Introduction
A cottage industry has grown around the subject of American isolationism in the interwar period – so much so that “isolationist” has become the standard characterization of America’s foreign policy between the two World Wars. It is often asserted that American isolationist sentiment was responsible for inaction in foreign affairs from the rejection of American membership in the League of Nations through the turbulent 1920s and 1930s and right up
to the American failure to respond to Nazi aggression. Only the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, we are typically told, was sufficient to rouse Americans from their insular torpor. Such assertions, both in textbooks and in the work of some of the finest scholars, can be multiplied indefinitely.
This characterization has directly informed three lines of research in the field of political science. The literature on public opinion and American foreign policy very often portrays isolationism as a belief system which, though vanquished by the second World War, found at least a partial resurgence around the time of the war in Vietnam. Another literature, on cyclic trends in American foreign policy, typically portrays the interwar period as a deeply isolationist (or “introverted”) one. Yet another literature, that having to do with grand strategy in general and American grand strategy in particular, looks to the isolationism of the 1920s and 1930s as an ideal type, though contributors differ on the question of whether it constitutes a usable past to be emulated in some ways or an aberration to be avoided.
