In declaring his long-shot challenge to George Bush for the Republican presidential nomination, conservative columnist Pat Buchanan toned down some of his reactionary ideas. But he retained enough traces of xenophobia to sound like a flashback from the isolationist 1930s. Launching his campaign in New Hampshire, where the first 1992 presidential primary is only nine weeks away, Buchanan demanded no less than America's retreat from the world at flank speed.
The debater's edge he has polished as a television shout-show panelist helped Buchanan frame his differences with Bush in only 41 words: "He is a globalist and we are nationalists. He believes in some Pax Universalis; we believe in the old Republic. He would put America's wealth and power at the service of some vague New World Order; we will put America first." Buchanan believes that the U.S. has no business promoting democracy abroad now that the cold war is history. He wants to end direct foreign aid and curtail U.S. participation in the World Bank. Buchanan would rapidly withdraw all American ground forces from Europe. Some of the troops, he suggests, should be used to reinforce border patrols that intercept illegal immigrants from Mexico. As for legal immigration from Third World countries, Buchanan would curb that too.
While Buchanan is by far the most extreme neo-isolationist to declare his candidacy, other versions of that creed are erupting all along the political spectrum. The redefinition of U.S. priorities and interests in the post-cold war world is a subject that cries out for cool debate. But what the country has been handed in the slow-starting presidential campaign is mostly warm mush.
Whatever the merits of Buchanan's arguments, mushiness is not his problem. His goal is not to win the nomination -- though he would surely accept it if a near-miracle occurred -- but to pressure Bush to move to the right by garnering a large share of votes in several primaries. Though Buchanan's America-first ideology is dismissed as unrealistic by those he derisively labels "the globalist foreign policy contingent in both parties," appealing to isolationism is a powerful political weapon.
The desire to pull back from foreign entanglements is an enduring part of the American psyche that rears up whenever the nation tires of exertions abroad. After World War I, the U.S. rejected membership in the League of Nations, adopted a restrictive immigration policy and eventually enacted high tariff barriers. It took Pearl Harbor and then communist expansionism to make internationalism the basis of U.S. foreign policy. Even during the heyday of the effort to contain communism, "the public never fully bought the challenge," says Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution. "Only a bipartisan consensus among elites kept the country's latent isolationism at bay."