Noah Glyn is a senior at Rutgers University, where he majors in economics and history, and minors in Jewish studies. He writes from a conservative perspective on economic, cultural, political, educational and foreign policy issues.
Today is a day that will live in infamy.
Seventy years ago today, the Imperial Japanese Navy struck the U.S. naval base in Pearl Harbor. The Japanese intended the damage to be severe, as to convince the American people not to enter World War II. It was a devastating attack indeed, as the Japanese killed 2,402 Americans and destroyed much of the United States Navy. The Pearl Harbor attack ultimately failed to accomplish its mission. On Dec. 8, 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt spoke before a joint session of Congress to request a declaration of war against Imperial Japan. His request was granted within the hour.
On Dec. 11, Germany and Italy declared war against the United States, which they agreed to do in the Tripartite Pact of 1940. This marked the second time during the 20th century that the United States found itself fighting a war in Europe. A war that many had tried to avoid.
In 2008, Christopher Hitchens wrote:
Is there any one shared principle or assumption on which our political consensus rests, any value judgment on which we are all essentially agreed? Apart from abstractions such as a general belief in democracy, one would probably get the widest measure of agreement for the proposition that the second World War was a “good war” and one well worth fighting.
Of course, this was not the case at the time. Before the Pearl Harbor attack jolted the United States into war, groups like America First and prominent citizens like Joseph Kennedy and Charles Lindbergh went to great lengths to prevent any intervention in the conflict. Even recently, author and former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan wrote a book calling the second World War an “unnecessary war.”
No author writes in a vacuum, and in many ways Buchanan’s book ? published in 2008 ? is as much a response to American intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan as it is to WWII. After all, critics of the Bush administration frequently use the term “unnecessary war” to argue that the U.S. had no business fighting wars in Mesopotamia and Central Asia.
In the 1930s and early 1940s, there was a strong isolationist faction of American politics that warned America to follow the advice of George Washington: to avoid foreign entanglements, especially in Europe. In a sense, to avoid “unnecessary wars.” After the attack on Pearl Harbor, isolationists quieted their rhetoric or changed their opinions. Ever since WWII ended, the U.S. has become the leading nation in the United Nations, NATO, World Trade Organization, the World Bank and many other international bodies.
Now, there is a growing call to return to pre-World War II “normalcy,” to sever our military, diplomatic and economic ties with the rest of the world. Among the leading proponents of such a policy is U.S. Congressman and Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul. More than anything, the neo-isolationists want to end the “unnecessary wars.”
These wars, though, were not unnecessary. World War II was a just war to end Italian fascism, German Nazism and Japanese imperialism. The war in Afghanistan was a sensible war to take out the terrorist network that killed thousands of Americans on 9/11 ? another day that will live in infamy ? and the government that sponsored it. The war in Iraq was the natural and necessary consequence of official American policy from the Clinton administration to overthrow the government of Saddam Hussein.
The neo-isolationist arguments, whether articulated by Pat Buchanan, Ron Paul or anyone else, rest on the assumption that no one in the world truly wishes harm on the the U.S.? The arguments presume that American interventions cause the hatred that makes attacks ? like those on Sept. 11, 2001 ? possible.
These positions do not take the lesson of Pearl Harbor into account: Enemies of America will try to strike the United States regardless of American policy.
After World War I, isolationists convinced America to leave the world stage; to leave post-war Europe to fend for itself. The result was another war, with more dead and more destruction. By the end of the 1940s, the United States realized that it could not retreat across the Atlantic: it had to ensure a stable peace. To that end, it organized European resistance to communism, and spent the next sixty years containing and defeating threats to world peace and stability.
The neo-isolationists are wrong. If America leaves the world stage, it’s presence won’t be replaced with a similarly benign force. Isolationism will only invite more attacks, more death and more destruction. If there’s one thing we learn from Pearl Harbor, hopefully it’s that.
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