The Isolation Pendulum

When Americans think about foreign policy, they often think in cycles. In 1952 an academic named Frank Klingberg divided America's relations with the world into periods of "extroversion" and "introversion," each lasting about a generation. After World War I, he noted, America turned inward, only to turn outward again after World War II. In 1974 another scholar, Michael Roskin, picked up the thread, arguing that Vietnam was pushing the pendulum back to isolationism. Sometime in the 1990s, he predicted, the pendulum might swing again.

Such theories, of course, lack social scientific rigor; American foreign policy cannot be set to a clock. But cyclical thinking still subtly frames much public discussion. For President Bush, the pendulum swung on Sept. 11, 2001, when a decade of introversion ended and the war on terrorism began. "After the shipwreck of communism," Bush declared in his second inaugural address, "came years of relative quiet, years of repose, years of sabbatical -- and then there came a day of fire."

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