Word: isolationists
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Strict Constructionism. While fighting off unacceptable amendments, the Administration had its hands full trying to salvage the draft bill itself. For the first time since 1940, when President Franklin Roosevelt persuaded an isolationist Congress to renew Selective Service, the Senate seriously considered whether to have a draft at all. Viet Nam, of course, was the reason. Some Senators argued that abolishing the draft would bring the war to a speedier conclusion...
...said his Illinois colleague Paul Douglas, "is a man of no principles." Dirksen preferred to call it "flexibility," and that kindlier word, which suggests growth rather than knavery, often proved accurate enough to describe his shifts in policy. During his 35 years in the House and Senate, Dirksen was isolationist, internationalist, champion of Joe McCarthy, internationalist again, antiwar critic (Korea), apologist for war (Viet Nam), Goldwaterite, and finally, an improbable shepherd of nearly all the major civil rights legislation of the '60s. Toward the end of his life-he died in 1969-it began to seem that Dirksen...
...ISOLATIONIST challenge to the internationalist mentality (both Cold War and radical) has been disappointing so far. Isolationist liberals reject ideology but lack the courage of their convictions, shirking the point-blank predicaments of modern statecraft. They must first specify the genuine obligation, if any, of the U. S. to Europe, Japan and the Middle East. They must also confront in some co-herent way the problem of imperialism, Communist or anti-Communist. Anti-imperialist convictions might endanger the Soviet-American detente-a detente which most liberals now exploit as a primary tactic against excessive military spending. The new isolationists ignored...
...worry about. Few liberals have thought out the difficulties of dismantling the Cold War bureaucracy, and no one has proposed the goals which a post-Vietnam foreign policy should pursue. Another East-West confrontation like the 1962 missile crisis-this time perhaps in Israel-might totally disorient the liberal isolationist impulse. The problem of aggression is the sleeper in the isolationist critique, a critique which does nothing more than ask America to be nice...
Perhaps the desultory isolationist-internationalist debate illustrates the poverty of democratic politics for making foreign policy. It leaves an activist President to do much as he wishes in Asia and Europe. The electorate has resigned itself on Vietnam, refusing even to make it an issue. Public tolerance has its limits, but so long as Nixon seems inclined to reduce the level of fighting, he may proceed as slowly as he wishes. He retains his free hand to steady the dangers in the Middle East with a rather showy brand of gunboat diplomacy. As the Administration's Vietnam strategy has provided...