Conservative Historian
History is too important to be left to the left. The Conservative Historian provides history governed by conservative principles. It is comprehensively researched but also entertainingly presented in a way accessible to history or non history buffs.
Conservative Historian
The Folly of Isolationism in History
Isolationism is back but not better. We look to the fate of the Chinese Ming Empire, the European Age of Exploration and our own politics.
The Folly of Isolationism in History
September 2023
How far is Greenland from Labrador? This is a rather odd way to begin a podcast, but I ask for your indulgence. The answer is about 1,500 miles. Considering various factors such as wind conditions, daylight hours, crew fatigue, and navigation requirements, a Viking ship, circa 1000 CE, would typically sail for about 12 to 14 hours daily. This allowed them to cover an average distance of approximately 120 to 170 nautical miles. So, an enterprising Viking such as Leif Ericson could get from Greenland to North America in about ten days. It is not a short time for a Long Ship, but it is not insurmountable either. It was about 4-6 days to travel from Norway to England. It took about three days to get to Iceland, so it was not as if these people were not accustomed to sailing on the open sea out of sight of land. We cannot know for a certainty that Ericson was the first European to see North America, but there is a great deal of evidence to support the claim.
It is about 1,200 miles between China and modern-day Indonesia. The distance from Thailand to India is even farther than 2,500 miles. But in the early 1400s, a Ming Empire admiral named Zheng He accomplished both feats. These voyages were part of seven expeditions staged between 1405 and 1433. They involved hundreds of ships and thousands of men and projected Chinese trade and influence throughout Asia. The significance of Zheng He’s Voyages was for diplomatic and trade relations with other countries. However, the primary purpose of the voyages was to spread awe and to communicate China’s ‘soft power’ of Chinese culture.
And did Zheng He, like Ericson, arrive in the Americas before Christopher Columbus? A small group of scholars and hobbyists, led by Gavin Menzies, a former British Navy submarine commander, argue that Zheng He traveled much farther than most Chinese and Western scholars say. Mr. Menzies claims that Zheng He visited America in 1421, 71 years before Columbus arrived. His 2003 book, “1421: The Year China Discovered America” laid out extensive but widely disputed evidence that Zheng He sailed to the east coast of today’s United States in 1421 and may have left settlements in South America.
One piece of evidence used by Menzies is a Chinese map, which was drawn in 1763 but had a note on it saying it is a reproduction of a map dated 1418. This map presents the world as a globe with all the major continents rendered with an exactitude that European maps did not have for at least another century after Columbus, Da Gama, Magellan, Dias and others had completed their renowned explorations.
I have doubts, and, interestingly, even Menzies puts the supposed arrival of Zheng He in South American on a different year than the map. And we know that the map was crafted in the 1700s, well after the contours of the continents were known to all. We cannot prove that the map mimics a 15th-century one because we need a map of that time showing the Americas.
But what of the issue of the sheer distance? I have noted expeditions of 1,500 or 2,500 miles, but the Pacific is nearly 7,000 miles from China to California. Yet, 100 years later, the Spanish crossed this widest sea expanse on our planet. We know Magellan did it going from South America to the Philippines but have no hard evidence that Zhang He went the other way across.
So why did it happen that a Spanish expedition did it and not a Chinese one? In the early 1400s, the Portuguese were starting to map Africa. It was not until 1492 that Columbus began his voyages, and seven years after that, De Gama went to India. After that expedition, the Portugues began to dominate the Indian Ocean trade. After them, the Dutch led to the conquests of the East Indies, the Philippines, and, eventually, all of South Asia, from Pakistan to Vietnam.
From Australia in the South to Macau and Hong Kong off the coast of China.
How did the Chinese, dominators of Asian sea trade under the early Ming personified by Zheng He, become bottled up and isolated by Europeans? There is an incredible photo, included in the transcript of this podcast, showing a scale of one of Columbus’s ships to that of Zheng He’s flagship. The former looks like a Dolphin swimming next to a Blue Whale.
The seven voyages of the Treasure Fleet were meant to display Chinese might to all the kingdoms and trade ports of the Indian Ocean world and to bring back exotic toys and novelties for the Emperor. In other words, Zheng He’s enormous junks were intended to shock and awe other Asian principalities into offering tribute to the Ming.
So then, why did the Ming halt these voyages in 1433 and either burn the great fleet in its moorings or allow it to rot (depending upon the source)? Three thoughts around this: First, the Yongle Emperor, who sponsored Zheng He’s first six voyages, died in 1424. His son, the Hongxi Emperor, was much more conservative and Confucianist in his thought, so he ordered the voyages stopped.
Second, besides political motivation, the new Emperor had financial incentives. The treasure fleet voyages cost Ming China enormous amounts of money; since they were not trade excursions, the government recovered little of the cost. The Hongxi Emperor inherited a much emptier treasury than it might have been if not for his father’s Indian Ocean adventures. China was self-sufficient; it didn’t need anything from the Indian Ocean world, so why send out these huge fleets?
