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As has become common in America's mainstream news outlets, French provides a myopic history of noninterventionism, casting it as spiritually akin to all the evils of American history, thereby juxtaposing it against his own thinly veiled whig history.

"What's happened to the Democrats? They used to be antiwar!" Such is one of the many questions being bandied about by an online commentariat seeking to make sense of a litany of Republican endorsements of Kamala Harris, many of them made by party elites known for their hawkish foreign policy like former Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney and former Vice President Dick Cheney. One could find similar consternation with American liberals' support for U.S. involvement in the Ukraine crisis. The confusion is based primarily on nostalgia, a selective view of history that obscures the Democratic Party's longer, more complicated relationship with interventionism. The reality is quite different: what we are witnessing is the latest iteration of an ongoing intraparty struggle where the dominant liberal interventionist core asserts itself over a smaller progressive noninterventionist periphery. While the latter often dominates popular conceptions of the Democratic Party and its vision for American foreign affairs, the former drives the reality of party politics. This has been happening since the First World War, best encapsulated by the public debate between Columbia professor John Dewey and one of his students, writer Randolph Bourne. While both were considered liberals of a progressive stripe, they maintained opposing views on American entry into Europe's conflagration. Known for his adherence to philosophical pragmatism, Dewey asserted that the war could save the world from German militarism and be used to shepherd the American political economy toward a fairer, managed state. Bourne rejected this notion and argued that American entry into the war would undermine the egalitarianism of the larger progressive project and create a labyrinth of bureaucracies that would undermine democracy.While Dewey's arguments held sway as the United States entered the war, American involvement in Europe's quarrel, compounded by civil rights abuses at home, proved Bourne posthumously correct. Despite succumbing to the Spanish Flu in 1918, Bourne's views of the war, bolstered by the posthumous publication of a collection of essays entitled Untimely Papers, found fertile soil in an American society horrified by the conflict. Chastened by the realities of the Western Front, interwar progressivism took on a solid strain of pacifism and opposition to centralized authority.While Bourne's sentiments survived the Great War and inspired a postwar mood of non-interventionism, they would not survive America's subsequent entry into World War II, which set the tone for the foreign policy of American liberalism and, by extension, the Democratic Party for the next 30 years. Liberal interventionism won out in the face of a threat posed by the distinctly right-wing geopolitical threat in the form of the Axis powers. Except for a few strident leftwing pacifists and a few dissident liberals who took refuge with the Republican Right, the bulk of the formerly pacifist left took up the cause of intervention in the name of antifascism. The tone set by the Second World War carried through into American liberalism's conduct of the Cold War. Beneath the din of anti-communism, one often amplified by conservatives, American foreign policy was shaped by a liberal understanding of recent history and the origins of communism. President Harry Truman's eponymously titled doctrine entangled the United States in Europe's security architecture.After the Eisenhower administration, which solidified the Truman doctrine and expanded it to the Middle East and Southeast Asia, the Cold War framework was thickened further still by a liberal cold warrior, President John F. Kennedy.Empowered by a materialist and universalistic view of human advancement and the belief that the U.S. had fallen behind the Soviets, JFK pursued a policy known as "flexible response" that expanded American military spending beyond the bounds of nuclear deterrence. These policy changes, maintained under his successor, President Lyndon Johnson, and coupled with a dramatic increase in foreign aid spending, expanded U.S. commitments throughout the postcolonial world. This combination of asymmetric warfare and economic development drastically raised the stakes of the Cold War and led directly to U.S. entry into the quagmire of the Vietnam War. Contrary to nostalgia present the Kennedy era as a missed path towards peace, in reality, JFK continued America on a path of war-making and militarization laid out by his predecessors and stretched well beyond the deaths of the slain Kennedy brothers.While the Vietnam War was the product of Cold War liberalism, it was also its undoing. The horrors of the war, coupled with the inequities of the draft and government secrecy revealed, inspired a mass antiwar