Internationalism and Isolationism - Essay Sample

Introduction

As most nations across the globe are headed for a multipolar order internationally, where they can potentially become freer in charting their future directions, a comprehensive discussion concerning the essentials of internationalist and isolationist foreign policy tendencies appears warranted.

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The Advantage of Internationalism

Internationalism holds that countries determine their national interests as well as their identity in a manner, which emphasizes the commonalities shared with other nations. Internationalism is crucial in the sense that it offers a given nation a platform for acknowledging the difference between redistributive and cooperative dynamics to appreciate how domestic opinion inflicts constraints on given foreign policy pursued by the government (Gravelle, Reifler & Scotto, 2017). By doing so, the government can determine and implement the most appropriate foreign policy.

Additionally, a nation that seeks to follow an internationalist foreign policy often believe in harmonizing a specific international or regional environment with their national priorities as the situation is in their nationwide interest. This global and neighborhood active role would help such a country to shape the progress of developments beyond its borders along with promoting its internal norms and values to third parties. Furthermore, internationalism offers a nation to incorporate both a realist and a liberal crucial internationalism approaches (Gravelle, Reifler & Scotto, 2017), particularly in addressing one of the contemporary issues facing most nations, which is insecurity and stability.

The Advantage of Isolationism

As opposed to internationalism, isolationism suggests that countries would not prefer to engage in political developments occurring beyond their territorial borders. As such, the isolationist economies do not claim either international or regional leadership as core of their foreign policy thinking. Nonetheless, there is an advantage to both internal fragility as well as self-sufficiency to isolationist foreign policies as is the case with the USA's isolationist foreign policy following its establishment during the eighteenth century until the start of the twentieth century. During this period, the America presidents utilized isolationist foreign policy which enabled the country to successfully emphasize on and achieved internal modernization, nation-building, and development processes (Doenecke, 2017).

Examples of practices associated with the US' usage of an isolationist foreign policy include supporting the idea of minimizing the population of the US troops deployed in a foreign nation, shunning nation-building exercises in a foreign country, adopting a transactional strategy when interacting with other nations, as well as the practice of disapproving globalism as a creed. However, it is difficult to explain the success of an isolationist foreign policy in different countries following the onset of the twentieth century until currently based on the logic of fragility.

Position of this Paper

Following the above review of the advantages of both the internationalist and isolationist international policies, the position of this paper is that the application of an internationalist foreign policy would best fit a country to address most concerns in the current increasingly attenuating world, despite the rising petition from the anti-globalist nationalism as well as illiberal populism.

References

Doenecke, J. D. (2017). Isolationism. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History.

Gravelle, T. B., Reifler, J., & Scotto, T. J. (2017). The structure of foreign policy attitudes in transatlantic perspective: Comparing the United States, United Kingdom, France and Germany. European Journal of Political Research, 56(4), 757-776. doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-6765.12197