A Brief History of Isolationism

And why Donald Trump is not an isolationist

Isolationism is back.

If you read the newspapers — notably The New York Times — you have noticed that musty old word popping up here and there. There’s seldom much explanation. But quite a few such references state flatly that Donald Trump and his Republican Party are “isolationist.”

So this essay is a short history of American isolationism. I will also argue that calling Trump and company “isolationist” is misleading. To be sure, there are strong strains of isolationism in the “America First” Republican Party. But the Trumpian worldview also deviates from isolationism in important and dangerous ways.

Dwight Eisenhower taking the presidential oath of office, January, 20, 1953.

Let me start at a happy moment: the day isolationism died.

Following the end of the Second World War, and the beginning of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, the United States, Canada, and a handful of European countries created a defensive military alliance called the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO.) That was in 1950. All NATO members were required to come to the aid of any member attacked by a foreign power. This sort of permanent peacetime alliance was something quite new in American history and there had been considerable opposition to joining. But Dwight Eisenhower, the famed commander of Allied forces in the Second World War, had personally campaigned for NATO and persuaded Congress to back it. Eisenhower became its first Supreme Commander, giving the new organization instant credibility.

That wasn’t enough to kill isolationism, however. What Eisenhower did next was.

Eisenhower had been pressed by both the Democratic and Republican parties to run for president in 1948. He had refused. But in 1951, it was increasingly clear that whoever won the Republican nomination was likely to win the presidency in 1952. And the leading candidate for the Republican nomination was Senator Robert Taft, a prominent isolationist who wanted the United States to return to its traditional policy of avoiding foreign alliances. Eisenhower thought this was a horrible mistake and he was convinced that he was the only man who could stop it. So he ran for the Republican nomination, won, then triumphed in the general election.

On January, 20, 1953, Dwight Eisenhower became president. That was the day isolationism died.

In all the decades that followed, American presidents, Republican and Democratic, hewed to the model Eisenhower helped create. They believed, to a man, that the United States not only benefited from a system of collective security alliances that effectively made the President of the United States “leader of the free world,” but that this approach was essential to maintaining peace in an increasingly interconnected world. And maintaining peace was essential to American prosperity.

I like Ike.

But in 2016, Donald Trump rode down that famous golden escalator. And isolationism rose from the grave.

Not that the international order changed much during Trump’s first four years. Trump’s Cabinet was full of people who found his isolationist instincts — Trump has impulses, not doctrines — bewildering and bizarre. And the entire foreign policy infrastructure of the United States treats isolationism the same way a human body treats an invading virus. It would take a revolution to change the fundamental orientation of American foreign policy, and Trump had neither the political capital nor the discipline for that.

But Trump’s original Cabinet of competent, accomplished people didn’t last long. It was replaced by mediocrities, sycophants, and toadies, and it’s a safe bet that if Trump is returned to power he will start with a Cabinet full of mediocrities, sycophants and toadies. The other major change has been the final transformation of the Republican Party — the party of Lincoln, they used to call it — into the party of Trump. That means Trump’s impulses are now the party’s impulses, and we can see the effects of this change already: In just the past two years, Congressional Republicans went from immediate and overwhelming support for Ukraine in its struggle to fend off Russian invasion to blocking aid to Ukraine — a policy likely to end in Russian victory.

Hence the return of the word “isolationist” to newspapers. And the need for some deep background.

And “deep” in this case means going back much further than the Second World War.

In the last address George Washington gave as president, he stated “it is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliance with any portion of the foreign world." In 1796, that was only stating settled policy. Avoiding “foreign entanglements” was the conventional view among the political elite in the new United States. And it remained the conventional view for almost a century and a half.

The foundation of that policy was geography. On one side of the United States was the Atlantic Ocean. On the other, the Pacific Ocean. Behind those mighty walls, went the thinking, America was safe. “Stay home and mind our own business” was America’s motto.

A corollary of this thinking was that the United States didn’t need a large peacetime military. In fact, Americans were proud that their military was tiny compared to those of the great European powers. Should war come, an army of citizen-soldiers could be mustered for the duration of the emergency, but it was both unnecessary and unprincipled to maintain a large force in peacetime. Tyrants have large standing armies, went the traditional American view. A nation of free men does not.

