Ignoring the long record of American involvement in such conflicts in every corner of the globe, those who question our current world-wide role express reverence for a simple-minded (and non existent) tradition of isolationism. They cite George Washington’s words in his celebrated Farewell Address of 1793: “The Great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign Nations, is in extending our commercial relations to have with them as little political connection as possible….’Tis our true policy to steer clear of permanent Alliances, with any portion of the foreign world.” Jefferson also warned against “entangling alliances,” at the same time he negotiated a vast expansion of U.S. territory with France, and pursued the daring and difficult Barbary Wars.

Even Pat Buchanan, the three time Presidential candidate most often identified as a contemporary advocate of “isolationism,” rejects the idea that the nation ever cowered behind its Atlantic and Pacific “water walls.” In his provocative and beautifully written book “A Republic, Not an Empire,” (1999), Buchanan argues: “The idea that America was ever an isolationist nation is a myth, a useful myth to be sure, but nonetheless a malevolent myth that approaches the status of a big lie…. What is derided today as isolationism was the foreign policy under which the Republic grew from thirteen states on the Atlantic into a continent-wide nation that dominated the hemisphere and whose power reached to Peking….To call the foreign policy that produced this result “isolationist” is absurd. Americans were willing to go to war with the greatest powers in Europe, but only for American interests. They had no wish to take sides in European wars in which America had no stake.”

Donald Kagan makes a similar case in “Dangerous Nation” (2006), insisting that many Americans remain misled or ill-informed about the true nature of our history: “This gap between Americans' self-perception and the perceptions of others has endured throughout the nation’s history. Americans have cherished an image of themselves as by nature inward-looking and aloof, only sporadically and spasmodically venturing forth into the world, usually in response to external attack or perceived threats. This self-image survives, despite four hundred years of steady expansion and an ever-deepening involvement in world affairs, and despite innumerable wars, interventions and prolonged occupations in foreign lands…. Even as the United States has risen to a position of global hegemony, expanding its reach and purview and involvement across the continent and then across the ocean, Americans still believe their nation’s natural tendencies are toward passivity, indifference and insularity.”

This misconception helped to produce one of the most common (and ignorant) indictments of the Iraq War, with angry critics of Bush policy emphatically insisting: “This is the first time in history we ever attacked any country that hadn’t attacked us first.” In fact, virtually all our major wars began without some clear-cut attack by the enemy on American soil: the French-and-Indian War, the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish American War, World War I, Korea, Vietnam and the First Gulf War claimed a total of tens of thousands of American lives based on incidents or interests, but without any undeniable mass assault. In 230 years of history only the Civil War (where Lincoln cleverly lured Southern forces into the initial bombardment of federal property at Fort Sumter) and World War II (where Japan struck at precisely one of those outposts of empire in distant Hawaii that anti-imperialists often decry) commenced in response to enemy strikes.

While American traditions hardly fit the “isolationist” and quiescent stereotypes that many anti-interventionists revere, they also amount to a far cry from the colonialist and imperialist selfishness associated with the European powers. Even the most bloody and long-standing U.S. occupations (as in the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century, or in Japan and Germany a half-century later) resulted in the voluntary departure of American forces. In some cases, the U.S. expansionism resulted in the incorporation of a territory as a full-recognized new state in the Union (as with Hawaii) while all observers recognize that the long twilight status for Puerto Rico will ultimately be resolved into either independence or statehood.

The nation’s lack of imperial designs revealed itself most clearly, perhaps, at the Versailles Conference following America’s triumphant (and very costly) involvement in World War I. Despite the fact that President Wilson clearly dominated the proceedings, the United States remained the only one of the victorious allied powers that sought no territorial or colonial enhancement at the proceedings.

In short, the categorization of the United States as a “dangerous nation” (in the 1817 phrase of America’s ambassador in London, John Quincy Adams) arose from ideological and cultural origins as much as the application of burgeoning power. Donald Kagan writes: “But aggressive territorial expansionism was not the only quality that made the young American republic dangerous in the eyes of others. Of equal if not sometimes greater concern was the danger posed by America’s revolutionary ideology, as well as by the way its liberal, commercial society seemed to swallow up those cultures with which it came into contact.”

This American ability to advance our interests through example and ideas deserves further exploration (next week), particularly in the context of the Cold War distortions so eagerly promulgated by today’s anti-Americans of the international left.