The Deep Roots of Trump’s Isolationism

The mainstream U.S. foreign policy establishment views former President Donald Trump as a dangerous neo-isolationist, completely out of step with American ideals and interests. Internationalists at home and abroad shudder at the prospect of Trump’s potential reelection in November, fearing that he would dismantle the liberal order that the United States and its allies have built and defended since World War II.

Such fears are justified; Trump may indeed seek to do away with at least some core elements of the U.S.-led liberal order. But to portray his “America first” approach as a dark deviation from the American experience is to misunderstand its deep historical and ideological roots, as well as its considerable political appeal. Trump’s statecraft is a response to a changing world and to demand signals from the U.S. electorate, not a capricious effort to take apart the world that the United States made.

None of this is to deny that Trump’s return to office could be disastrous. At home, he may well imperil American democracy. Abroad, Trump’s mere reelection would set the world on edge. U.S. allies would have to face the reality that their security guarantor—the globe’s premier power—has been beset by intractable political dysfunction; they would have no choice but to question Washington’s long-term reliability and make other plans. Meanwhile, autocrats would be emboldened and the cause of democracy everywhere debilitated.

Yet the best way to avoid that highly unattractive outcome is not to recoil at Trump’s “America first” movement or to see it merely as the work of a know-nothing felon. Rather, the way forward requires unpacking that movement, understanding its considerable political appeal, and appropriating its worthy elements. If the Democrats are to defeat Trump and his neo-isolationist agenda, they should cull central elements of his “America first” program and pivot toward a more modest, restrained, and pragmatic brand of U.S. statecraft.

STEAL HIS THUNDER

From 1789 to 1941 (with brief exceptions during the Spanish-American War and World War I), the United States embraced an isolationist grand strategy to which Trump’s basic impulses bear a strong resemblance. In his Farewell Address of 1796, President George Washington called for “as little political connection as possible” with foreign nations, declaring, “It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.” Isolationism endured well into the twentieth century, in no small part because its multiple ideological strains broadened its political appeal.

Isolationism offered something for everyone, enabling it to long have a lock on U.S. politics. For realists, isolationism properly reflected and reinforced geographic insulation and strategic detachment. For idealists and progressives, isolationism meant escaping realpolitik and enabling investment in the country’s economic well-being rather than in instruments of war. Conservative nationalists looked to isolationism to defend sovereignty and strengthen the unilateral exercise of U.S. power. Libertarians saw the strategy as a means of securing small government and domestic freedom. For anti-immigrant groups, isolationism meant preserving social homogeneity by keeping the nonwhite world at bay. Industrialists saw isolationism as an extension of protectionism—keeping imports, rather than migrants, at bay.

Fearful that the expansionist ambitions of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan would entangle the United States in great-power rivalry, the isolationist camp in September 1940 founded the America First Committee, which did its best to keep the nation far away from World War II. But the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, in 1941, shattered the isolationist consensus. The United States’ entry into World War II marked a historical inflection point, clearing the way for the nation’s embrace of an expansive internationalism. Soon thereafter, the onset of the Cold War accelerated the country’s appetite for global engagement. By the early 1950s, it was liberal internationalism, not isolationism, that had captured U.S. politics. The projection of American power and the creation and defense of an open, multilateral order among like-minded democracies had come to pay dividends across the political spectrum. The result was a centrist and bipartisan compact behind liberal internationalism. That compact long served as the political foundation of Pax Americana.

If the Democrats are to defeat Trump and his neo-isolationist agenda, they should cull central elements of his “America first” program.

Today, however, that internationalist consensus has shattered—just as the isolationist consensus did in 1941. Washington’s purposes abroad are no longer in equilibrium with its domestic means. Deindustrialization and the hollowing out of the middle class, decades of strategic overreach and hyperglobalization, and the influx of immigrants and rapid shifts in the country’s demographic makeup are combining to bring back into political vogue the multiple ideological strains of isolationism that previously shaped U.S. grand strategy.

Enter Trump. “The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer,” he pledged in his inaugural address, in 2017. “From this moment on, it’s going to be America first. Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs, will be made to benefit American workers and American families.” Rather than resisting the public’s call for an inward turn, Trump amplified it, promising to free the U.S. government from its foreign burdens and focus its attention and resources on the home front. That promise won the support of many millions of Americans that felt—and still feel—left behind by liberal internationalism. Trump fell far short of his pledge to get working Americans back on their feet—an electoral liability but also one of the reasons that his politics of grievance and neo-isolationist impulses still have considerable public appeal.

