served the nation well during that period. You're right to point out that isolationism is today a dirty word. And if someone calls someone else an isolationist, it's really an epithet. It's an attempt to denigrate them and isolate them politically. And one of the things I wanted to do in the book is to refurbish isolationism's reputation, not because I'm an isolationist. I'm not. I'm sure we'll get to that later. But because I think that the country needs to have a searching, open debate about the future of its role in the world, and that anybody who says, hey, let's lighten the load, let's step back. Let's let others do more. They shouldn't be called an isolationist. And so I think it does a disservice to the quality of debate in this country to continue to use the notion of pulling back, of lightening our load abroad as some sort of insult. But that's the way it's been since 1941. And that's because the isolationists were pushed to the margins of American politics during World War II (8/33)
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