The Republicans are retreating to isolationism, we are told, and this latest humiliation of the President is comparable in impact and significance to the Senate's refusal to ratify Woodrow Wilson's signature on the Versailles Treaty, ending World War I, in 1920. The comparison is tempting. It is indeed rare for a President to be overruled on such a significant foreign-policy decision. And the manner in which the Senate majority has eviscerated a major international agreement does recall the events of 80 years ago. But the resemblance stops there.
Historical analogies are always imperfect, sometimes misleading.
This comparison risks diluting the implications of the Senate's actions. The senators' motives in refusing to endorse Wilson's signature were of course mixed, but some of the doubts expressed were substantive and prescient. In any case, the failure of the World War I peace settlement and the League of Nations that it created had little to do with American absence from the international scene. To be sure, America's retreat contributed to disillusionment with the outcome of the war, but even under the rosiest Wilsonian scenario the United States was never going to underwrite or police the settlement, and no one thought it would. The situation now is very different.