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By the closing decades of the 19th century, time began to run out on the traditional faith. U.S. foreign trade doubled between 1870 and 1890. Navy Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, a visionary military strategist, saw the seas as an "open plain" and urged the country "to cast aside the policy of isolation which befitted her infancy." The isolationist past was decisively rejected by Woodrow Wilson's intervention on the Allied side in World War I, but it was revived by the disillusionment that followed his crusade to make the world safe for democracy. The anti-internationalist movement reached a peak of influence in the years just before World War II. Its primary goal was to prevent the U.S. from becoming entangled in the looming war in Europe. Hapless remnants of isolationism persisted for a decade after the war ended, as a score of Senators (most of them Midwestern Republicans) sought unavailingly to defeat such undertakings as the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan and NATO. But for all practical purposes, the doctrine died with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Senator Arthur Vandenberg wrote in his diary: "That day ended isolationism for any realist." The postwar efforts to keep the flame alive were merely, as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. put it, "the last convulsive outbreak of an old nostalgia."
No serious political figure now suggests that the U.S. could or should put aside the burden of global responsibilities it has assumed through necessity and moral conviction. But just how large that burden should be and how it should be borne obviously needs reappraisal. This quest for reappraisal was inspired by Viet Nam. But other factors would have brought it about even without the Indochina conflict.
During World War II, the U.S. acquired a mental habit of considering itself nearly omnipotent and the defender of freedom all over the globe. This self-image carried over into the cold war, when U.S. power was needed to halt Communist expansionism. That stance is no longer possible because reality has changed; the U.S. no longer has a nuclear monopoly, its economic resources have limits, and other nations do not necessarily agree with the U.S. definition of freedom or the good life. Moreover, Communism has become fissiparous and more amenable to negotiated détente.
In this new situation, which has actually existed for at least a decade but which the U.S. is not yet really accustomed to, foreign policy will have to depend less on military force and direct Marshall Plan-style economic heft and more on diplomacy, trade and political maneuvering. French Journalist-Politician Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, among others, has argued that the U.S. will have to choose between continued international power and the building of "an ambitious civilization" at home. For the foreseeable future, the U.S. will obviously insist on both, but Servan-Schreiber is right in asserting that the U.S. will have to rely more on sheer intelligence than sheer force. Secretary of State William Rogers puts it another way; he says that "there are lots of ways to influence people. The force of reasoning and the force of public opinion have a lot to do with influencing nations."