American Foreign Policy: A Review of some Recent Literature on Isolation and Collective Security

As professor Friedrich has pointed out in his Foreign Policy in the Making (Norton, New York, 1938) an effective foreign policy presupposes national unity and continuity. President Wilson tasted the bitterness of defeat over his League of Nations because he was an innovator and because he found it impossible to rally the nation behind his plan for American participation in an international peace program. At the present moment President Roosevelt is confronted both inside and outside his party by aggressive dissenters from his foreign policy. Persons and groups posing as the true defenders of the American democratic tradition have demanded the Ludlow referendum on war. They have presented isolationism, neutrality and economic nationalism as the principles of an authentic democratic way of life and have depicted international collaboration against aggressors as autocratic and dictatorial in tendency. The traditional American foreign policy of a “broad neutrality” says former President Hoover in Liberty, April 15, 1939, is being discarded by the present administration for a “vague use of force in association with European democracies.” Others say that President Roosevelt is leading the United States into war in order to assure himself a third term and to perpetuate New Deal “dictatorship.”