Would you support a non-intervention or neutral policy like in WW2?

30 comments

1. The world needs US. See NATO, etc.

2. I think we’re more prosperous and more safe when we have a leading role in the world, so I’m very much against isolationism.

   Edit: Is this Tulsi’s reddit account? You seem to have a very specific (pro-isolationism) theme going in your posts.

3. We were as neutral in the beginning of WWII as we are in Ukraine. Public sentiment was more for neutrality before Pearl Harbor than we have been during the last 8 years of the war in Ukraine, but the government was not.

4. Isolationism is a recipe for disaster in the modern world. One of the main reasons Russia is suffering so heavily from sanctions is because they alienated virtually all potential allies. I could not be more against it.

5. No isolationism is wishful thinking and only works if your goal is too destroy US influence.

6. The problem with this thinking is that it presumes every country has good intentions. China is actively trying to unseat US power on the global stage. US forces have kept North Korea from invading South Korea, China from invading Taiwan, and minimized Iran’s attacks on it’s neighbors. US troops are fighting pirates off Africa, and fighting terrorists within the continent.

   Sadly, the US is doing the peacekeeping force that the UN should but never will.

7. Personally I don’t think it’s feasible to cut ourselves off totally from every corner of the world (seeing as how we trade with so many of them).

   And of course there’s the fact that some parties are going to do things that are unconscionably evil and if we have all this power we might as well occasionally use it to correct that. World War II being a pretty good example, since it’s come up.

8. I’m for diplomacy first and trying to avoid armed conflict. I am not in favor of non-interventionism. We have too big of resource demands. The world order is shifting more towards authoritarianism. There are legitimate military threats against our trading partners. If we just up and left, why would they continue to trade with us.

9. >I am curious as to how many Americans support neutrality.

   Not me

   >I am inclined to think the world does not need us as much anymore.

   Why not see how people in Ukraine and Taiwan and Japan and South Korea and Poland and Estonia in Australia and Saudi Arabia and Jordan and Vietnam feel about that? Yes, even Vietnam

   >But what do you think?

   We’re not a neutral country, the world order would collapse if we became one and an untold amount of innocent people would die

10. Isolationism may seem tempting because it’s an easy solution to a complex problem, but self-sufficiency is just not a viable option in a world as interdependent as ours. The moment we recede from the world stage is the moment that China and Russia swoop in and usurp us as suzerains of the Western World and we lose diplomatic/economic leverage.

    Globalism is the future whether we like it or not and fighting it is a fool’s errand.

11. We were a lot less neutral in that period than people seem to think. Militarily, sure we held back. Economically? Hell no. And a lot of that trade policy amounted to constant brinkmanship basically daring Germany to poke us hard enough to bring us in.

12. Doesn’t anybody learn history anymore??

    Isolationism *was* popular in America in the years before WW2. But the outbreak of the war, and America’s inevitable participation in it, proved what a bad, short-sighted policy isolationism was. In many instances, American non-intervention made the conflict more likely. In others, it left America unprepared once the conflict came. Either way, American lives were lost because isolationists thought we could ignore the outside world.

    Public figures supporting non-intervention before the war were literally humiliated by their pre-war stance after Pearl Harbor. People either changed their opinion, or simply disappeared from public influence. Hell, when JFK ran for president in 1960, he took heat over his father’s pre-war isolationism from 20 years earlier.

    It was a bad, dumb policy that’s failed us in the past. So, of course Donald Trump is an isolationist.

13. Absolutely not. Isolationism only hurts the US, our influence, and our trade.

14. No, isolationism doesn’t work in an interconnected world

15. I’ve always been against the idea that somehow it’s our responsibility to police the entire world.

16. Yep, we’re not the world police and we’ve been spending way too much on Europe.

17. Idk why people are confusing isolationism with neutrality. You can be neutral without being isolationist. Yes, I support neutrality and non intervention in terms of government. Talk about real world examples you might want to look up us supplying and aiding the taliban, and look how that ended up turning out

18. I think we should be more careful about use of military force than we have been of late, but a withdrawal from the world stage makes Ukraine happen over and over again in many more places

19. America arguably had justification for neutrality during the 1930s because of the Great Depression and our reach being limited to the Pacific and the Caribbean.

    Much has changed however, and now US influence is felt everywhere. And to dial it back leaves room for others to fill its place, or more specifically China. And even if the US sullies back into isolation and leaves Asia to China. Eventually, they will come around to us. And we best be ready.

20. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Also, what do you mean by “like in WW2”? We weren’t neutral.

21. The world *always* needs us when their ass is in the fire.

22. Most post WWII interventions were fucking disasters in my opinion, so I err on the side of less interventionism.

23. I don’t think you realize how much influence the threat of war with the US has.

24. No way. If we don’t take an active role in world affairs it just leaves the door open for the likes of a country like Russia (not so much anymore) or China to call the shots. I’d love to say the EU would try to be a counterweight to those two but I’m a little skeptical it would work without us.

25. As long as the rest of the world agrees not to complain that we arent helping.

26. No. Overthrowing every regime we don’t like is foolish but so is isolationism.

27. No. American isolationism has never worked. One hundred times no.

    I’d love for us to work on our soft power capabilities. We can tweak how frequently we are involving ourselves in certain situations, particularly like the disaster that was Iraq, but neutral and isolationist? No, no, no. It wouldn’t sit well with any decent person to hide behind “neutrality” while a sadistic fascist like putin openly tries to wipe an entire people from the earth. Even *Switzerland* grew a spine and knew neutrality can’t work in situations where one side is clearly the primary evil, so the US being neutral? No way.

28. All of the most important problems we face require global solutions (climate change, pandemics, AI, inequality, etc.) It’s not about whether the world needs us, it’s a mutual need

29. No, definitely not. In an ideal world, that would be great. But between the last 100 years of world military history, the size and importance of our trade economy, and our role as world police since the Cold War started, the toothpaste is out of the tube.

30. No, strongly oppose. Also weird to say we were neutral in WW2.