Of course, the US was willing to project military force beyond the oceans if it was threatened. Thus in 1801, the Marines sailed for “the shores of Tripoli” — as it is forever enshrined in The Marines’ Hymn — to defeat pirates attacking American shipping. (Fun fact: In the First Barbary War, Sweden became an independent America’s first ally in war. Yes, Sweden.) But generally, isolationism meant staying home. As the name suggests.

It wasn’t only the United States behind America’s oceanic walls, however, and the rest of North and South America wasn’t generally considered “the foreign world.” In the traditional American view, the United States had an interest in the lands of the Americas outside the United States, not least because it was widely expected that much of that land would, in due time, be joined to the United States. Hence the famous “Monroe Doctrine” declared the United States would oppose any foreign power meddling in the Americas. If there was meddling to do in the Americas, the United States would do it.

And it did. The 1812 invasion of Canada would have led to British North America being annexed if it hadn’t been repulsed. The 1846 invasion of Mexico brought all the land from Texas to California into the United States. There were many schemes to annex Cuba outright. And a litany of incursions in the 19th- and early 20th-centuries ensured the advancement of American interests in Central America, the Caribbean, and South America.

Isolationists were mostly fine with all of this. The “isolation” sought by “isolationists” was always from the world on the other side of the oceans.

The first cracks in this way of thinking came with the Spanish-American War of 1898. When Cuba revolted against Spanish rule, the United States intervened, seizing Cuba and Puerto Rico. And on the other side of the Pacific, the US Navy sailed into Manilla and took the Philippines from Spain. This was new.

The end of the 19th century was the high-water mark of European imperialism and “white man’s burden” thinking. American imperialists like Theodore Roosevelt urged annexation and the creation of an American overseas empire. That view was hotly contested but the imperialists got their way and the Philippines became, effectively, an American colony (after Americans soldiers fought a brutal war against the Filipino rebels they had “liberated” from Spain.)

The First World War was a much bigger challenge to traditional American isolationism.

By 1914, new technologies like steam power and the telegraph, along with an enormous growth in global trade and migration — what a later era would call globalization — had connected the world like never before. And the United States was in the thick of that entanglement because its economy had become the world’s largest. When the European great powers went to war with each other, the American instinct was to stay out, and the United States did remain neutral. But as the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915 vividly demonstrated to Americans, remaining aloof from foreign wars was much harder in the interconnected 20th century.

In 1917, the United States finally declared war on Germany, expanded its military massively, and sent millions of soldiers to Europe for the first time. President Woodrow Wilson — a Princeton historian and political scientist — enunciated a high-minded set of principles, including an anti-imperial notion of national self-determination, that he said America was defending. When the war ended, the United States was a major player at the negotiating table for the first time in its history. Wilson used this leverage to back a proposal for a League of Nations — a forum in which the nations of the world would work together to settle disputes without resort to war.

Wilson turned out to be a better theorist than a politician. In 1920, after a long, bruising debate, Congress refused to join the League, which, without American leadership, became a hapless sideshow unable to stop the slide into the next world war. The one lasting effect of Wilson’s failed effort to get the United States to take a seat at the world’s table was the popularization of the word “isolationism,” in opposition to Wilson’s “internationalism.” It would get a lot of use as the Second World War approached.

Wilson’s failure was compounded in the presidential election of 1920, when his chosen Democratic successor was defeated by Republican Warren G. Harding, who promised a “return to normalcy.” In foreign policy terms, Harding’s normalcy meant a return to traditional American isolationism and a drastic reduction in the size of the American military. Which is what three successive Republican presidents delivered in the 1920s.

It also brought a dramatic revision of how Americans saw their involvement in the Great War. Despite having overwhelmingly and passionately supported American intervention after 1917, popular opinion swung hard the other way and by the 1930s most Americans were convinced that American involvement in the war had been a terrible mistake that should never be repeated.

