Isolationism as provincialism

In any conversation you have, any large-based discussion on foreign policy (especially in the US), you will eventually get someone touting some form of isolationism.  "Hey, they're [X miles away], why do I have to care about them?"  This especially came up in light of the conflict in Libya, with isolationists painting Libya as a second Iraq, but it will come up in the context peace keeping mission or intervention.

I have...a lot of problems with this idea.  On a purely emotional level, as a foreign policy student isolationism seems ostrich-like--it is a refutation of the importance of anything going on outside our borders, and is ignorant of the transnational nature of modern threats.  But I dislike it on an intellectual level as well.  Isolationism has generally used unhistorical examples to support it--"Hey, we were isolationist in the 19th century, and that worked out pretty well for us!  Never mind that we expanded our territory via war just as much as all of the other imperialists!"

But lastly, and most gratingly, isolationists generally re-purpose the language of realism (a subject which I will get on later) to make an argument against any form of humanitarian intervention.  By this I mean, a scientistic view of some unchanging and objectively-determined "national interest" which we are going against by doing X or Y.  This ignores the fact that the 'national interest', as a social construction, is entirely subjective and is created and altered by whichever reader or writer is participating in creating it at that particular moment.

It is understandable, for multiple reasons, that people generally think of national security/the national interest as an objective fact, not least because the conception of national interest as an objective fact gives power to supposed 'experts' (think pundits), but it suffices to say that national interest isn't a real thing.

And this is what particularly jives me about isolationism, and how provincial it is--it assumes firstly that everyone else has the same national interest as we do, and that this conception of a national interest is more important than human lives and emancipation.  The reason that humanitarian intervention is necessary is that many countries don't have the same idea of national security as we do--that, say, to the Libyan government a year ago, the security of Qaddafi trumped the security of hundreds of thousands of people.  And, as the civil war in Libya was going on, the isolationist wing of American politics brought a series of high minded arguments against the intervention.  But we need to ask ourselves whether these high minded arguments and our imagined ideas of nationality and sovereignty trump the lives and well being of others.