And finally, the Emperor had a ready-made excuse. Mongols were threatening the Chinese borders, so resources were needed elsewhere. Though these threats were nothing like those faced in the 1200s when the Mongols were temporarily united, they provided a ready-made excuse for officials to use when the course of isolation was already determined. The Yongle Emperor had already made a series of successful campaigns against them during his reign.
So, we wish to spend resources at home, prevent a purported invasion on the border, and believe that the world abroad has little to offer.
These concepts feed into a sense of the right of a return to isolationism. This philosophy has a rich history on the right espoused by figures such as Michigan Senator Arthur Vandenberg and Robert Taft, who sounded very much like many modern isolationists, “We cannot adopt a foreign policy which gives away all of our people’s earnings or imposes such a tremendous burden on the individual American as, in effect, to destroy his incentive and his ability to increase production and productivity and his standard of living.” This is obviously a straw man argument. The most ardent hawk alive is not advocating giving away “all of our people’s earnings.”
But Vandenberg did something increasingly difficult in our tribal elective mentality; he changed his mind based on the clear evidence, “My convictions regarding international cooperation and collective security for peace took firm form on the afternoon of the Pearl Harbor attack. That day ended isolationism for any realist.”
But does Taft have a point? Is US involvement abroad an undue burden? Not getting involved will create future unnecessary burdens. Think about that concept espoused by the later Ming Emperors: self-sufficiency. There is a sense about our nation today that we are self-sufficient. If only those pesky problems from the world abroad would disappear, we could live in harmony. Not quite. American imports totaled $2.614 trillion last year. Among these are the following:
- Minerals, fuels, and oil – $241.4 billion.
- Pharmaceuticals – $116.3 billion.
- Medical equipment and supplies – $93.4 billion.
- Furniture, Lighting, and Signs – $72.1 billion.
- Plastics – $61.9 billion.
- Gems and precious metals – $60.8 billion.
- Organic chemicals – $54.6 billion.
An argument could be made that we could make everything on this list except two significant issues: cost and labor. Walmart and Sam’s Club are not popular because they have such great service; people go there to pay less, and if Americans fully understand how much they would pay without imported goods, there would be screaming in the streets. In total wages, the US ranks 3rd in the world, behind Iceland and Luxembourg, so in terms of any nation larger than a Chicago suburb, we are 1st. Mexico, a focus on manufacturing, by contrast, is 38th. Regarding manufacturing wages, 13 countries pay more—all of Europe except Australia. And in many ways, this is a silly comparison. Belgium’s GDP is 500 billion compared to the US of $23 trillion. Norway is at the top of the list, but massive North Sea oil profits subsidize those higher wages. And none of them have the manufacturing output of nations such as China, Mexico, or Vietnam.
One can decry the inequity all they want.
But Economics 101 states that higher labor costs will result in higher prices, period, borne by the consumer.
And then there is the issue of whether tens of millions of Americans want a manufacturing job. A CNBC article by Eric Rosenbaum explores this trend,
“Nick Pinchuk, chairman and CEO of Snap-on, is worried about the future of manufacturing work in America—not because of all the obsessive talk of industrial robots wiping out jobs and the impact of a trade war. Instead, Pinchuk sees a much bigger problem for the future of blue-collar jobs than sound bites at a time when 500,000 jobs remain open in the sector: Too many Americans don’t want to do the work themselves.
Robots are increasingly being used by Snap-On in its operations, but the company that employs 12,600 has not laid off an employee since before the Great Recession began.
Only 30% of Americans want to work in manufacturing, Pinchuk told attendees at CNBC’s @Work Human Capital + Finance conference in Chicago on Tuesday, citing data from the National Association of Manufacturers. When Americans talk about support for manufacturing jobs, Pinchuk says there is something that most believe but do not want to say out loud: “This is what other people’s kids do.”
This means that we will continue to make US goods abroad, which means we will need to know what is happening and be present to shape policy around our trade networks.
Then there are geopolitics. Writing this week in Forbes, Daniel Blackman states, “One of the predictions I made in January’s annual predictions piece was that the BRICS Alliance would vote to add Saudi Arabia as a member when it held its annual summit in South Africa on August 22-24. As things turned out, the voting BRICS members – Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa – went further than that last week, adding five new member countries and Saudi Arabia.
Those other countries that will now be admitted into the trading alliance’s membership include Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, The United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Iran. Even though this constitutes an extraordinary move with potentially enormous geopolitical implications, it has been interesting to note a somewhat muted reaction to it thus far from Western governments and the press.
Quiet indeed. Since the Iranian Revolution over 40 years ago, a staple of US Governmental policy has used the Saudi Arabian monarchy as a counterweight to the Iranian Theocracy. The announcement of this alliance, led by China but now including the Saudis and Iranians, calls into question our policy and, again, isolates our close ally Israel. The best accomplishment of Trump’s foreign policy was the Abraham Accords, in which several Gulf states put aside their decades-long animosity and funding of Palestinian terrorism to ally with the Israelis. BRICS upends this as well.
