“Lindbergh was more right than he was wrong.
I find it interesting to read of so many Freepers condemning Lindbergh for his isolationism...Lindbergh who was only giving voice to what the majority of Americans were thinking prior to Dec 7.
So save your judgmentalism…” RedMonqey, post 62]
It isn’t “judgementalism” to point out the impossibility of pursuing a particular policy.
America was founded as a trading nation. Trading nations cannot be isolationist. These two statements were objectively true in 1780. And in 1812, 1860, 1914, 1939 - any date you care to mention. To pretend otherwise is to evaluate geopolitics, grand strategy, and world history from the viewpoint of a nine-year-old.
We Americans of today need to find the courage to re-examine what the Founders said about “entangling” alliances. We must confront the possibility they were wrong (they were mere mortals, not purveyors of Holy Writ). And we must summon the self-awareness to notice that almost a quarter of a millennium has passed since then. Reconsidering the admonitions of the Founders, in light of all that has happened since they left the scene, is not blasphemy; it’s prudence.
“Shining city on a hill” might make for inspiring rhetoric, but it cannot provide much useful input in crafting current policy.
“Making the world safe for democracy” was also rhetoric, not a fully-fledged policy. Those who wring their hands over T Woodrow Wilson’s refusal to honor this or that campaign promise have missed the point: the world situation had changed from the 1916 presidential campaign to early 1917. He requested a declaration of war from Congress because US trading partners were in peril, and because Imperial Germany had commenced unrestricted submarine warfare - after having committed a number of acts of war against the US already. Disappointment visited on voters was a lesser evil than Allied collapse, victory for the Central Powers, American economic collapse, and continued existence only as a German client state.
Charles Lindbergh made a quintessentially American mistake: he looked at the conduct of World War One, and decided that because it did not always go according to hopes & predictions, that the strategic goals and survival imperatives were not valid in the first place. In a word, the outcome wasn’t worth the effort, therefore we should have avoided it. Confusing the two is a grave error: the strategic worth of a particular policy cannot be evaluated in terms of how one goes about prosecuting that policy. They are measured along different axes.
Americans of 1970 proved we had learned nothing from 1940, or 1914. In concluding that the nation’s actions in Southeast Asia were flawed, therefore we should never have gotten involved to begin with, Americans proved to the world we were cowards bereft of honor. With short attention spans.
A-men!