The country is now in the midst of a tug of war over its role in the world. If the Democrats want to defeat the new “America first” movement, they need to better understand it, and then steal Trump’s thunder by borrowing its most appealing components.

NON-ENTANGLEMENT, THEN AND NOW

After the errant attempt of the original America First movement to keep the United States out of World War II, “isolationism” became a dirty word. Ever since, internationalists have deployed the term to tar and feather the likes of the conservative commentator Patrick Buchanan, the former Republican member of Congress Ron Paul, and now Trump, charging that they are naively deluded about the desirability and viability of strategic detachment. Internationalists contend that even if isolationism may have made sense in an earlier era, when expansive oceans to the east and west afforded the United States natural security, today’s world provides no such luxury. Due to numerous developments—including ballistic missiles, economic interdependence, the connectedness of cyberspace, and climate change—strategic detachment and going it alone are no longer viable options.

This critique of isolationism is valid; the United States can never again enjoy the natural security that it once did. But the original conception of isolationism rested on the advantages not just of geographic separation but also of non-entanglement. Were Donald Trump to fail to honor NATO’s commitment to collective defense, he would have a solid precedent. In 1793, George Washington unilaterally reneged on the alliance that the United States had concluded with France in 1778 to secure French help during the Revolutionary War. The main reason for this act of “ignominious perfidy,” as the Virginia representative James Madison called the move, was that Washington deemed it to be contrary to the national interest for the country to be dragged into another war with the United Kingdom.

The United States did not conclude another military alliance for more than 150 years, when it did so through the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance and NATO after World War II. This preference for non-entanglement was also the principal source of opposition to the commitment to collective security contained in the League of Nations covenant. Senator William Borah, an Idaho Republican and a leading opponent of ratifying the treaty that created the league, argued that U.S. membership would mean that “we have forfeited and surrendered, once and for all, the great policy of ‘no entangling alliances’ upon which the strength of this Republic has been founded.”

Trump’s skepticism toward nation building and the promotion of democracy abroad resonates with the isolationist posture of early America.

In similar fashion, Trump’s brand of isolationism is motivated more by unilateralism than by a search for strategic detachment. “I am skeptical of international unions that tie us up and bring America down,” Trump has declared, insisting that “we will never enter America into any agreement that reduces our ability to control our own affairs.” He has informed the UN General Assembly that “we will never surrender America’s sovereignty to an unelected, unaccountable global bureaucracy.” For Trump, alliances qualify as “unions that tie us up,” especially when allies do not shoulder their fair share of the defense burden.

Trump’s stiff-necked unilateralism is self-defeating, alienating the allies that the United States needs in order to defend common interests and secure collective action. But his cautionary stance toward entanglement does help inoculate the United States against chronic overreach. Trump initiated the process of ending Washington’s disastrous war in Afghanistan. He has reportedly questioned the wisdom of granting Ukraine membership in NATO—with good reason. NATO’s declaration of an “irreversible” commitment to Ukraine’s membership, which would obligate NATO to defend the country if attacked, is fundamentally at odds with the alliance’s current unwillingness to go to war in Ukraine’s defense. JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, is wrong to oppose further U.S. aid to Ukraine, but he is right on some things. “The Biden administration has no viable plan for the Ukrainians to win this war,” he correctly noted in an essay for The New York Times in April. “The sooner Americans confront this truth, the sooner we can fix this mess and broker for peace.”

The American public deserves a sober and realistic debate about the nature and salience of the U.S. interests at stake in Ukraine. The American electorate also deserves to be told the truth: that Ukraine is highly unlikely to succeed in expelling Russian forces from its territory, even with the continuation of strong support from the West. Trump’s readiness to seek a negotiated settlement is not capitulation: it is pragmatism.

THE WORLD AS IT IS

Trump’s skepticism toward nation building and the promotion of democracy abroad also resonates with the isolationist posture of early America. To be sure, Americans from the founding era onward believed that they were embarking on a unique experiment in building republican government, an experiment that they were ultimately destined to share with the rest of the world. Yet the founders and their successors were appropriately doubtful of the United States’ ability to engineer political change abroad and therefore understood that they needed to spread democracy primarily by example. As then Secretary of State John Quincy Adams famously stated in 1821, the United States “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.”

