The Bipartisam Foreign Policy has Worked, yet remains controversial

I have been reading The Cold War: A New History by John Lewis Gaddis. He describes the situation marked by little hope for the world as we know it at the end of World War II. Communists believed Marxist-Leninist theory that Capitalist society would end in class warfare.

The West had experienced World War I, fought among the most advanced Capitalist countries. The Great Depression had caused great suffering as the worst of the periodic economic crashes that had marked Capitalism for generations. It had also spawned authoritarian governments in Spain, Italy and Germany, which in turn had led to World War II. World War II had not only left the Communist Soviet Union a super power, with a cluster of satellite states in Europe, but had left Communist movements in China, France, Italy, Greece and other countries that had been strengthened by their effective resistance against the Axis powers.

The United States, by far the strongest economy in the world, had a population that had been moved from its traditional isolationism, awakened by Pearl Harbor and the declaration of war on the United States by the Axis powers to the realization that the oceans separating the United States from aggressive foreign powers no longer sufficed for defense.

These conditions led American political leaders to the decision to intervene to develop a network of intergovernmental institutions, including not only the IMF, World Bank and United Nations (with its specialized agencies) but also NATO and SEATO. It also led to their realization that strong economies not only in the Allied nations but also in the defeated Axis nations were necessary to protect capitalism against the challenge of Communism; thus the United States began the Marshall Plan, the Point Four program, and supported a program of economic development for restoration of the economies damaged by war. Gaddis suggests that the emphasis on building democracy may have been in part a more acceptable rationale than a reinforcement of Capitalism.

Given the extraordinary success of the activist foreign policy, leading to unprecedented economic prosperity in the West and to the fall of Communism almost everywhere, I find it surprising that there remains such a strong support in the United States for isolationism, or at least a foreign policy that focuses on military might rather than support for the economic health of our allies. Moreover, the multinational approaches have worked well, but there remains quite a strong anti-multinational sentiment in parts of the American political system.

The Cold War is often seen as an East West conflict, but much of it was located in the post-colonial world of Africa, Asia and Latin America, and there it was fiercely fought in economic terms and was not always "cold". As we see emerging economies, all based on market Capitalism, coming to be comparable in GDP to the economies of North America and Europe, there would seem to be a considerable threat of conflict in the future. It would seem that an activist foreign policy which combines development of multinational institutions promoting peace and prosperity with appropriate economic assistance where appropriate and military preparedness would continue in order to protect our economic and security interests. Yet there seems to be a faction in American politics that continues to doubt the efficacy of this policy approach that has served so well for two generations.