By an unfortunate coincidence, just as Americans were once again confident they should not send their military across the oceans, fascist aggression started to spread, sparking conflicts in Asia, Africa, and Europe. Once again forced to grapple with the question of whether the world’s leading economic power also had to be a major player in international relations, and help prevent war, the Republican Party overwhelmingly stuck with isolationism. So did the American public.

Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt saw the danger and wanted to be more involved, particularly after Nazi Germany invaded Poland and Britain and France declared war. But his options were limited. America was firmly isolationist. And a wide array of powerful voices — Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, lots of Republicans — organized to ensure it stayed that way. They formed the “America First Committee,” which became the leading voice of isolationism.

An aside: As historian Sarah Churchwell showed in her fascinating book Behold America, the slogan “America First” had a long and evolving history dating back all the way to Wilson and the First World War. But its use by those opposed to fighting Nazi Germany — some of whom were open anti-Semites sympathetic to Hitler — made it infamous for those who remembered the debates prior to America’s entry into the Second World War. But they’re gone now. When Donald Trump adopted the “America First” slogan, historically literate Americans were agog. But historically literate Americans could hold a convention in a circus tent, so… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

When Nazi Germany swept through Western Europe in the spring of 1940, American sentiment finally started to shift. Roosevelt was able to greatly expand American aid for Britain. He also launched a massive expansion of the tiny American military. (In the late 1930s, the U.S. Army was the 14th-largest in the world, behind Portugal’s.)

Finally, on December 7, 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and Adolf Hitler made the historic mistake of declaring war on the United States. Despite the best efforts of isolationists, America was fully in the war.

After the final defeat of the Axis powers, American dominance of the international scene was overwhelming. The American military was massive and technologically sophisticated in a way it never had been before. And the American economy — the only major economy unscathed by the war — had become a colossus. With this unprecedented power, the United States loomed over a world that needed to be rebuilt. And secured: The Soviet Union, too, was now a military giant and the Soviets were busily installing puppet governments in the Eastern European countries they had “liberated.” With Europe reduced to rubble, and the Soviets committed to worldwide revolution, the threat was blatant.

Much of the public and the American leadership looked back over the previous thirty years of war and destruction and drew a lesson: In the modern world of international radio, continent-crossing airplanes, and atom bombs, the United States could not simply withdraw from foreign affairs and expect to enjoy peace and prosperity. America had to lead.

In 1947, President Harry Truman announced the United States would support democracies against authoritarian threats. That same year, the term “Cold War” was popularized to describe the growing frostiness between the West and the Soviet Union. In 1948, the United States announced the “Marshall Plan,” which would see American dollars clear the rubble of Europe and start the long reconstruction.

That is how we got to Eisenhower becoming the first Supreme Commander of NATO, then the Republican nominee in 1952, and the President of the United States in 1953.

That is how we got to the international order that delivered the unprecedented peace and prosperity in the decades following the Second World War.

That is how we got to isolationism dead, buried, and forgotten.

Until Donald John Trump dug it up.

But is Trump really an isolationist, as so many are now calling him and his party?

There are important elements of isolationism in his impulses. Trump infamously despises “shithole countries” and shows little interest in less-benighted foreign lands. He also has no apparent interest in defending and promoting American ideals of democracy and liberty abroad, as all his predecessors did, at least nominally, all the way back to Roosevelt. Nor does he show the slightest regard for the idea of America as a “shining city on a hill,” the phrase made famous by Ronald Reagan. Trump doesn’t do soft power. He probably thinks it sounds weak.

To the extent that Trump has shown concern for the rest of the planet, it is strictly transactional, with each quid pro quo judged by short-term self-interest. “What’s in it for me?” sums it up. If there is no immediate payoff, well, then, as J.D. Vance, the most Trumpian of senators, said with admirable candour and succinctness: “I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.” That’s pure isolationism. Vance spoke 93 years after the Japanese invasion of the Chinese province of Manchuria — the beginning of the long slide to the Second World War — but his words expressed the views of isolationists perfectly.

But notice what’s missing?

Isolationists always believed that the peacetime American military should be small. And it should stay home.

