Bush's Legacy: An Isolationist United States

This would be rather ironic indeed.

May 4, 2007
Iraq War May End With an Isolationist US
by Leon Hadar​

The war which resulted in the ouster of a dangerous despot ended and the US troops, who had fought in a bloody conflict overseas, were returning home. But the human and financial costs of the war were very high and its promise of helping to spread democracy in regions that had been ruled by authoritarian regimes did not materialize.

Instead, the war led to the rise of radical forces that threatened to draw their neighbors into new wars while producing even more anti-democratic sentiment. It was not surprising that the American people, angry and frustrated by the outcome of the war, were increasingly supporting disengagement from a threatening world. Isolationism, protectionism and anti-immigration attitudes and even xenophobia became more rampant.
No, the above is not a forecast about the shape of things to come in post-Iraq War America. It is a brief description of some of the trends in the US in the aftermath of the nation's intervention in World War I in Europe.

Many analysts have compared the current US military quagmire in Iraq to the costly American involvement in Vietnam in the 1960s, and have warned that the diplomatic and military consequences of the current intervention in the Middle East would resemble the aftermath of the US-led war in Southeast Asia.

But a more appropriate historical analogy in discussing the impact of the war in Mesopotamia is the disastrous outcome of American fighting in World War I.

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