movement among the heretofore latent progressive left that found a resonant audience on Capitol Hill. Earlier antiwar works from the left, including that of Randolph Bourne, were revived for a youth movement radicalized against the war. This movement similarly inspired subsequent debates during the late Cold War, particularly on the issue of the Reagan administration's arming of the Contras in Nicaragua and intervention in the Angolan Civil War. The future seemed bright for a left-wing anti-war sensibility and its access to a Democratic Party that was amenable to its views. However, the collapse of the Soviet Union, internal changes within the Democratic Party, and the subsequent birth of a new logic for humanitarian interventionism subsumed the ruptures caused by the Vietnam War. While the Democrats indeed offered notable resistance to Operation Desert Storm, often invoking the specter of Vietnam, congressional Democrats provided significant support to U.S. operations in Somalia and interventions in the former Yugoslavia. During the Clinton administration, inspired by retrospectives on the Holocaust compounded by the Rwandan genocide, the notion of a "responsibility to protect," the concept that the U.S. had the moral obligation to use force to prevent mass atrocity, took hold within elite liberal circles.Due to these competing impulses, Democratic opposition to the Global War on Terror was checkered and paired by a left-wing anti-war movement that, in retrospect, was a shadow of its Vietnam-era self. While, as with Iraq War I, Democrats posted noticeable opposition to Iraq War II, such opposition was overshadowed by the fact that Democratic leadership, especially in the Senate, acquiesced to a war spearheaded by a Republican administration. Three of the last five Democratic presidential nominees — then Senators John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden — voted in support of using military action against Iraq. President Obama won in 2008 in part because he publicly opposed war in Iraq before it began and campaigned on ending that war. While he advanced that sentiment by pursuing diplomacy with Iran and opening up to Cuba, he also launched interventions into Libya, Syria, and Yemen, often sold on the grounds of a "responsibility to protect." Much like the liberal rationale of interventions past, American involvement was justified on humanitarian grounds and met largely with Democratic acquiescence in Congress and voter apathy. Liberalism has entered a new wave of internal strife regarding America's role in the world. In a new era of great power competition, the progressive base of the Democratic Party has come out hard against unconditional U.S. support for Israel's war in Gaza and Lebanon. It has also shown varying degrees of opposition to U.S. involvement in the Ukraine crisis. Yet, unlike the Vietnam era, this grassroots opposition has been unable to substantively influence Democratic politics, where a party elite clings to old views about upholding international norms and alliances, no matter how inconsistent or counterproductive those views in practice may be. Given this intraparty divide, it should not be surprising that the Harris campaign has courted the endorsement of hawkish Republicans. This history, however, should not be viewed as determinative of an inevitable path forward. The past has shown that these impulses are not static but held by individuals determined to shape the future.

In a new book, left-wing writers debate whether America is going fascist.

President Trump's latest comments criticizing NATO and the ensuing media reaction obscure the fact that Americans have long held dissenting opinions on the U.S. relationship to European security.As has happened all too often throughout the Trump era, the heat of escalating rhetoric on the part of the 45th President and his committed adversaries has distracted from the more substantive foreign policy debate. Today, the U.S-European security relationship has never been more sacrosanct, at least in the mind's eye of the national security establishment and their allies in the mainstream press. Yet historically, the range of debate and criticism of this ostensibly sacred pact has been far more open than nostalgia or the modern commentariat may suggest. Throughout American involvement in NATO, the nation's national security elites, members of Congress, commentators, and, yes, presidents, too, have all challenged the contours of commitment to the organization and its members at one time or another. Furthermore, they did so when Western countries faced a significantly larger Soviet military deployed deep into the heart of Central Europe.During the early Cold War, the nature of American involvement in the alliance and its commitment to staff Europe with a permanent garrison were not seen as beyond question, even by American officials in positions of authority. In fact, American Cold War architects sold an American garrison in Europe as a temporary measure meant to shore up allies still licking their wounds from the Second World War. In