Two Types of Isolationism – Both Are Hopelessly Flawed

“Isolationism,” as it is most commonly understood, calls for America to fortify its southern border and count on the geographically isolated North American continent to provide a measure of security from other nations that is unimaginable in turbulent Eurasia. Let them fight among themselves. With vast oceans separating us from far-flung conflicts, we will stay out of foreign wars.

That might have been an option a century ago. It won’t work today.

Unlike previous eras, we now confront technologies that can make anywhere on earth the front line in a conflict. Hypersonic missiles, space-based lasers, genetically engineered pathogens, nanotech, drones, robots—you get the idea. Add to that the unavoidable fact that if we abandon our global commitments, others will take our place. And if they do, we will not have guaranteed access to the raw materials and manufactured goods that, unfortunately, we are utterly dependent on. While we urgently need to revive our own mining and manufacturing, that restoration will not happen overnight.

It’s easy to condemn an anti-isolationist perspective as neocon warmongering, and in some ways that criticism is valid. There are plenty of examples of how America has intervened in nations and conflicts between nations where we didn’t make anything better, not for ourselves or for the people we were allegedly trying to help. And to be fair, there are also examples where it is lucky for everyone that we did get involved. The point, however, isn’t to pick and choose which conflicts America should have avoided or not, only to acknowledge that even if we were to exercise more restraint overseas, we still need to retain a strategic advantage. If we don’t maintain a technologically superior military with global reach, someone else will.

Everybody with a sense of history and an appreciation for the enduring power of tribalism understands this imperative. America needs to be more judicious about where and how it intervenes overseas, but America can’t walk away from the world.

But there is another kind of isolationism that, if anything, constitutes more of a threat to the American way of life. It can be defined as a wish to focus so exclusively on protecting American traditions, prosperity, and freedom, that there is no room to make common cause with like-minded Europeans who face precisely the same threats in their own nations.

These threats are internal to each nation, but the perpetrators of these threats share common goals. They intend to transform nations into economic units with no national identity, dramatically reduce the average standard of living, and further concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a small elite. In every Western democracy, they are using overwrought moral justifications of fighting climate change and racism to con a majority of voters into supporting the ruling parties who are implementing this plan.

It’s unusual to need such a nuanced response to such a profound threat, but here goes: Western nations, led by the United States, cannot survive if they turn inward and become isolationists. But on the other hand, the agenda that Western nations are currently attempting to perpetrate on the entire world must change. The future that America’s ruling class has in store for us, along with everyone else in the world, is one of tyranny and poverty. Their goal of “net zero” is a misanthropic, manipulative ruse. It is inherently oppressive.

In pursuit of “net zero,” they are shutting down our reliable sources of energy and destroying our farms and livestock. They are deliberately engineering scarcity of everything: land, energy, water, food, and housing. They are making life unaffordable, and in an irony of stupefying duplicity, they are marketing socialist idealism to gullible youth who have already given up hope of ever owning anything, anyway, at the same time as they snarf up distressed assets and rent them back to us.

To further their goal of erasing the cultural unity that might give rise to genuine, landslide-worthy democratic opposition, they are flooding Western nations with immigrants. In America’s case, unlike previous waves of immigration, these immigrants arrive in a welfare state, remain intimately connected to their cultures of origin thanks to the internet, and are trained in our public schools to despise and resent those of us already here as privileged bigots. Similar dynamics apply in Europe. And so here and over there, millions of these immigrants are coalescing into militant political blocs with power sufficient to intimidate politicians, judges, and police to ignore their crimes and rationalize their actions and ultimate goals as mostly peaceful.

Meanwhile, we are divided over how to handle this. Shall we object and be branded as bigots? Shall we retain our naivete, hoping things will work out, and do nothing? Or shall we, as happens all too often, believe the curated lies we are being fed and fervently support everything that’s marketed as green and diverse?

And so we fight among ourselves.

This process of national erasure is happening at breathtaking speed in Ireland, England, Scotland, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Spain, and Greece. In less than one generation, we have seen these nations transformed from having a mostly indigenous population to a situation today where those natives are within a couple of decades of becoming minorities in their own nations. And not one honest word on this from the establishment media.

To recognize that all this is really happening—demographic replacement combined with economic repression in the name of fighting climate change—is to recognize virtually every approved mainstream institution as an instrument of propaganda. From kindergarten classrooms to corporate ad campaigns to online/offline media, it is unrelenting. The climate crisis. The threat from the “far right.” The danger of “misinformation.” The perpetual celebration of lifestyles and ideologies that suppress birthrates, including abortion, feminism, gay/lesbian, and trans. The demonization or at least ridicule of traditional values and stereotypes—Christians, men, masculinity, and white people are now, respectively, exclusionary, oppressive, toxic, and privileged.

This second form of isolationism, then, would have us be indifferent to the fact that a unified, globalist oligarchy is imposing this fate on every Western nation. For Americans to fail to make common cause with the people resisting a much more advanced onslaught in Europe is to risk watching tyranny descend on these nations one by one. Every time that happens, our hope to successfully resist here at home is diminished.

When we fight to save America’s freedom and prosperity, our chances of success are enhanced if we coordinate our fight with our counterparts in other countries who are fighting the same process, orchestrated by the same enemy.

Our battle is not nationalist or “far right,” nor is it ethnocentric. Millions of thoroughly assimilated immigrants are ready to fight with us and we should welcome them. Our movement is Eurocentric. We are fighting for the European traditions and values that define us and sustain us, and we refuse to allow our national identities to be erased. By making the distinction between ethnocentric and Eurocentric, we attract powerful allies whose ethnic origins are non-European while also demolishing accusations of racism.

There is a synergy to be gained if we reject both forms of isolationism. By joining forces with our friends in other Western nations to successfully save our finest European traditions, we then show the rest of the world genuine examples of freedom and prosperity that they’ll want to align with, instead of net zero tyranny.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

Edward Ring

Edward Ring is a contributing editor and senior fellow with the California Policy Center, which he co-founded in 2013 and served as its first president. He is also a senior fellow with the Center for American Greatness, and a regular contributor to the California Globe. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, Forbes, and other media outlets.

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