the Truman doctrine when he was asking for assistance to Greece and Turkey to prevent the spread of communism. So yes, there are signs that the U.S. was settling back towards disengagement, but that was stopped in its tracks by the Soviet threat. And the Soviet threat also played an important role in silencing the libertarian right because the America first movement during the interwar period, a lot of those people were hardcore right wing libertarians, American nationalists. What happened once the Soviet threat came along was that anti-communism trumped anti-internationalism and it trumped this hard right libertarian sentiment. So that's when you get the John Birch Society and these other kind of libertarian leaning and I would say somewhat racist and anti-Semitic groups becoming internationalists. They weren't multilaterals. They didn't like the UN. They didn't like alliances, but they were ready to send American soldiers abroad because they thought that the real threat was (26/33)
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