comicAt the beginning of the century president W.H.Taft aimed to prevent wars through arbitration of international disputes, yet then Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman H.C.Lodge (who disliked even the notion of creating a body that "might consist of foreigners". e.g. like the U.N. today) managed to amend the arbitration pacts, that Taft signed, to death before passage. Between the world wars in Paris 62 countries agreed to "renounce war" and settle disputes by "pacific means", adopting the Kellog-Briand Pact outlawing war, drafted by no less a peacenik than a U.S. Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg. The Senate immediately added reservations to U.S. ratification: no one had to act in case of a treaty violation - making the treaty worthless.

Long before Vietnam, Americans were worried with the "military-industrial complex". A correct, though Marxist, idea that the WW I was partially caused by a conspiracy among greedy capitalists, weapons manufacturers - "merchants of death", lead to full-blown Senate hearings: the Nye probe - where likes of J.P.Morgan and Du Pont brothers were called to testify. The Nye probe lead to passage of Neutrality Acts, that made it illegal to lend money or export arms to belligerents - which included victims of aggression, like the Spanish Republic.
American people don't like going to war. But they love their presidents, when they go to war. The only three times, in sixty years of Gallup polling, when the popular approval of the U.S. president's job performace was above 80%, were:
  1. Pearl Harbour, 1941, Roosevelt
  2. Bay of Pigs, 1961, Kennedy
  3. Gulf War, 1991, Bush

So, arms embargoed Bosnia was just another deja-vu for American war and peace politics. And proclaiming the moral commitment while withholding the ground troops is nothing new either: as late as autumn 1941, polls (those ever-present ubiquitous polls) reflected a similar kind of national schizophrenia: Gallup surveys showed that 70 percent of Americans felt that it was "more important" to defeat Germany than to stay out of war; but 83 percent opposed a congressional declaration of a state of war. The later failure of both the policy and the implementation of that policy in the case of Vietnam, made American foreign commitment just even more difficult.
The American Way of Life The reason why the U.S. needed to fight the Gulf War in 1991 and why it cannot sign the Kyoto Agreement ten years later is in the precarious "American way of life" - an average American consumes more than twice gigajoules of energy than an average Western-European, and about seven times as much as an average Sub-Saharan African. In the country built around the car paradigm, eight-lane highways are not wide enough, SUV-s are not big enough, and there is never enough fuel.

History from the 1987 New Year's issue of The Wilson Quarterly; article on The Peace Movement; comic from The Tampa Tribune; graph from The Economist; polls from Gallup