“I think Ron Paul is one of those old isolationists left over from 1940 who, like the late Sen. Borah, opposed U. S. involvement in World War II.”
He’s an isolationist who belongs to the “Blames the victim first” crowd.
The old isolationists who thought America too good to engage with the corrupt Old World were a remnant of what was once at least a plurality opinion in the States, one that animated both Know-Nothingism (its stance against immigration) and Abraham Lincoln's conviction that the institution of slavery was a stain on the American moral example to the world, a stain that needed to be burned out by war and scrubbed out with the detergent of slavers' blood (some people still think that, too, and hate the South for reasons they don't really understand; but then, hate is so forgiving that way).
The "Billion Dollar Congress" acted to protect the Tariff, which some people interpreted thereafter as a Republican affection for the U. S. Navy (animated by banana-loving investors), when that isn't the case. The Republicans have always been hair-trigger tax cutters, owing to their ownership by blue-haired millionairesses and their masculine accumulator-consorts ; it was they who tried to cut back the U. S. Army, in a new and dangerous century, to the manning levels of the 1900 Indian-fighting army of President McKinley.