The best way for America to mind its own business

The other day I was digging in a drawer and came upon my notes from an interview in 2000 with Sen. Slade Gorton. What struck me were his comments about President Clinton's "disastrously interventionist foreign policy."

Washington's Republican senator argued that American soldiers should be committed to battle "only when our own national-security interests are at stake." American security was not at stake in the Balkans, he said. Yugoslavia, a country invented after World War I, was breaking apart into ethnic units, and we should respect the people's wishes about it. Under the Clinton policy, he said, "We continue the fiction that Kosovo is part of Yugoslavia."

As for humanitarianism — the stated reason why U.S. forces bombed Serbia for 79 days — Gorton said, "We have caused more death in Kosovo than the Serbs."

He summed up: "We are not a policeman for the entire world. We can have grave differences with other countries without having military intervention."

I liked Gorton's comments, and I voted for him.

A few weeks later, George W. Bush had his second debate with Al Gore, and said America should have a humble foreign policy, using military force only "in our nation's strategic interests."

Bush did endorse Clinton's bombing of Serbia. He said it was "in our strategic interests to keep Milosevic in check because of our relations in NATO," which seemed to mean America was dropping bombs on one group of people in order to improve relations with another group of people. Well, I voted for Bush, too, and later was sorry I had.

Now, another war and tens of thousands of dead and wounded later, Bush and others from his entourage warn us against isolationism.

"Isolationist" was a smear term used in the months before Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, when Americans were arguing about how involved they should be in World War II. By June 1941, it was largely a war between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in Europe and Japan and China in Asia. Remembering the horrible cost and puny result of World War I, the "isolationists" wanted to stay out of both conflicts.

After America was attacked, the interventionists declared themselves to have been right all along. Whether they were or not, the term "isolationist" has been pinned on anyone, particularly a conservative, who has opposed any war since then. If you are on the left and oppose war, you "hate America"; if you are on the right, you want America to be "isolated."

What is isolationism really? The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press did a survey earlier this year and proclaimed "a revival of isolationist sentiment among the general public." And what showed that? The finding that 42 percent of American "influentials" agreed that the United States should "mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own."

For a country to mind its own business does not mean isolating itself. It means it chooses its own way, neither poking its nose unnecessarily into other countries' business nor neglecting its own.

When America engages in trade agreements with Canada and Mexico, we are minding our business. When we negotiate a treaty on land mines or saving the whales, we are minding our business. When we invaded Iraq, we used the rhetoric of minding our business, but really our security was not at stake there. Nor was it at stake in Somalia or Bosnia, nor is it in Darfur.

What George Bush, Condoleezza Rice and others denounce within the Republican Party are the stirrings of a thought that America could have an independent foreign policy that minded its business and let other countries mind theirs. Such a foreign policy would be safer and more profitable than the foreign policy of George W. Bush, which is more "disastrously interventionist" than Clinton's ever was.

Bruce Ramsey's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is bramsey@seattletimes.com