06.08
I posted my thoughts about Russell Moore’s recent article the other day. But, something else he said in that piece made me want to return to it again. He says this early in the article:
Someone once described Roe vs. Wade as the “Pearl Harbor” of the evangelical pro-life conscience. Pearl Harbor is an apt metaphor. Before that date of infamy, foreign policy isolationism seemed to be a legitimate American option. The “America First” committees and some of the most influential figures in the United States Congress argued that Hitler’s war was none of our concern. We should tend to ourselves, and we could deal with whomever won in Europe and the Pacific when all the dust had settled.
After Pearl Harbor, the shortsightedness, and indeed utopianism, of isolationism was seen for what it was.
Before I move on to analysis, I’d like to correct, for the millionth time, the misuse of this word: isolationism. North Korea is isolationist. Laos is isolationist. Pre-WWII America was non-interventionist. Trade and dialogue with other countries was robust. The only thing America didn’t engage in was military intervention into foreign wars. Isolationism is a politically pejorative term meant to taint the argument toward the speaker’s position before they’ve even made their argument. It’s poisoning the well. Moving on…
Given his above comments, I can only surmise that Dr. Moore is moving into territory here where he hasn’t done much research. The Pearl Harbour period that he describes leaves out crucial context that invalidates his later conclusion that “after Pearl Harbor, the shortsightedness, and indeed utopianism, of isolationism was seen for what it was.” I’m guessing here that by “seen for what it was” he means that the collective American mind began to think that staying out of foreign wars wouldn’t assure them of peace. This leads to two questions. First, why did the American population move toward non-interventionism in the first place? And, secondly, was Pearl Harbour a legitimate proof of the failure of non-interventionism? Let’s explore these.
It is a fact that before Pearl Harbour, polls were showing as high as 80% of the American people were opposed to entering WWII. The reason for this opposition to involvement in the war goes back to WWI. In the words of John Denson, “World War I and World War II were really one war with a twenty year recess and it was the harsh and unfair Versailles Treaty which allowed Hitler to come to power which then led directly to renewal of the war in 1939 in Poland when the League of Nations failed to revise the treaty, which it had the specific authority to do.”
The same players were involved on the European front, and the reasons for the war stemmed mostly from post-WWI treaty abuse against Germany. After losing 117,000 troops in a completely unnecessary war(WWI), the U.S. population was sick to death of European affairs. Much was written after WWI by thinkers such as Harry Elmer Barnes, Albert Jay Nock and H.L. Mencken criticizing Woodrow Wilson’s decision to get us into the war after running his campaign on a peace platform. They further exposed Wilson’s agenda of trying to use the war to create his long sought-after League of Nations and spread “progressivism” to the world.
This was the social milieu to which F.D.R. was trying to attach his war in the late 30′s. It smacked too much of Wilsonian bumbling for the American public to accept. They saw nothing good coming from involvement in another European war. It wasn’t isolationism that drove such overwhelming opposition to entering WWII, it was pragmatism. It would be as if Reagan had tried to invade Vietnam upon taking office. When such painful war memories are still only 2 decades removed, you can hardly blame a wise fellow for wanting to stand this one out.
The other facet of analyzing Dr. Moore’s comments are to research whether or not it was non-interventionism itself that proved ineffectual at maintaining peace. I’ve gone over this before, but it bears constant repeating. We now know that F.D.R. goaded the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbour. The oil embargo against Japan. His moving of almost the entire western fleet to Hawaii in the weeks before the attack. His clearing of the shipping lanes that would be used by the Japanese as a corridor to Hawaii. The fact that it’s now known that U.S. intelligence had cracked the Japanese communications code weeks before the communique from Tokyo to the Japanese embassy in Washington declaring the attack was coming. And on, and on. If the government of a non-interventionist minded populace takes it upon itself to secretly maneuver their country into a war, it can hardly be the fault of that policy.
Dr. Moore remarks that “the ‘America First’ committees and some of the most influential figures in the United States Congress argued that Hitler’s war was none of our concern. We should tend to ourselves, and we could deal with whomever won in Europe and the Pacific when all the dust had settled.” Again, he is interpreting historical events in the light of later knowledge. It’s hard to look back now and imagine allowing Hitler to continue with his war crimes against the Jews. But, at the time, none of that was known. The U.S. didn’t enter the European front to stop Hitlerian genocide. They entered the war to help England maintain their superpower status in Europe against a rising Germany and Russia. At the time, a policy of staying out of the conflict and “deal[ing] with whomever won” was an absolutely correct policy. It was widely held at the time that a new war between Russia and Germany would result in the two countries grinding it out for years until they both had, had enough and came to the table. Interference would only extend the war to other parts of Europe and result in needless loss of life.
If America had stayed out of WWII, I don’t know that any different outcome would have come. By the time our troops crossed the Rhine, most of the remaining Jews in concentration camps had been executed or death marched. Yes, we ended up saving some, but we will never know what other options may have opened up in a protracted war with Russia. We already know of a few famous cases of underground Jewish escape routes being managed by such figures as Schindler and Irena Sendler. With a smaller war footprint on the European map and without the urgency which the Germans felt in the last days leading up to the invasion of Berlin, perhaps a more extensive escape network would have formed and fewer Jews would have died. We will never know. But, we do know that it wasn’t America’s role to be a saviour in Europe. That’s an anachronism. And it isn’t clear that our involvement in WWII did anything other than get more people killed across the globe and at home.
I will continue to be a fan of Dr. Moore, and a huge fan of Touchstone, but I would recommend that Dr. Moore find a different historical analogy than Pearl Harbour in the future.
