How  long  will  the  United  States remain  an  isolationist?

When Americans are asked if they should come to the aid of victims of countries that are attacked by other countries or are victims in their own countries, the majority of Americans chant the common mantra—“It’s not our problem.” and “We shouldn’t get involved.”

It is easy to see why so many Americans feel this way. For example, the U.S. got involved in the First World War and they lost 53,402 soldiers in battle and during the Second World War, they lost 291,557 soldiers in battle. During the Korean War, they lost 33,741 soldiers in battle and during the war in Vietnam; they lost 47,424 soldiers in battle.  In Iraq, the U.S. lost 32,021 in battle or by terrorist attacks, and in Afghanistan; the U.S. has so far lost 2,272 soldiers in battle or by terrorist attacks. All told, the Americans have lost 460,417 soldiers in combat since 1917 through 2013.

Should the Americans have gotten involved in those wars?  Let me take you through the reasons that I feel that in some wars the answer is yes and in others, the answer is no.

The First World War

The United States entry into World War I came in April 1917, after two and a half years of efforts by President Woodrow Wilson to keep the United States neutral. Americans had no idea that war was imminent in the summer of 1914. However, the citizenry increasingly came to see the German Empire as the villain after news of atrocities in Belgium committed by the German military in 1914, and the sinking of the passenger liner RMS Lusitania in 1915 by a German submarine in defiance of international law.

Wilson made all the key decisions and kept the economy on a peacetime basis, while allowing large-scale loans to the United Kingdom and France. To preclude making any military threat towards Germany, Wilson made no preparations for war and kept American armed forces on its small peacetime basis despite increasing demands for preparedness for war with Germany.

Imperial German plans for the invasion of the United States were ordered by Germany's Emperor Kaiser Wilhelm II from 1897 to 1903. Wilhelm II did not intend to conquer the US; he wanted only to reduce the country's influence. His planned invasion was supposed to force the US to bargain from a weak position; to sever its growing economic and political connections in the Pacific, the Caribbean and South America; and to increase Germany's influence in those places.

At the beginning of 1917, Germany decided to resume all-out submarine warfare on all commercial ships headed toward Britain, realizing it would almost certainly mean war with the United States. Germany offered a military alliance to Mexico for Mexico to attack the U.S. and publication of that offer outraged American opinion just as the U-boats (submarines) started sinking American ships in the North Atlantic. Wilson then asked Congress for “a war to end all wars” and “to make the world safe for democracy.”  Congress voted to declare war on Germany on April 6, 1917 with only one dissenting vote.

Public opinion in the U.S. changed radically in three years' time. In 1914 most Americans called for neutrality, seeing the war as a dreadful mistake and they were determined to stay out of it. However, by 1917, the same public felt just as strongly as Wilson did that going to war was both necessary and the wise thing to do. The prevailing attitude was that the United States possessed a superior moral position as the only large nation devoted to the principles of freedom and democracy. Of course, Canada, Great Britain and other westernized countries had those same values. Nevertheless, while the Americans stayed aloof from the squabbles of reactionary empires such as Germany, it felt that it could preserve those ideals in the U.S. but Americans realized that sooner or later sooner the countries under attack would come to appreciate and adopt them also providing that the U.S. could first come to their aid and protected them from the aggressor which was the German Hun.  

And to their aid, the Americans came and with their Allies, they defeated the Germans and peace more or less reigned for many years after that.

The Second World War   

Now there was a war of all wars. It was the biggest war in history with the biggest loss of life known since Man began walking on his two legs. But even before the Americans entered that war in 1941 and even before Canada and Great Britain entered that war in 1939, two countries, Italy and Germany were at war with other countries. The independence of Ethiopia was interrupted by the Second Italian/Abyssinian War and Italian occupation of that country came about from 1936 to 1941. No other countries including the U.S. came to the aid of the Ethiopians during and after the invasion of Ethiopia by the Italians under the direction of Mussolini, the Italian dictator despite the pleas of the emperor of Ethiopia for help.  The Italians also invaded Greece.  

On March 7, 1936, the Nazi dictator of Germany, Adolf Hitler marched his troops into the Rhineland, a clear violation of the Versailles Treaty signed in 1918 at the end of the First World War. No nation did anything to stop him. That is when Hitler realized that he could expand Germany to encompass other European nations while other nations such as the United States and Great Britain and Canada, just to name a few, would sit on their arses and twiddle their thumbs as spectators.

