“The idea of imposing universal peace on the world by force is a barbarian fantasy.” ~ Garet Garrett

After the death of Taft and as the Eisenhower foreign policy began to take on the frozen Dullesian lineaments of permanent mass armament and the threat of “massive nuclear retaliation” throughout the globe, I began to notice isolationist sentiment starting to fade away, even among old libertarian and isolationist compatriots who should have known better. Old friends who used to scoff at the “Russian threat” and had declared The Enemy to be Washington, DC now began to mutter about the “international Communist conspiracy.” I noticed that young libertarians coming into the ranks were increasingly infected with the Cold War mentality and had never even heard of the isolationist alternative. Young libertarians wondered how it was that I upheld a “Communist foreign policy.”

In this emerging atmosphere, novelist Louis Bromfield’s nonfiction work of 1954, A New Pattern for a Tired World, a hard-hitting tract on behalf of free-market capitalism and a peaceful foreign policy, began to seem anachronistic and had almost no impact on the right wing of the day. (Continue to full story…)