Isolationism: Policies of the Past and Lessons for Today

Co-sponsored by the Clements Center and Alexander Hamilton Society

Wednesday, April 16, 2014  |  5:15 pm  |  SRH 3.124

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Journalists casually refer to Sen. Paul as the leader of the isolationist wing of the Republican Party, although he vigorously rejects that label. Public discussions of isolationism are rarely informative both because of the pejorative nature of the word itself as well as deficient understanding of U.S. politics in the 1930s. A rigorous examination of that history helps to show why the odds are heavily against a return to isolationism, a contention supported by careful examination of polling data. A deeper understanding of isolationism and it history shows that the true subject of debate today is not whether America will remain engaged in the world but whether it will continue to play a decisive leadership role in international politics.

David Adesnik is a visiting fellow at the Marilyn Ware Center for Security Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he works on isolationism, national security strategy, and democracy promotion. He is part of AEI’s American Internationalism Project.

Before joining AEI, Adesnik was a research analyst at the Institute for Defense Analyses. He has served as deputy director of Joint Data Support at the US Department of Defense, where he focused on the modeling and simulation of irregular warfare and counterinsurgency. Earlier, he spent several months in Baghdad as an operations research and systems analyst for the Coalition Provisional Authority’s counter–improvised explosive device (IED) unit, Task Force Troy during Operation Iraqi Freedom.  In 2008, he was part of John McCain’s presidential campaign national security staff. From 2002 to 2009, Adesnik was the coeditor of OxBlog, a blog started with a fellow Oxford University classmate.

A Rhodes scholar, Adesnik has a doctorate and master’s degree in international relations from Oxford University, where he wrote about the democracy promotion efforts of the Reagan administration. He received a bachelor’s degree in history from Yale University.