Isolationism: Everything New Is Old Again
The Allure of Autarky
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This is a riff on an Aeon essay by Ben Chu.
A great wave of desire for more self-sufficiency is sweeping across the planet. Donald Trump has declared the “economic independence” of the United States, wanting to excise the US from the global trading system that it has so painstakingly built since WWII—a system that has delivered considerable economic benefits for everyone.
Trump is not alone in wanting to rely less on other countries for imports of goods and raw materials. China’s president Xi Jinping has been advocating self-reliance for China, discouraging imports and trying to enhance Chinese domestic production of everything from food to computer chips.
Others have followed this path too.
As the medieval world gave way to the Enlightenment and Romanticism in Europe, Jean-Jacques Rousseau reinvigorated the ideal of autarky. Rousseau held that primitive man had been naturally ‘solitary’, coming together with others only for mating, and was much happier for it.
…wandering in the forests without industry, without speech, without a home, without war, and without relationships, with no need for his fellow men, and similarly with no desire to harm them, perhaps even without ever recognizing any of them individually.
Jean Jaques Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality (1754)
Not a new idea, even to Rousseau.
The impulse has resonated deeply with both individuals and communities over many centuries. Understanding how the two interact and reinforce each other might be crucial to understanding the enduring appeal of this way of thinking, and for getting a sense of where it can lead us, whether as individuals, as nation states or as a global community.
Rousseau was wrong.
In Kenya’s Olorgesailie basin, anthropologists have found hand-worked axes made of obsidian—volcanic glass not from the area, suggesting that these Stone Age humans who lived some 320,000 years ago were trading with other groups. Part of what defines our species, making us distinct from other apes, seems to be Homo sapiens’ cooperative and social nature and, specifically, our capability for cultural learning.
Sakoku in Japan.
The Tokugawas imposed the policy of sakoku, or ‘closed country’ on Japan in the 17th Century, to maintain what they—Japanese, not just the shogun—saw as racial and ideological purity from especially Western ideas. They banned Christian missionaries; authorities persecuted Japanese citizens within the country and compelled their priests to abjure prior to execution. They forbade emigration and reduced Western trade almost to nothing. Economic isolationism also connected with resistance to foreign empires' incursions and served as a practical way to secure sovereignty and control, extending beyond mere abstract principles.
Self-sufficiency does not mean narrowness. To be self-sufficient is not to be altogether self-contained.
Gandhi
Gandhi’s vision of an India independent of British rule was for a network of economically autonomous villages growing their own crops and spinning their own cotton for clothing, writing, “every village has to be self-sustained and capable of managing its affairs even to the extent of defending itself against the whole world.” That’s why the image of the spinning wheel once sat at the heart of the tricolor Indian flag.
For Gandhi, self-sufficiency did not mean there would be no trade, but trade only in the things that the village could not realistically produce itself.
Yet at other times Gandhi struck a much more isolationist tone, insisting that ‘it is certainly our right and duty to discard everything foreign that is superfluous and even everything foreign that is necessary if we can produce or manufacture it in our country.’ Gandhi’s self-sufficiency movement - Swadeshi in Hindi - has to be understood as self-sufficiency for India primarily in relation to Britain, the imperial overlord. The movement's announcement occurred in Bengal in 1905, accompanied by a boycott of British goods. Swadeshi was Gandhi’s antidote to what he saw as the predatory imperial capitalism of the British.
That mindset of India needing self-sufficiency remained long after the nation achieved independence.
Germany's experience in WWI, when the British navy's blockade starved the country, prompted Hitler's autarkism. Writing in the 1920s, Hitler dismissed the idea that Germany could nourish its population through increases in agricultural productivity and lamented that “the German people is today even less in a position than in the years of peace to feed itself from its own land and territory.” The road to national self-preservation for the former lance-corporal would have to run through a radical program of building national self-sufficiency. And he believed that Germany’s salvation lay in conquering and exploiting the rural bounty of lands to the east, thus gaining the notorious Lebensraum (‘living space’). In a speech in 1936, when he had ascended to the German Chancellorship and crushed all internal opposition, Hitler made his expansionist territorial intentions plain:
If I had the Ural Mountains with their incalculable store of treasures in raw materials, Siberia with its vast forests, and the Ukraine with its tremendous wheat fields, Germany and the National Socialist leadership would swim in plenty!
Joseph Stalin, despite having Hitler’s fecund lands under his direct control, also felt a dread of national insecurity and pursued a policy of self- sufficiency for the Soviet Union in the 1930s, deliberately cutting off exports and seeking to establish Soviet economic independence from the capitalist world. Mao used similar justifications for self-reliance, based on national security in China during the Great Leap Forward of the 1950s, when he sought to create a national domestic steel industry from scratch by forcing farmers to melt down their pots and pans in backyard furnaces. In the 1950s, Kim II Sung made national self-sufficiency not just an important aim for North Korea, but the lodestar of his new regime, calling it Juche.
Establishing Juche means ... rejecting dependence on others, using one’s own brains, believing in one’s own strength, displaying the revolutionary spirit of self-reliance.
The specter of war primarily motivated Kim, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, rather than ideals of national virtue, when they implemented their programs of national isolationism. The outcomes of their visions for self-sufficiency were catastrophic, resulting in genocide and suffering on a scarcely imaginable scale. North Korea remains a hermit kingdom, shaped by a totalitarian family cult, effectively a prison state for its people, a warning of the economic and social toll of isolationism. Yet despite the economic disasters autarky has often wrought, it’s important to recognize that some outstanding national economic success stories have also felt its allure.
A free people ought not only to be armed, but disciplined, and their safety and interest require that they should promote such manufactories as tend to render them independent of others for essential, particularly military, supplies.
George Washington, January 1790
The context was the threat of Great Britain, which was still a profound military danger to the nascent republic. Washington and his Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton, believed they had to build up the states’ industrial base to enable the republic to defend itself. And this meant a high wall of tariffs to prevent the infant factories of the US from being suffocated by cheaper imported products from a more productive Britain. One of the first acts of the First Congress was the imposition of a tariff.
If we don’t have ... steel and lots of other things, we don’t have a military and, frankly, we just won’t have a country very long,..We used to make so many ships. We don’t make them anymore very much, but we’re going to make them very fast, very soon.
Donald Trump, 2025
When Trump explained why he had re-imposed tariffs on steel imports, he explicitly linked trade policy to national self-reliance and defense capabilities. Trump resurrected ideas that were influential at the very birth of the republic.
Like El Nino, the drive for self- sufficiency keeps returning.
Steele’s Battalion: The Great War Diaries
Arguably, America’s uneven performance in WWI resulted from American isolationism. A young man goes to France in an army that had never fought a war like he did. Yet, he and America prevailed.
…a novel about an all-American hero in the First World War…A gripping and satisfyingly detailed war novel in the vein of Sergeant York.
Kirkus Reviews
And Finally...
On 30 May:
1942: Operation MILLENNIUM begins, with as many as a thousand RAF aircraft targeting Cologne, Germany, in the largest air attack on a single target up to that time. A little under a thousand planes hit Cologne, dropping just over 34,000 tons of bombs, causing considerable damage and inflicting about 20,000 casualties.
1970: The US observes its last 30 May Memorial Day. Begun as Decoration Day in 1868, the Uniform Monday Holiday Act of 1968, which became effective in 1971, designated Memorial Day a national holiday and moved it from 30 May to the last Monday in May.
And today is NATIONAL CREATIVITY DAY, encouraging us to engage in making something never seen before, never imagined, or in describing something in a new way to stimulate not just imagination but a sense of accomplishing something—anything.