Isolationism Is Not Pacifism
On the errors of Senator Ted Cruz and Tucker Carlson
One of the things that struck me about the Tucker Carlson interview of Senator Ted Cruz is how both of them are using the term isolationist incorrectly. They make a distinction between competing camps within the Republican Party of foreign policy interventionists who might be typified by the late John McCain and isolationists such as Ron Paul and, to a lesser degree in my mind, but not to theirs, his son, Senator Rand Paul. Senator Cruz says he sees himself somewhere in between those two camps, or as a third camp entirely, where he judges a foreign policy on the basis of whether it’s in the interest of America or not, and Carlson made the point that he is not an isolationist and, as such, believes that if Iran is genuinely trying to assassinate President Donald Trump, a claim that Cruz makes in the interview without evidence, then the United States should be full-scale invading Iran if not outright nuking them.
Both men are equating isolationism with pacifism, which are two distinct ideologies. It may be true that all pacifists are isolationists, I’ll let the pacifists speak for themselves but it seems like a reasonable assumption, but it is certainly not true that all, or even most, isolationists are pacifists. They use Ron Paul as their chief example of an isolationist; Ron Paul prefers the term “noninterventionist” to isolationist, which I personally find too cumbersome a word for casual use and don’t care to argue with warmongers who will continue to use isolationist just to annoy us anyway; but Ron Paul himself voted in favor of the authorization for military action against Afghanistan after the attacks of September 11, 2001, which I believe was a mistake on his part, and introduced legislation for letters of marque and reprisal against Osama bin-Laden, which I think was a better strategy. Those are not the actions of a pacifist, but can be in line with isolationism, or “noninterventionism” if you prefer. From Ron Paul’s 2008 book The Revolution: A Manifesto, emphasis mine:
Americans have the right to defend themselves against attack; that is not at issue. But that is very different from launching a preemptive war against a country that had not attacked us and could not attack us, that lacked a navy and an air force, and whose military budget was a fraction of a percent of our own. A policy of overthrowing or destabilizing every regime our government dislikes is no strategy at all, unless our goal is international chaos and domestic impoverishment.
These are not the words of a pacifist against any military action whatsoever as Tucker and Cruz want to paint isolationists, but is perfectly in line with an isolationist foreign policy that views war only as an absolutely necessary last resort rather than the answer to every foreign policy desire that can be dreamed up by politicians looking to get kickbacks from arms manufacturers.
Whether you call it isolationism or noninterventionism, again, I use the terms interchangeably without distinction because it’s not worth a pointless argument, the fact is that one can espouse this foreign policy without being against all war all the time. In fact, I would describe an isolationist foreign policy similarly to how Senator Cruz describes his foreign policy views in that our foreign policy must be in the interests of the United States. In the case of war, however, it’s not that war must be reflexively opposed no matter what, but that war must be both an absolute last resort, in that all peaceful diplomatic possibilities have been exhausted, and just in the sense that the United States has been attacked or is definitively going to be attacked. In the case of the attack on Iran that the Trump regime engaged in on behalf of the Israeli government, or the regime change that Senator Cruz advocates against the Iranian government, the Iranian government had not attacked the United States, nor do they have the capability to attack the United States aside from the many American military bases surrounding Iran that the United States has no business having anyway; there is no evidence suggesting that Iran was working to develop nuclear weapons, nor does the United States have the authority to decide what countries are allowed to have nuclear weapons, especially considering that the U.S. unilaterally withdrew from the Iranian agreement limiting their nuclear capabilities during Trump’s first-term in office; and the United States was in the middle of diplomatic negotiations with Iran at the time they backed the Israeli attacks against Iran and then directly attacked Iran on their own. So the United States was not attacked, was not under threat of an attack, the pretext of the alleged threat was a lie, and diplomacy had barely begun.
For these specific reasons, an isolationist would oppose the attacks on Iran, and not because of some reflexive, unconsidered sentiment against war itself as Tucker and Cruz tried to frame the isolationist position. Again, isolationism is not pacifism, but a foreign policy that does not equate diplomacy with war, as warmongers like Senator Lindsey Graham and even Senator Cruz himself, in calling for regime change in Iran, do, but believes that diplomacy is preferable to war. And, if diplomacy has truly been exhausted and it must be war, then that war must meet the criteria of being both just and in the interests of the United States. War is such a catastrophe for everyone involved that the bar must be almost impossibly high to pass before we engage in it. That’s what an isolationist believes.