Purported conservatives such as Ramaswamy, commentator Tucker Carlson, and Ohio Senator JD Vance might ask why any of this is essential. is not 1823 anymore, in which a self-sufficient United States (even then, there was a great deal of trade) relied on the Atlantic and Pacific to shield the homeland. One need not have heard of Pearl Harbor or 9/11 to understand the folly of that thinking. Even before the doctrine, in the War of 1812, the British could land forces in the United States and burn down the white house. And why did that war begin? Trade issues.
And finally, the role and status of government itself. One of the arguments, most recently seen in the tragedy that took place in Maui in which hundreds died, is that of allocation of funds. The specious argument was that we send more aid to Ukrainians than was proposed for our Hawaiian citizens. Aside from faulty comparisons, the assistance to Hawaii is in direct grants, whereas the help to Ukraine is in defensive weaponry manufactured here in the US. Workers paid; taxes banked against this aid. But the real point is that these supposed conservatives believe that the government, in non-disaster situations, should have a prominent role in the means of production.
In Reason Magazine, Stephanie Slades notes,
“On the other side is an increasingly restless group of writers and thinkers at places like First Things and the Claremont Institute who say America has tried classical liberalism—and it failed us. These “post-liberals” believe it’s time for conservative politics to stop worrying about protecting individual liberty and attaining the common good. Generally speaking, that means embracing “strict rule” by a government tasked, among other things, with “enforcing duties of community and solidarity in the use and distribution of resources,” as Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule put it.”
Instead of worrying about what is going on over there, we need to worry more about here, and part of that worry is assuming control of things once the purview of the left, such as companies. But the America First concept carries a corollary of not spending on interests abroad and, more importantly, not projecting strength.
Former Vice President Dan Quayle once stated, “We must reject the idea of isolationism, . But that doesn't mean we should get involved in every civil war around the world.” There is no hawk who believes that we should get involved in every civil war. We did not intervene in the Rwandan Civil Wars of the the 1990s in which millions were murdered, did not see a US presence. From a moral perspective I would like to have helped, but US involvement would not have helped in this situation nor were there American interests in this case. There is in the Middle East, in south Asia, and in the East China Sea.
Norman Podhoretz said the isolationism of the Left stems from the conviction that America is bad for the rest of the world, whereas the isolationism of the Right is based on the belief that the rest of the world is bad for America.
Given the presence of Eisenhower, Reagan and the two Bushes in the GOP the days of Robert Taft seemed to be in the past. But if there is a current architect of isolationism it is Pat Buchanan who made a splash running against George W Bush in 2000. We are thus in the position of having to borrow from Europe to defend Europe, of having to borrow from China and Japan to defend Chinese and Japanese access to Gulf oil, and of having to borrow from Arab emirs, sultans and monarchs to make Iraq safe for democracy. We borrow from the nations we defend so that we may continue to defend them. To question this is an unpardonable heresy called 'isolationism.'
Buchanan is one of those people who come off as smart but is actually playing a game. He makes an economic argument decrying isolation because we have to borrow money. He is actually making a solid argument for smaller government and entitlement reform to get our fiscal house in order. But of course that is not his goal. And the negative impact by our ceding our influence in the world is not a factor in this argument, as it should be.
Writing for the national interest, author John Heubusch notes that the words “peace through strength” have been included in the Republican Party platform every four years since 1980. But the phrase’s origins date back some 1,900 years before that, attesting to the fact that its wisdom has stood the test of time. Si vis pacem, para bellum,” a Latin adage translated as “If you want peace, prepare for war,” has been traced to an author in the late 4th century, while the more concise “peace through strength” goes back even further, attributed to Roman Emperor Hadrian (AD 76-138). In the 1980 presidential campaign — amid the Iranian hostage crisis— Ronald Reagan invoked the phrase to contrast incumbent President Jimmy Carter’s leadership as weak and equivocal and only to embolden our enemies. Following his landslide win, Reagan made the concept of peace through strength one of the cornerstones of his foreign policy.
China, except for the Yuan dynasty, projected its strength for nearly 1,200 years before the Ming. Even after the fall of the Mings in 1644, the sheer wealth and bulk of China made them a formidable nation throughout the 1700s under the Qing Dynasty, which were technically invaders from Manchuria. But by 1800, the game was up, and by the time of the Opium Wars in the middle of the 19th century, China was being dictated to and exploited by European nations on all sides. China no controlled their foreign policy, trade, and, in the case of the Boxer rebellion in 1899, the ability to wage war. The uprising saw the capital city of Beijing looted and burned. And in the 20th century, without the US being pulled into World War II, the Japanese may have conquered all of China. This is the legacy of the Ming’s inward focus.
From the War of 1812 to Pancho Villa murdering citizens in the Southwest, to the Lusitania, Pearl Harbor, and 9/11, they will come here. Ignoring foreign issues will not prevent the murders of US citizens. It might be simply marauders in the case of Villa, thousands of deaths on that Monday in 2001, or an Empire in the case of Japan. Isolationism means we wait, we ignore, we prevaricate. These are recipes for future calamities. We can face them, face them with weakness here, or face them with strength there.