So, too, did successive U.S. presidents appreciate the need to operate in the world as it is, working with democracies and nondemocracies alike in the pursuit of U.S. interests. Even as President James Monroe warned Europe’s great powers in 1823 against any “future colonization” in the Western Hemisphere, he acknowledged and accepted Europe’s political preferences. It was the policy of the United States, he asserted, “not to interfere in the internal concerns of any of its powers; to consider the government de facto as the legitimate government for us; to cultivate friendly relations with it.”

Trump took this ideological variant of isolationism too far during his presidency, exhibiting a fondness for autocrats such as Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jung Un while giving a cold shoulder to the leaders of allied democracies. But Trump’s approach to grand strategy does exhibit due caution to the promotion of democracy abroad. He correctly traced the United States’ overreach in the Middle East to the “dangerous idea that we could make Western democracies out of countries that had no experience or interests in becoming a Western democracy.” He told the UN General Assembly that “we do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone” and that “I honor the right of every nation in this room to pursue its own customs, beliefs, and traditions.” In an interdependent and globalized world, Trump’s pragmatic readiness to work across ideological dividing lines may produce better results than positing the twenty-first century as “a battle between democracy and autocracy,” as President Joe Biden has done.

The United States’ early embrace of isolationism also emerged from the firm belief of the founders that ambition abroad would come at the expense of freedom and prosperity at home. Entanglement in great-power rivalries would require a large federal government and military establishment, which would in turn threaten tyranny at home and divert resources that would be better spent on productive domestic investment.

When it comes to the defense of liberty at home, Trump unquestionably breaks with American traditions, having attempted to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election and expressed interest in imposing exactly the kind of tyranny that the founders feared. Yet Trump’s attacks against what he deems the “deep state” resonate with libertarian skepticism of the federal government. And even though he supports the sizable military establishment that the founders opposed, Trump has effectively portrayed nation building and foreign aid as a wasteful distraction, arguing that Washington should be spending taxpayer money solving problems at home rather than abroad. Many Americans agree.

BORDERS AND BARRIERS

On immigration, Trump’s program is in line with the anti-immigrant sentiment that accompanied the nation’s long embrace of isolationism. In the nineteenth century, U.S. expansion into the Caribbean and Latin America was blocked by widespread public and elite opposition to bringing more Black, Hispanic, and Catholic people into the U.S. body politic. The United States did annex over half of Mexico at the end of the Mexican-American War (1846–48), but the U.S. government wanted not Mexico’s people but its land, which was soon settled by whites. The intensification of isolationism during the interwar era coincided with a surge in anti-immigrant fervor. In 1924, Congress passed legislation that reduced the number of Jews and Catholics coming into the country by 90 percent and barred immigration from Asia entirely. During the 1930s, the United States deported about a million immigrants from Mexico, many of whom were U.S. citizens.

Trump’s brand of neo-isolationism is tinged by a similar embrace of anti-immigrant sentiment. As president, he cut back on immigrant quotas, made insulting references to minorities, and strove to build a wall on the border with Mexico. Trump is now campaigning on an anti-immigrant platform, pledging to deport millions of undocumented migrants, who, he insists, are “poisoning the blood of our country.” Many Americans see immigration as the top challenge facing the country, which is why most Democrats also see an urgent need to fix the system. Biden worked hard to secure a bipartisan overhaul of immigration policy, but Republicans, at Trump’s prompting, sank that effort earlier this year. Thereafter, Biden took the extraordinary step of issuing an executive order providing for temporary closure of the southern border when the seven-day average of daily illegal crossings exceeds 2,500.

Trump has also resuscitated the protectionism that long guided the nation’s economic statecraft. Even though the United States from its earliest days relied heavily on commerce with other nations, it sought fair rather than free trade and relied on tariffs for revenue and to protect domestic industries. The United States’ geopolitical retreat of the 1930s coincided with a sharp pullback on the trade front; the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 triggered the fragmentation of the global economy and the collapse of international trade.

