Franklin D. Roosevelt, fearing a backlash from isolationists, secretly helped the British before the attack on Pearl Harbor.
He needed help from the new majority, and, while he wouldn't get it from isolationists like Senator Robert A. Taft, he was able to turn to Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.
(A decade later, Eisenhower, under attack from isolationists who threatened his ability to conduct his foreign policy, talked of a new party of "progressive moderates," perhaps one modelled on Theodore Roosevelt's Bull Moosers).
Still, his hypercautious reluctance to send troops into danger led him at that time to take a position no different from isolationists in practice, though different in principle.Moreover, his reluctance to use force was not confined to the Gulf.
There were pundits who whispered "quagmire" and allies whose applause for the effort was one-handed, but the outright opposition came from isolationists, the doctrinaire left and the soft-headed types Christopher Hitchens described as people who, "discovering a viper in the bed of their child, would place the first call to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals".
While some as US Senator John McCain have maintained a consistency in their calls for greater US involvement, others have transcended the spectrum from isolationists to hawks.
His aim, he said, was to cajole American travelers away from their isolationist ways.
"It is far, far from an isolationist caucus," Mr. Hagel said speaking of Senate Republicans.
They also took a keen interest in foreign affairs, adopting an interventionist stance that set them apart from the isolationist tendencies of earlier conservatives.
