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I don’t believe that America can stay at home, nor should it stay at home. But the answer of what to do next is not easy.
Despite involvement in World War I, which should have made it obvious that the US could not insulate itself from world distress and conflict, many Americans still clung to traditional foreign policy attitudes. In doing so, they refused to allow the nation to play the constructive political role that its own enlightened interests demand.
Or, as Ernest R. May put it, the government of this indisputable great power had continued until the 1930s to be little more than that of a provincial confederation concerned more with delivering the mail, collecting customs, and regulating immigration than with dealing with external threats posed by the emergence of totalitarianism.
Free peoples everywhere paid the price, as the world watched the rise and rise of fascism, national socialism, and communism. Since then, the contrast in the American state of mind is complete. The question of global security is no longer academic, nor the problems of foreign policy unreal. Everybody gets it.