Quotes About Isolationism

The tension between isolationism and the global economy creates what George Kennan called "fateful alliances": multinational power blocs. We call them "New Empires" because they take on the qualities of empires. Federated and all-powerful, bureaucratic but decentralized, these superpower-style blocs of countries and corporations grow to dominate the world. They are often benevolent, but they are always despots.

Some might have opposed the war because they were isolationists. But America's bipartisan, postwar consensus was that we had a responsibility to contain Communist aggression. In any event, the anti-war protesters liked to assume they represented a higher morality, and it would be hard to square isolationism with idealism. At best, one might call it naïve; at worst, short-sighted and selfish.

There was more. "I would build a wall of steel," Walker said, "a wall as high as Heaven, against the admission of a single one of those Southern Europeans who never thought the thoughts or spoke the language of a democracy in their lives.

Extremism, racism, nativism, and isolationism, driven by fear of the unknown, tend to spike in periods of economic and social stress

Extremism, racism, nativism, and isolationism, driven by fear of the unknown, tend to spike in periods of economic and social stress—a period like our own.

Ahead now, I think you'll see the big nations shrink back into their own corners of the world. I'm not saying we'll see no international trade, but it will be nothing like the conveyer belt from China to Wal-Mart that we've known the last few decades. And the prospects for conflict are very, very high.

An isolationist America is no bloody use to anyone.

If we do not counter the argument that most radical nationlists use, which is, 'To protect is to be protectionist,' if we don't counter that argument, all of our economies will suffer.

A politically divided and destabilized America - an America drifting toward white nationalism, authoritarianism, and isolationism - will pose no challenge (...). Page 467.

Japan was a closed book. Western ignorance of Japan was not the fault of the westerners but the design of the Japanese. For two hundred years, Japan had been shut tight. By national law, a Japanese could not leave Japan and no outsider was allowed in. Death sentences were meted out to any who gave foreigners information about the land of the gods. Almost no maps and no books existed in the English-speaking world describing the closed land.

In the wars of the European powers in matters relating to themselves we have never taken any part, nor does it comport with our policy so to do.

Building walls is entirely sensible. We don't need to do it. We have got the English Channel.

There's a reason nationalists build walls, denigrate foreigners, and denounce immigrants: Because our people are better than those people. There's a reason nationalism has so often become violent in the past. For if we - our nation - are better, then what right do others have to live beside us? Or to occupy land that we covet?

I want to go get trade agreements because if America walls itself up, if we address sort of an economic fortress America, we will lose.

It is our policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.

If our Founding Fathers wanted us to care about the rest of the world, they wouldn't have declared their independence from it.

Commerce with all nations, alliance with none, should be our motto.

It is better to be here ready to protect the peace than to take blind shelter across the sea, rushing to respond only after freedom is lost. We've learned that isolationism never was and never will be an acceptable response to tyrannical governments with an expansionist intent.

President Donald Trump's policies are not global but inward-looking.

Senator Harding, who declared in his inaugural address that "We seek no part in directing the destinies of the world.

And yet these same oceans, by separating America by thousands of miles from other continents, have given America a virulent strain of isolationism that has persisted to this day.

Nationalist isolationism is probably even more dangerous in the context of climate change than of nuclear war

El aislacionismo nacionalista probablemente sea incluso más peligroso en el contexto del cambio climático que en el de la guerra nuclear.

Lindbergh's America Firsters, and the Nazi-run fifth columnists