Stephen Wertheim

Too concerned with the question of whether or not anti-interventionists were, in a technical sense, isolationists. Not enough concerned with whether or not they were in the right. Came away from the book less convinced of its thesis than I did going in.

The postwar planners had valid motivations from the standpoint of American self-interest. German hegemony of Europe would have created an economic block that could surpass America in trade power and devastate American exports. Would this have actually happened? In retrospect it seems unlikely, but the planners had no way of knowing this.… (mer)