Robert Taft and His Forgotten “Isolationism”

http://mises.org/daily/6685/Robert-Taft-and-His-Forgotten-Isolationism

Robert Taft and His Forgotten “Isolationism”

Mises Daily: Saturday, March 08, 2014 by Gregory Bresiger

Republicans are today almost always fervent supporters of big military budgets and an interventionist foreign policy.

But many Republicans forget a period before and after World War II when dozens of Republican lawmakers were against military alliances and a save-the-world American foreign policy. They ignore a time when many of their predecessors were called isolationists. Later, these Cold War isolationists criticized an interventionist foreign policy. They were sometimes labeled “apologists” for Moscow. The accurate term for these forgotten Republicans is “non-interventionists.” One of the leaders of the isolationists/non-interventionists was Republican Senator Robert Alphonso Taft (1889-1953).

Taft is now a forgotten Republican, but in the 1940s and 1950s he was known as “Mr. Republican.” Taft has few scions in the modern GOP.

Still, echoes of Taft recently re-surfaced, even though many of the people subscribing to these ideas had never heard of Taft. Millions of Americans inadvertently became “isolationists” for a short period. After President Obama suggested that the United States should start bombing Syria, they flooded Washington with communications, insisting that we stay out. Taft likely would have been delighted. He believed that when foreign policy issues were extensively debated by the public the potential for war declined. https://mises.org/library/robert-taft-and-his-forgotten-%E2%80%9Cisolationism%E2%80%9D