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Statements by George Washington opposing "foreign entanglements" must be taken in the context of the nature of the United States at such times as his Farewell Address. Our national population was around five million, about a million of whom were slaves. We were almost entirely an agrarian nation and the frontier included the western areas of the several of the old Thirteen Colonies. Indian nations occupied the majority of the territory of the United States. As a colonel of the Virginia militia, Washington himself was a pivotal point of the British-French worldwide conflict called the Seven Years War, or the French and Indian War in the United States. Of all men, Washington would have known that the United States was in no position to side with either England or France in the Napoleonic Wars. Granted, Napoleon was the 19th Century's answer to Hitler, minus the racism of course, but the amount of impact the United States could have in supporting Britain would have been minimal. Besides, the British were highly unpopular in the aftermath of our War for Independence, especially on the western frontier, where the Scots-Irish had carried their old grudges against England across the Atlantic.

Except for the issue of freedom of the seas, both the Federalists and Democratic Republicans agreed that the United States was incapable of allying with other nations without risking a major war. Jefferson may have acted against the Barbary pirates in part because the British Navy was too busy in its war against France to deal with such matters. In any case, Jefferson did back down from confrontations with the Brits over the impressment of seaman from American merchant vessels and trading with French-dominated Continental Europe and instead promoted the Embargo Act. Although this move angered merchants and bankers, the United States lacked the capacity to confront the world's greatest navy.

The foreign policy decisions of Washington, Adams, and Jefferson, and indeed of American presidents through Cleveland, must be understood in light of the nature of the United States and its lack of ability to project military power worldwide. It is ironic that many of the America First advocates of the pre-Pearl Harbor days had no problem with American expansion into the Caribbean and the Pacific Basin. Perhaps Frank Chodorov, Garet Garrett, and John Flynn were consistent isolationists, but others were not.

In the present time, the United States cannot be a gigantic Switzerland; no nation of our size and economic power can be, as history has demonstrated. That being said, the United States has made a large number of bad foreign policy decisions, whether motivated by hubris or misguided idealism. Liberals and neo-conservatives are sometimes as motivated by the same lack of realism that infects libertarians and Buchananites. The Vietnam redux in Iraq and Afghanistan is one of them. We have spent four years fighting ineffectively there. We need to win this war by using our massive military powers and abandoning the chimera of a democratic, unified Iraq. Tacitus complained about the harsh measures the Romans used to subdue the Britons: that they had made a desert and called it peace. Nonetheless, British rule was firmly established over what is now England for three centuries thereafter.