The Nation: Turning Inward?

That word again. Isolationism. Speaking at N.Y.U. last week, Lyndon Johnson denounced a "new coalition of isolationists, conservatives and liberals, who seek to diminish America's role in the world—for entirely different reasons." At another point he said: "We cannot just get up and go home. Telling a man to go to hell and making him go there are two different propositions."

Quite a few Americans these days seem inclined to tell the rest of the world to go to hell. It is not isolationism in the old sense, but rather a turning inward to urgent domestic concerns, a somewhat naive disillusionment over...

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