US no longer our Yankee poodles

I SUPPOSE it’s understandable that so many Europeans are taken aback by American isolationism, but other than the swiftness of its return, we really shouldn’t be. It’s merely a return to form; the default US setting of “stay out of it”.

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The last few decades of American engagement have been an aberration, not the norm. The US delayed entering the First and Second World War because they believed the deadly struggles on the continent were “none of our damn business” (Woodrow Wilson, US president 1913-1921). They only threw their lot in with us in 1917, after nearly four years of stalemate in France, because Germany was stupid enough to start sinking American shipping with submarine attacks. God knows how much longer we'd have been stuck in the trenches otherwise.

And there is still much misunderstanding today about why Franklin D Roosevelt committed his country to war in Europe in December 1941, more than two years after the Nazis invaded Poland. “Pearl Harbor” is the glib answer. No, not really.