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…….

 

Taft also warned of the long term domestic effects of following an imperial foreign policy. “Just as our nation can be destroyed by war it can also be destroyed by a political or economic policy at home which destroys liberty or breaks down the fiscal and economic structure of the United States,” Taft wrote in his only published book, A Foreign Policy for Americans. Taft continued: “We cannot adopt a foreign policy which gives away all of our people’s earnings or imposes such a tremendous burden on the individual American as, in effect, to destroy his incentive and his ability to increase production and productivity and his standard of living.”…..To Read More….