congressional testimony concerning the ratification of the NATO treaty, Sen. Bourke B. Hickenlooper (R-Iowa) pressed Secretary of State Dean Acheson on if he thought the treaty meant that the U.S. would leave "substantial numbers of troops over there." An indignant Acheson responded, "[t]he answer to that question, Senator, is a clear and absolute 'No.'" Even as Acheson's assurances to Congress proved hollow, NATO's first commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, while supportive of NATO's legal mechanisms of collective security, believed that America's garrison and material aid were temporary. Eisenhower warned that if "in 10 years, all American troops stationed in Europe for national defense purposes have not been returned to the United States, then this whole project will have failed." Later as president, Eisenhower, despite solidifying the Cold War policies of his predecessor and eschewing the Republican Party's non-interventionism, continued to press behind the scenes for a greater degree of burden-sharing on the part of NATO's European members, quietly fuming that they were "making a sucker out of Uncle Sam." Several of his successors shared Eisenhower's sentiments, from Kennedy and Johnson to George W. Bush. In Congress, the extent of American military involvement remained a persistent issue for the Republican Right. Be they principled noninterventionists or Asia First unilateralists, the extent of American troop presence in Europe remained a contested issue. Retired Army officer Bonner Fellers, writing in a July 1949 issue of Human Events, a conservative magazine, summed up the widely agreed-upon position of these dissenters. While Fellers believed that the NATO treaty had "enormous psychological value," as it served as a "symbol of unity" and deterrence, he did not think that that should translate into a massive and permanent military garrison in Western Europe. Fellers revisited the issue two years later in an article for Human Events, which was read into the Congressional Record. Rather than see the American European garrison as a deterrent, Fellers asserted that it could be viewed as a provocation and argued that the "presence of our forces on the Rhine gives Stalin a visible symbol, a unifying agent which tends to enlist the support of all Russians behind the Kremlin." It is important to note that Fellers was hardly a dove. Instead, he was a committed anti-communist who loathed the Soviet Union and supported a nuclear deterrence on the cheap, a Fortress America 2.0. Yet, he, like many within the Republican Right, did not allow their ideological priors to automatically dictate a desire for endless security commitments to Western Europe.On Capitol Hill, Fellers's views were common and supported by conservative Republicans who saw an American military garrison as an expensive handout to allies whose rebuilt economies could shoulder their defense, all while providing little deterrent effect. In 1953, speaking on the issue of America's military mission in Europe, Rep. Lawrence H. Smith (R-Wis.) asked rhetorically, "[w]here is the threat of military aggression?" According to Smith, after returning from a fact-finding mission in Europe, his subcommittee on Europe reported that "there was no fear of communism in the hearts and the minds of the people there." The sentiments espoused by Fellers and Smith persisted in pockets of the Republican Right throughout the early Cold War despite the ideological demands of the era.During the final decades of the Cold War, opposition to the presence of an American military garrison in Western Europe and the continuation of military aid emanated primarily from the left wing of the Democratic Party as a new generation of Democrats took office and sought to rein military spending and commitments. On Capitol Hill, Democrats attempted to force American troop level cuts in Europe in the House in 1988, and the Senate in 1990. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the horseshoe of opposition to maintaining the status quo thickened as a body of conservative Republicans joined progressive Democrats in opposing NATO expansion, first in 1994 and then in 1999. While both votes failed, and the United States maintained a sizeable garrison in Europe, the opposition to outdated Cold War paradigms remained and flowed freely, untainted by the scurrilous charge of echoing "Putin talking points." Indeed, even as late as November 2016, President Obama mirrored the sentiments of then President-elect Donald Trump in stating that "[i]f Greece can meet this NATO commitment, all our NATO allies should be able to do so."This latest fervor has, as all too often now, completely ignored these historical debates around American foreign policy commitments, creating in their passions an ahistorical sense of policy inevitability. If Americans past and present, from presidents on down, could question the contours of American security commitments and did so in far more perilous times, then so should we.

The book blames foreign subversives for ideas long rooted in American life.