stayed at home and employed peaceful persuasion; all he can know for certain is that the innocents who may die in any exacerbated mess he leaves behind are at least indirectly his victims. It is a patriotic-posing clich that we clearly prevented Hitler from killing millions of Jews since he had already slaughtered millions when we stopped him; and that critics of World War Two are thus condoning mass murder and retroactively licensing an even more nightmarish atrocity than the Holocaust. Yet it would have been materially impossible for the Nazis to purge as many tens of millions as did Stalin and Mao an apocalyptic harvest facilitated by our strategy in the war. Indeed had Hitler been preoccupied with a war in the east and thus strongly motivated to preserve peace at his back to the west we could very likely have prevented his death-camp gambit entirely through diplomatic means. As it was Hitlers central-European allies gleefully ransomed off a great many of their Jews to Western intercessors before the Fuhrer put his boot down.
My ultimate objection then to the word isolationist" is that it rhetorically scuffs over an unimpeachable moral fact: that we have free will in making better or worse choices and that we are obligated to extend to others the opportunity of making similar choices. We are all isolationists like it or not in the sense that we must answer for what we do personally; and we are all duty-bound to be isolationists in another sense insofar as we respect the individuality of other creatures. It is not our right as beings of freedom to usurp the decision-making of our fellows. Though their choices may be clearly wrong to us they cannot recognize that wrongness and learn from it if we imperiously highjack the process. A child who is never allowed to speak does not grow up to be an adult who always speaks the truth. This indeed is the fundamental conflict between Christianity and Islam: a pauper who doesnt steal because his neighbors hand has been lopped off is a terrified pauper not a mature believer who understands that possessions must not enthrall him.
Within our society as well we are fighting this same battleand those of us who believe in freedom are losing. Our children are not allowed to fail in school or at the games they play. Individuals are not allowed to fail in the struggle to bring home a monthly check. Companies are not allowed to fail no matter how sloppy their business practices. Our government is not allowed to fail no matter how absurdly far it extends its commitments beyond the bounds of solvency. The globalists are taking it to the isolationiststranslation: the people who want their lives managed (or want to manage others lives) are winning converts to Big Brothers creed in droves and hordes from the ranks of those who want to succeed or fail on their own effort and to respect that sacred right in their neighbors. Intrusionists" are everywhere. They claim the right to keep other nationsand other individuals including fellow Americansfrom making choices that they themselves would not advise. They claim the parents right to dictate rules to the child and to exact punishment when a rule is disobeyed. They are well meaning they tell us (and themselves): a dubious assertion since shackling the activity of another free sane adult scarcely smells of good intention… but if we would only stop squirming and let them work out the kinks in their autocratic agenda then we would eventually see that we are much better off having them as our heart our brain and our god.
The lazy sign over their soul to this devil while dangerously childish adults around the world grow more dangerous and more childish as a result of not facing squarely the consequences of their own actions. (Ruin may flow from corrupt pretext as well as righteous consequence: were we to assassinate Baschar al-Assad the true cause of his demise would remain so murky that he would likely achieve martyrdom to many.) Unelected bureaucrats and heads of state who spit on their electors draw the strings tighter and tighter. Centripety has trumped centrifugy. The collective has engulfed the individual. Salvation is now determined by statistical preponderance. The single soul no longer mattersand the god to whom that soul was dear no longer exists. The new god Progress is at once the forward-struggling hive and the more efficient hive of the future toward which we struggle. And we worship that hive-godwe worship ourselves collectively in himby grinding down every unitary obstacle that offers resistance.
Sneer at isolationism if you will. Just be aware of what ideas and forces you embrace in doing so.