And as to be expected, Hitler marched on Austria, then Czechoslovakia and still the previous other nations sat on their arses and twiddled their thumbs. And when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, Great Britain, France and Canada declared war on Germany, while the Americans continued to twiddle. 

“The United States has just spent thousands of American lives in a distant land for a victory in 1918 that now seems hollow, if indeed it can be called a victory at all. Our own country, moreover, is emerging from a recession, dispirited and self-absorbed, worried about the fragility of the recovery and the state of our democracy. Idealism is in short supply. So, as another far-off war worsens, Americans are loath to take sides, even against a merciless dictator, even to the extent of sending weapons. The voices opposed to getting involved range from the pacifist left to the populist right. The president, fearful that foreign conflict will undermine his domestic agenda, vacillates.”

Are these the words of an American politician who is afraid that President Obama will take the United States into a war with Syria? No. They are not. They were the words of an American politician who made that statement in 1940 while expressing his fear that President Roosevelt would bring the United States into war with Germany.

Roosevelt was supplying Great Britain with food and ships on a Lend/Lease Agreement between the two nations where Great Britain would use some of the American warships and at the same time, lease some of its property in the Far East to the United States.

Others did not believe Roosevelt's claim that America would remain neutral after Hitler invaded Poland on September 3^rd, 1939.  Six days later, Hans Thomson, the German charge d'affaires in Washington, cabled the German government: and said in part; “If defeat should threaten the Allies (Great Britain and France), Roosevelt is determined to go to war against Germany, even in the face of the resistance of his own country.”

I believe his presumption was quite accurate. Roosevelt was looking for any excuse to declare war on Germany even though Americans per se were against that concept. As isolationists, their view of the terrible events occurring in Europe was none of their business and they definitely didn’t want to get involved.

Ironically, the opportunity came 0n December 7^th, 1941 when Japanese aircraft bombed the American warships in Pearl Harbour. Hitler then made one of his stupidest blunders. He declared war on the United States. Roosevelt was ecstatic. The opening he had been hoping for came as a direct result of Hitler’s blunder. 

Now admittedly, the Americans weren’t excited in the prospect of fighting the Germans in Europe as they were in fighting the Japanese in the Pacific. However, they joined up by the thousands to fight whom they called, the Yellow Bastards. Their call was “Remember the Arizona!”—the warship in which so many Americans died during the bombing of Pearl Harbour. Later when Roosevelt sent hundreds of thousands of American soldiers and their equipment to England, they were just as anxious to get their teeth into the Nazi horde. Isolationism by then had waned in the United States. If it wasn’t for the entry of the United States into both wars (against Japan and Germany) those wars may have been lost and the world would be far different today than it was then. 

The Korean War

World War II divided Korea into a Communist northern half of the peninsula and an American-occupied southern half of the peninsula which was then divided at the 38th parallel. The Korean War (1950-1953) began when the North Korean Communist army crossed the 38th Parallel and invaded non-Communist South Korea. Kim Il-sung’s North Korean army, armed with Soviet tanks, quickly overran South Korea.

The United States came to South Korea's aid even though South Korea was not strategically essential to the benefit of the United States at that time. The political environment at that stage of the Cold War was such that American policymakers did not want to appear soft on Communism. Nominally, the U.S. intervened as part of a police action run by a United Nations international peace-keeping force since the U.S. was encouraged to cooperate with the United Nations in the police action to fight Communist interests in Korea. If North Korea had conquered South Korea, the people in South Korea would suffer from the dictators in North Korea and for this reason, South Korea would not have attained the world reputation as a peace-loving nation it has attained since the war in Korea ended nor would the United States be benefiting from the commercial relationship that currently exists between the U.S. and South Korea.  When the Americans entered that War, it benefitted the Americans in the long run.

The Vietnam War    

In May 1950, President Harry S. Truman authorized a modest program of economic and military aid to the French, who were fighting to retain control of their Indochina colony, including Laos and Cambodia as well as Vietnam. When the Vietnamese Nationalist (and Communist-led) Vietminh army defeated French forces at Dienbienphu in 1954, the French were compelled to accede to the creation of a Communist Vietnam north of the 17th parallel while leaving a non-Communist entity south of that line. The United States refused to accept the arrangement. The administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower undertook instead to build a nation from the spurious political entity that was South Vietnam by fabricating a government there, taking over control from the French, dispatching military advisers to train a South Vietnamese army, and unleashing the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to conduct psychological warfare against North Vietnam.

