What can we say of La Follette’s foreign-policy legacy? In practical terms, it qualifies as nil. Generations of schoolchildren have been instructed to see the Senate’s refusal to join the League of Nations as making another, even more destructive world war inevitable, an error laid at the feet of mischief-makers who opposed Woodrow Wilson and thereby prevented the United States from donning the mantle of global leadership. Even today that myth-history prevails in Washington, where the mantle has long since become a blindfold, as vividly illustrated by bumbling U.S. policies in the Middle East that Britain and France bequeathed to the United States.
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