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In fact, many of the proposals that White House officials have so casually referred to as neo-isolationist no more deserve that description than does the Nixon Doctrine. First enunciated by the President at Guam in July 1969, it was a major effort to rethink U.S. world policy and lower the American profile abroad. Quite rightly, Historian Manfred Jonas argues that applying the term isolationist to contemporary Senators tends to confuse rather than illuminate their stance. "They earnestly believe that there are limits to America's power," he writes in Isolationism in America, "and that to overstep these limits means courting failure and nuclear war. To call the course they propose isolationism is to misread both the history of the '30s and the record of American foreign policy prior to that time."
From the perspective of the '70s, it is all too easy to dismiss America's past isolationism as inevitably misguided and foolish. As Selig Adler points out in The Isolationist Impulse, the doctrine in many ways is "woven into the warp and woof of the American epic." From the very beginnings of the U.S., immigrants envisioned it as a way to a new existence. "They reasoned," Adler wrote of the colonists, "that God Himself had intended to divide the globe into separate spheres. America was the 'New Zion,' and Providence had severed this 'American Israel' from a timeworn, corrupt and warring continent."
Until the outbreak of World War I, the U.S. consistently followed a policy of isolationism—at least in the all-important sense of acting alone—even as its actual isolation from the rest of the world gradually disappeared. To be sure, the U.S. invaded Canada in 1812, and gradually eliminated the British, French, Spanish and Mexican presence from within its continental borders. It also fought Spain in Cuba and the Philippines. But in all these enterprises, the U.S. took a unilateral stance and confined most of its treaty obligations to such limited matters as fishing and sealing rights, immigration and trade.
These sporadic ventures into international affairs point to a basic ambiguity in American history. On the one hand, there was a desire to keep clear of other continents' internecine squabbles; on the other, an almost mystical sense that America had a mission to spread freedom and democracy everywhere. This evangelistic belief was strongly reinforced by the waves of immigrants, who periodically tried to involve the U.S. in the revolutionary movements of their homelands. By and large, political leaders of all parties did their best to cool this interventionist ardor. As early as 1821, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams was forced to counter a popular enthusiasm for Greece's struggle against Turkish overlordship. While the U.S. would always view sympathetically the struggles of foreign peoples against tyranny, he said, "she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy."