Internationalism/Isolationism: Concepts of American Global Power

This chapter provides a conceptual history of the emergence of the internationalism/isolationism dualism in U.S. political discourse. It asks how, why, and to what effect Americans came to speak in these loaded terms, which scholars and practitioners often employ as coherent and neutral categories. “Internationalism” emerged in the nineteenth century in close association with the peace movement. Early in World War II, however, U.S. officials and intellectuals decided that the United States should henceforth project preponderant political-military power in Europe and Asia, transcending hemispheric constraints. They cast U.S. global dominance as the fulfillment of internationalism, a term they redefined in opposition to their pejorative coinage, “isolationism.” In so doing, they made U.S. hegemony sound essential rather than antithetical to international peace and cooperation: the only hope of taming power politics, if that were even possible, was now to master it.