| Publication |
2014.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This essay assesses the pitfalls of relying on isolationism to describe American political culture during the 1920s and 1930s and proposes that the concept of neutrality offers a more useful framework for understanding how Americans struggled with their place in a world at war. Americans had long worried about foreign entanglements, but what lent the debates after World War I their special urgency and potency was a sense that one important option in the traditional conduct of international relations-neutrality-had become unhinged from its moorings. Understanding the shifting meanings, and ultimately the perceived demise of neutrality as a viable form of statecraft, points toward a new way to narrate the turning points and political alliances of the interwar years. It also helps to explain why, since the 1930s, Americans have become more readily embroiled in military conflicts overseas despite their recurring doubts about the price of such engagement.
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