A Chequer-Board of Nights and Days

I am pleased to see that the Bush Administration seems set to make the argument in favor of engaging the world, especially in light of the Dubai ports debacle and the attendant nativism that so sullied the debate over that issue. But the first paragraph in the linked article irks me:

The president who made pre-emption and going it alone the watchwords of his first term is quietly turning in a new direction, warning at every opportunity of the dangers of turning the nation inward and isolationist, and making the case for international engagement on issues from national security to global economics.

Feh. Making the case that sometimes, if worst truly comes to worst, a nation-state may have to resort to pursuing its interests in unilateral fashion does not mean that said nation-state was being "isolationist" in nature. And yet, that is the impression one would get from reading the above paragraph.

How very clumsy. Isolationism is the relative absence of foreign engagement. The Bush Administration engaged but felt that it had to do so unilaterally at times when the importance of American security interests outweighed the perceived relative lack of allies. This does not isolationism make, and it is quite inaccurate to blithely claim otherwise.