During his presidency, Trump relied heavily on the protectionist component of the isolationist playbook. He renegotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement, ended efforts to conclude the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, and announced a wide range of tariffs. Trump has pledged to impose a raft of new tariffs if reelected, including 60 percent on all Chinese goods and ten percent on products from the rest of the world. Trump has even floated the idea of turning back time to the nineteenth century by eliminating the personal income tax and relying on tariffs for all federal revenue. (A federal income tax was introduced temporarily during the Civil War but not regularized until the twentieth century.) Once again, Trump is responding to demand signals from the electorate, seeking to appeal to the many Americans who have suffered economic dislocation as a result of automation and free trade. It is no surprise that Biden has not only continued to rely on tariffs (particularly on Chinese goods) to promote manufacturing and has also turned to industrial policy to create jobs, advance economic security, and fight climate change.

PREEMPTING “AMERICA FIRST”

Trump’s brand of U.S. statecraft has deep roots in the American experience and, like the original version of isolationism, has something for almost everyone, giving it broad appeal across the American electorate. Democrats dismiss his “America first” agenda as strategic delusion at their own peril. Instead, they should preempt it by embracing its best elements.

Democrats need to find the middle ground between an expansive liberal internationalism that is no longer sustainable at home or abroad and the dangerous isolationist excesses that would likely accompany Trump’s return to the presidency. That middle ground entails standing by Biden’s multilateralism and his investment in old alliances and new partnerships, moves that have resuscitated U.S.-led collective action and restored the nation’s image as a team player. At the same time, the United States must avoid the bouts of strategic overreach, such as in Afghanistan and Iraq, that encourage the electorate to gravitate toward isolationist alternatives.

In Ukraine, that middle ground requires working to broker a cease-fire and focusing on ensuring that the 80 percent of the country still under Kyiv’s control is secure, prosperous, and stable. With Ukraine up against relentless aggression from a much larger neighbor, that outcome would qualify as a success by any reasonable measure. In the Middle East, Washington should seek to end the violence in Gaza and then lay out a pathway to Palestinian self-determination and normalization of Israel’s relationships with its neighbors. The United States should stand up to Chinese ambition, but also avoid unnecessary provocations that could lead to an irreversible geopolitical rupture. Washington should work intently to cooperate with Beijing to tame rivalry and advance joint efforts to tackle global challenges.

The United States cannot afford to run away from the world, as it did during the long era of isolationism. But it can no longer seek to run the world, which it has neither the power nor the domestic consensus to do. Instead, Americans need to learn to live in a world of ideological diversity and multiple conceptions of order, working alongside other centers of power, democracies and nondemocracies alike. Pragmatic realism should guide U.S. statecraft.

Democrats need to find the middle ground between expansive liberal internationalism and dangerous isolationist excesses.

The Democrats must also focus on fixing a broken immigration system. The uncontrolled influx of migrants across the nation’s southern border will further polarize U.S. society and strengthen right-wing forces calling for the United States to pull up the drawbridge; as in the past, anti-immigrant and isolationist sentiment go hand in hand. Democrats need to preempt Trump’s anti-immigrant excesses, including mass deportations, by setting out credible plans for securing the border, creating an orderly system to process legal immigration, and laying out a pathway to resolving the status of millions of undocumented migrants.

Democrats must also prioritize getting working Americans back on their feet. Rebuilding the middle class is the starting point for rebuilding the political center, which is necessary to restore the political foundation of a purposeful and steady brand of internationalism. Tariffs need to be part of that effort, but only a small part. The 60 percent tariff on Chinese goods envisaged by Trump would hit American consumers hard and risk fragmenting the global economy, just as the Smoot-Hawley Act did. Moreover, even though protectionism and industrial policy will bring back some manufacturing jobs, this approach will not redress the problems facing the nation’s deindustrialized heartland.

Rebuilding the middle class requires generating well-paying jobs in the service sector, where most Americans work. This challenge will necessitate place-based investment, workforce development and training, and the fashioning of an education and employment ecosystem that prepares Americans for the jobs of the digital era. Democrats should also showcase plans for containing the cost of housing, food, fuel, childcare, and higher education.

This course correction would simultaneously achieve two urgent objectives. It would help defeat Trump and avert the dangers of his reelection by appropriating key elements of his electoral appeal. It would also help shore up the domestic foundations of U.S. internationalism, thereby steadying U.S. leadership in a world sorely in need of American power and purpose.