President John F. Kennedy created a turning point in early 1961, when he secretly sent 400 Special Operations Forces-trained (Green Beret) soldiers to teach the South Vietnamese how to fight what was called then referred to as a counterinsurgency war against Communist guerrillas in South Vietnam. When Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, there were more than 16,000 U.S. military advisers already in South Vietnam, and more than 100 Americans had been killed. Kennedy's successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, committed the United States fully to the war. In August 1964, he secured from Congress a functional (not actual) declaration of war: the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. Then, in February and March 1965, Johnson authorized the sustained bombing, by U.S. aircraft, of targets north of the 17th parallel, and on the 8^th of  March, he dispatched 3,500 Marines to South Vietnam. Legal declaration or no, the United States was now at war.

Well as we all know, the Americans lost that war and the North Vietnamese overran South Vietnam and it appears that all of Vietnam is doing rather well as a nation in our current era. The president of South Vietnam was a dictator that wasn’t worthy of assistance from the United Nations. The United States’ intrusion in the war between the French and the North Vietnamese to protect the interests of that dictator was a big mistake and the United States suffered not only the embarrassment of losing the war but also the loss of so many of its soldiers.

The Iraq/Kuwait War

By the time the Iran-Iraq war ended, Iraq was not in a financial position to repay the US$14 billion it borrowed from Kuwait to finance its war and requested Kuwait to forgive the debt. Iraq argued that the war had prevented the rise of Persian influence in the Arab World. However, Kuwait's reluctance to pardon the debt created strains in the relationship between the two Arab countries. During late 1989, several official meetings were held between the Kuwaiti and Iraqi leaders but they were unable to break the deadlock between the two, hence the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq.

After the decisive Iraqi victory, Saddam Hussein installed Alaa Hussein Ali as the Prime Minister of the Provisional Government of Free Kuwait and Ali Hassan al-Majid as the de facto governor of Kuwait. The exiled Kuwaiti royal family and other former government officials began an international campaign to persuade other countries to pressure Iraq to vacate Kuwait. During the Iraqi occupation, the forces of Saddam Hussein looted Kuwait's vast wealth and there were also reports of violations of human rights. According to some independent organizations, about 600 Kuwaiti nationals were taken to Iraq and haven't yet been accounted for.

The UN Security Council passed 12 resolutions demanding immediate withdrawal of Iraqi forces from Kuwait, but to no avail. After a series of failed negotiations between major world powers and Iraq, the United States-led coalition forces launched a massive military assault on Iraqi forces stationed in Kuwait in mid January 1991. Subsequently, the Iraqi forces were forced out of Kuwait.

The war between Iraq and Kuwait had been a major conflict between the Ba'athist Iraq and the State of Kuwait, which resulted in the seven-month long Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, and subsequently led to direct military intervention by American-led forces in the Persian Gulf War, and the torching of 600 Kuwaiti oil wells by the retreating Iraqi soldiers.

The Iraqi War

The 2003 invasion of Iraq lasted from 19 March 2003 to 1 May 2003, had signaled the start of the conflict that later came to be known as the Iraq War, which was incited under Weapons of Mass Destruction  pretext and dubbed Operation Iraqi Freedom by the United States.

It was a war that the United States should not have started. The U.S. government erroneously believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destructions (poisonous gas) which they previously used against the Iranians during the Iraq/Iran war and against the Kurds in northwest part of of Iraq.  As it turned out, the Americans couldn’t find any evidence of weapons of mass destruction.  But once in Iraq, the Americans decided to proceed against Saddam and the war against Iraq continued until its finality in 2011. Admittedly, the overthrow of Saddam ended his dictatorship but Iraq is still undergoing the throes of terrorist acts with the Americans no longer there.

