Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

The New American Isolationism

The Cost of Turning Away from War’s Horrific Realities

By  William J. Astore

A new isolationism is metastasizing in the American body politic.  At its heart lies not an urge to avoid war, but an urge to avoid contemplating the costs and realities of war.  It sees war as having analgesic qualities -- as lessening a collective feeling of impotence, a collective sense of fear and terror.  Making war in the name of reducing terror serves this state of mind and helps to preserve it.  Marked by a calculated estrangement from war’s horrific realities and mercenary purposes, the new isolationism magically turns an historic term on its head, for it keeps us in wars, rather than out of them.

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