Crisis To Crisis

George McGovern's 1967 article echoes Max Bergmann's worries from earlier this week:

Many Americans, having grown impatient with the frustrations of the cold war, see each international tension as an urgent crisis calling for a direct and decisive attack on the enemy. Moreover, there must be no halfway measures: "Either get in or get out!" Those who suggest that there may be a proper limit to American power are branded as "neo-isolationists." A preference for the peacekeeping actions of the United Nations over a freewheeling unilateral interventionism is, for example, a sure sign of "neo-isolationism."

I believe that, in fact, we are in danger of seeing the isolationists of the 1920s and 1930s replaced by the neo-imperialists, who somehow imagine that the United States has a mandate to impose an American solution the world around. Those who see the United States in this role not only want U.S. police action in each trouble spot, but with decisive speed.

And the beat goes on.