ESSAY 29THE ABIDING DEFECT OF U.S.
POLICY DURING THE INTERWARPERIOD WAS OVERSTRETCHCOMPOUNDED BY INDOLENCE1924 found Brigadier General Douglas MacArthur presiding over the
U.S. Army’s Philippine Division, with headquarters at Manila’s Fort Santiago.
Around the same time, Dwight D. Eisenhower was serving in Panama while
George S. Patton was assigned to the Hawaiian Division, at Schofield Bar-
racks. Matthew Ridgway’s duty stations between the world wars included stints
in China, Nicaragua, and the Philippines. In 1935, MacArthur returned to
Manila for another tour, this time bringing Ike along as a member of his staff.
The pattern of assignments of these soon-to-be-famous officers was not
atypical. During the period between the two world wars, the Army kept busy
policing outposts of the American empire. The Navy and Marine Corps shoul-
dered similar obligations: to maintain its “Open Door” policy, the United States
deployed a small flotilla of warships at its “China Station,” headquartered in
Shanghai, for example, while contingents of U.S. Marines enforced order
across the Caribbean. Marine Major Gen eral Smedley Butler
achieved immortality by confessing that he had spent his
career as “a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall
Street and for the Bankers.” While hyperbolic, Butler’s as-
sessment was not altogether wrong.
It isn’t possible to square the deployment of U.S. forces
everywhere from the Yangtze and Manila to Guantánamo
and Managua with any plausible definition of isolationism.
While the United States did pull its troops out of Europe
after 1918, it maintained its empire. So the abiding defect of
U.S. policy during the interwar period was not a head-in-the-
sand penchant for ignoring the world. The actual problem
was overstretch compounded by indolence. Decision- makers
had abdicated their responsibility to align means and ends,
even as the world drifted toward the precipice of another
horrific conflict.
Nonetheless, those who advocated going to war against
Germany in the “nationwide debate” to which Marshall
alluded in his West Point speech charged their adversaries
with being “isolationists.” The tag resonated—though, in
point of fact, isolationism no more accurately described
U.S. foreign policy at the time than it does that of the Trump
Administration today. (And President Trump is no more an
isolationist than he is a Presbyterian.)
Proponents of intervention between 1939 and 1941 were
diverting attention from the real issue, which was a debate on
whether to remember or to forget. To go to war with Ger-
many a second time meant swallowing the bitter disappoint-
ments wrought by having done so just two decades before.
The interventionist case came down to this: given the
enormity of the Nazi threat, it was incumbent on Americans
to get over their vexations with the recent past. It was time to
get back to work. For their part, the anti-interventionists were
disinclined to forget. They believed that the Allies had taken the United States
to the cleaners—as indeed they had—and they did not intend to repeat the
experience. Anti-interventionists insisted that fulfilling the American appetite
for liberty and abundance did not require further expansion. They believed that
the domain the United States had already carved out in the Western Hemisphere
was sufficient to satisfy the aspirations specified in the Preamble to the Consti-
tution. Expansion, in their view, had gone far enough. In December 1941, Adolf
Hitler settled this issue, seemingly for good, when he declared war on the
United States after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. The Nazi dictator ef-
fectively wiped the slate clean, rendering irrelevant all that had occurred since
1917, including Marshall’s own prior service on the Western Front and in the
outer provinces of the American imperium. Thanks to Hitler, the path forward
seemed clear. Only one thing was needed: the mobilization of Marshall’s “great
citizen-army” as an expression of both freedom and power.
An explosion on the U.S.S. Shaw during the attack on Pearl Harbor,
December 7, 1941. Courtesy the George Eastman Museum