Isolationist Criticisms

The last antiinterventionist and antiimperialist thrust of the old conservative and classical liberal isolationists came during the Korean War. [p. 275]

Conservative George Morgenstern, chief editorial writer of the Chicago Tribune and author of the first revisionist book on Pearl Harbor, published an article in the right-wing Washington weekly Human Events, which detailed the grisly imperialist record of the United States government from the Spanish-American War down to Korea. Morgenstern noted that the “exalted nonsense” by which President McKinley had justified the war against Spain was “familiar to anyone who later attended the evangelical rationalizations of Wilson for intervening in the European war, of Roosevelt promising the millennium, . . . of Eisenhower treasuring the ‘crusade in Europe’ that somehow went sour, or of Truman, Stevenson, Paul Douglas or the New York Times preaching the holy war in Korea.”5

In a widely noted speech at the height of the American defeat in North Korea at the hands of the Chinese in late 1950, conservative isolationist Joseph P. Kennedy called for U.S. withdrawal from Korea. Kennedy proclaimed that “I naturally opposed Communism but I said if portions of Europe or Asia wish to go Communistic or even have Communism thrust upon them, we cannot stop it.” The result of the Cold War, the Truman Doctrine, and the Marshall Plan, Kennedy charged, was disaster — a failure to purchase friends and a threat of land war in Europe or Asia. Kennedy warned that:

. . . half of this world will never submit to dictation by the other half . . . . What business is it of ours to support French colonial policy in Indo-China or to achieve Mr. Syngman Rhee’s concepts of democracy in Korea? Shall we now send the Marines into the mountains of Tibet to keep the Dalai Lama on his throne?

Economically, Kennedy added, we have been burdening ourselves with unnecessary debts as a consequence of Cold War policy. If we continue to weaken our economy “with lavish spending either on foreign nations or in foreign wars, we run the danger of precipitating another 1932 and of destroying the very system which we are trying to save.”

Kennedy concluded that the only rational alternative for America is to scrap the Cold War foreign policy altogether: “to get out of Korea,” and out of Berlin and Europe. The United States could not possibly contain Russian armies if they chose to march through Europe, and if [p. 276] Europe should then turn Communist, Communism “may break of itself as a unified force . . . . The more people that it will have to govern, the more necessary it becomes for those who govern to justify themselves to those being governed. The more peoples that are under its yoke, the greater are the possibilities of revolt.” And here, at a time when cold warriors were forecasting a world Communist monolith as an eternal fact of life, Joseph Kennedy cited Marshall Tito as pointing the way for the eventual breakup of the Communist world: thus, “Mao in China is not likely to take his orders from Stalin . . . .”

Kennedy realized that “this policy will, of course, be criticized as appeasement. [But] . . . is it appeasement to withdraw from unwise commitments . . . . If it is wise in our interest not to make commitments that endanger our security, and this is appeasement, then I am for appeasement.” Kennedy concluded that “the suggestions I make [would] conserve American lives for American ends, not waste them in the freezing hills of Korea or on the battlescarred plains of Western Germany.”6

One of the most trenchant and forceful attacks on American foreign policy to emerge from the Korean War was leveled by the veteran classical liberal journalist, Garet Garrett. Garrett began his pamphlet, The Rise of Empire (1952), by declaring, “We have crossed the boundary that lies between Republic and Empire.” Explicitly linking this thesis with his notable pamphlet of the 1930s, The Revolution Was, which had denounced the advent of executive and statist tyranny within the republican form under the New Deal, Garrett once more saw a “revolution within the form” of the old constitutional republic. Garrett, for example, called Truman’s intervention in Korea without a declaration of war a “usurpation” of congressional power.

In his pamphlet, Garrett adumbrated the criteria, the hallmarks for the existence of Empire. The first is the dominance of the executive power, a dominance reflected in the President’s unauthorized intervention in Korea. The second is the subordination of domestic to foreign policy; the third, the “ascendancy of the military mind”; the fourth, a “system of satellite nations”; and the fifth, “a complex of vaunting and fear,” a vaunting of unlimited national might combined with a continuing fear, fear of the enemy, of the “barbarian,” and of the unreliability of the satellite allies. Garrett found each one of these criteria to apply fully to the United States.

Having discovered that the United States had developed all the hallmarks [p. 277] of empire, Garrett added that the United States, like previous empires, feels itself to be “a prisoner of history.” For beyond fear lies “collective security,” and the playing of the supposedly destined American role upon the world stage. Garrett concluded:

It is our turn.
Our turn to do what?
Our turn to assume the responsibilities of moral leadership in the world.
Our turn to maintain a balance of power against the forces of evil everywhere — in Europe and Asia and Africa, in the Atlantic and in the Pacific, by air and by sea — evil in this case being the Russian barbarian.
Our turn to keep the peace of the world.
Our turn to save civilization.
Our turn to serve mankind.
But this is the language of Empire. The Roman Empire never doubted that it was the defender of civilization. Its good intentions were peace, law and order. The Spanish Empire added salvation. The British Empire added the noble myth of the white man’s burden. We have added freedom and democracy. Yet the more that may be added to it the more it is the same language still. A language of power.7

• 5 George Morgenstern, “The Past Marches On,” Human Events (April 22, 1953). The revisionist work on Pearl Harbor was Morgenstern, Pearl Harbor: Story of a Secret War (New York: Devin-Adair, 1947). For more on the conservative isolationists and their critique of the Cold War, see Murray N. Rothbard, “The Foreign Policy of the Old Right,” Journal of Libertarian Studies (Winter 1978).
• 6Joseph P. Kennedy, “Present Policy is Politically and Morally Bankrupt,” Vital Speeches (January i, 1951), pp. 170-73.
• 7Garet Garrett, The People’s Pottage (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1953), pp. 158-59, 129-174. For more expressions of conservative or classical liberal antiimperialist critiques of the Cold War, see Doenecke, Not to the Swift, p. 79.