The Afghanistan War

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, prompted the United States to dismantle the al-Qaeda terrorist organization in Afghanistan and to remove from power the Taliban government, which at the time controlled 90% of Afghanistan and hosted al-Qaeda leadership. U.S. President George W. Bush had demanded that the Taliban hand over Osama bin Laden and expel the al-Qaeda network which was supporting the Taliban in its war with the Afghan Northern Alliance. The Taliban advised bin Laden to leave the country but declined to extradite him without evidence of his involvement in the 9/11 attacks. The United States refused to negotiate further and launched Operation Enduring Freedom on the 7^th of  October 2001 with the United Kingdom and later joined by Germany and other western allies, to attack the Taliban and al-Qaeda forces in conjunction with the Northern Alliance.

I will say this from the get go. It was a big mistake on President Bush’s part to invade Afghanistan simply to capture Osama bin Laden. Trying to find that elusive terrorist in Afghanistan was as fruitless as trying to find a needle in thousands of haystacks during a hurricane.  As it turned out, they finally found him in Pakistan years later and killed him in his villa.

Admittedly, the invasion of Afghanistan resulted in the Taliban being removed from power which is a good thing for the citizens of Afghanistan but that by itself is not a legitimate reason to invade a country.

The Americans are war-weary from their non-stop excursions into wars that seem to go on and on and quite frankly, I sympathize with their concerns. One is forced to ask this rhetorical question, “When will it all end?”  The United States is plagued with problems of its own with high unemployment, political dysfunction in Congress, along with economic problems so it follows that the people of the U.S. aren’t that excited at the prospect of entering Syria to end the dictatorial regime of Bashar Assad. The war in Iraq and Afghanistan has already cost the American taxpayers more than a trillion dollars—money that could have been used for building more schools, repairing old bridges etc.

Consider the fact that if the Americans hadn’t come to the aid of the British in the Second World War, the Germans would have eventually overrun Great Britain and then the Americans wouldn’t have had the opportunity to put military boots in England in preparation for the invasion against the Germans in France which with the help of the Russians, ended the war within a year.

Isolationism isn’t just an aversion to war; it also includes an aversion to meddle in the affairs of other nations. However, since the United States is currently the most powerful nation in the world, other nations look upon them as the big brother in the school yard who will protect them from the bullies. Let’s face it. When the U.S. steps in between the bullies and their victims, everyone calls it a police action—which in fact it is.

But a great many Americans are asking themselves, “Why should we spend our money and the lives of our troops to enter into a fray between two antagonists?  That is a reasonable question.

Let me put my answer in a way that you will appreciate where I am coming from. Suppose you were in a school yard and you were the biggest kid in the school. And suppose one day you saw a bully beating a smaller kid and while the smaller kid was being beaten, he reached out his hand to you and begged you to save him. Would you simply walk away and the last thing that small kid would hear was you telling him, “It’s not my problem. I don’t want to get involved.” And how will you later feel when you learn that the small kid you ignored; died as a result of the beating he got from the bully?

The world we live in is a vast community of nations. When a nation is in need of help, most people are willing to offer assistance to such nations. To ignore their plight is no different than ignoring the bully in the school yard or ignoring the needs of a neighbor whose house has burned to the ground.

Back in the 1940s, everything was more or less black and white. Hitler was a menace to all nations and had the Americans not intervened, it is possible that Hitler would have succeeded in developing the Intercontinental rockets and since German scientists were working towards creating an atomic bomb, it is conceivable that he could have had such a bomb dropped on New York City.

Nowadays, not everything is black and white. There are varying degrees of gray that confounds and confuses us as to what we should do next. The choices Americans make are much harder now than they were in the 1940s.

It is one thing to be the most powerful nation in the world and it is quite something else to be one of the most hated nations in the world. I am not blaming the Americans for this at all. Big kids who stand up to bullies are often hated by the bullies. But that hatred will expand to innocent victims of bullies if the United States doesn’t heed the calls of those who are victimized by the bullies.

Remember Nero? Of course you weren’t around then. But while Rome burned, he continued to fiddle with his lyre. Well, while our world burns, will the Isolationist Americans continue to twiddle with their thumbs while they are whispering in our ears, “It’s not my problem so why should I get involved?

And when his home is burning furiously and he is trapped and asking for someone to bring a ladder to his window on the second floor, how will he feel when a neighbour tells him that it is not his problem and he doesn’t think he should get involved?

The last thing the Isolationist on the ground will hear from the screaming Isolationist man in the window who is engulfed in flames is; “For God’s sake, do something!”