Trump inherited a mammoth, labyrinthine military built from the ground up to be a global force. The Pentagon divides the world into seven commands, each presided over by an American general, and it maintains more than 1,000 bases outside American territory. Annual American military spending is a little more than the military budgets of China, Russia, India, Saudi Arabia, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, and Ukraine combined.

The reason for this global extension of US military power is simple: It enforces the Pax Americana. If Somali pirates in the Red Sea seize a cargo ship owned by a German company and registered in Panama, the call for help doesn’t go to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Germany, or Panama. It goes to Washington. Americans understandably grumble about being the world’s police department. But the direct and indirect benefits to the United States of being the guarantor of world order are substantial — just as it was very much in Great Britain’s interest for the Royal Navy to enforce the Pax Britannica in the 19th century.

But for a true isolationist — an isolationist of the sort Calvin Coolidge would recognize — the modern American military posture is crazy, if not downright un-American. To an isolationist, America needs a military strong enough to protect America and American interests. And no more. “Mind our own business,” an isolationist would say, “and let others mind theirs.”

So what did Donald Trump do when he became president?

His supporters like to note that he didn’t start any wars, as if going a whole four years without starting a war is an accomplishment. But he did authorize plenty of military strikes around the world. And not reluctantly. His bragging about the destruction of ISIS continues to this day. And when Trump announced that the US had killed an Iranian general with an airstrike, he sounded as excited as Vince McMahon at Wrestlemania. This is a man who loves giving the order to blow shit up.

More tellingly, he did not reduce the geographic reach of the US military. If anything, he expanded it by creating the Space Force.

Nor did he cut the military budget. In fact, he substantially increased that budget.

All of this is antithetical to traditional American isolationism. So why do people call Trump an isolationist?

Almost entirely due to his naked hostility toward allies and alliances.

There are countless illustrations but the most recent is the most shocking.

From CNN:

Former President Donald Trump on Saturday said he would encourage Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to any NATO member country that doesn’t meet spending guidelines on defense in a stunning admission he would not abide by the collective-defense clause at the heart of the alliance if reelected.

“NATO was busted until I came along,” Trump said at a rally in Conway, South Carolina. “I said, ‘Everybody’s gonna pay.’ They said, ‘Well, if we don’t pay, are you still going to protect us?’ I said, ‘Absolutely not.’ They couldn’t believe the answer.”

Trump said “one of the presidents of a big country” at one point asked him whether the US would still defend the country if they were invaded by Russia even if they “don’t pay.”

“No, I would not protect you,” Trump recalled telling that president. “In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You got to pay. You got to pay your bills.”

Trump’s fans cheered. His professional rationalizers — the Republican establishment desperate to fend off the cognitive dissonance echoing in their heads — insisted he was only criticizing NATO’s free riders in order to get them to “pay their bills.” But Trump’s history with NATO made his feelings plain long before this. And what Trump said was so much more than “you got to pay your bills.”

To understand why, remember that the purpose of NATO is not to fight and win wars. It is to ensure wars don’t happen in the first place.

It does that with simple logic: When a potential aggressor considers a military attack, he asks himself if the target of his aggression will fight back. If the answer is yes, our potential aggressor — let’s call him Vlad — judges the strength of the target’s military and tries to determine how difficult and costly the war will be. And Vlad asks the same questions of other countries: How will they feel? Will they support the target? How?

It’s an exercise in judging risks and weighing costs and benefits. Only if Vlad concludes that the attack is worthwhile will his tanks roll across the border.

By requiring that all members of NATO go to war to defend any member under attack, NATO makes Vlad’s calculations dead easy: “If I attack a NATO member, it is absolutely guaranteed that all NATO countries will go to war with me. I would be massively outmanned and outgunned. The war would be disaster.”

So the war never happens.

But the only way this works is if all alliance members are unequivocal that an attack on any member will be treated as an attack on all. It has to be a certainty. If any doubt is allowed to creep in — if the certainty slips into a “maybe” — clarity is lost and the logic that prevents war is undermined: “If I send my tanks into Latvia,” thinks Vlad, “maybe the United States and other NATO countries would go to war. But maybe they wouldn’t. Or maybe some would and others wouldn’t. How would that play out?” Now Vlad is making complex calculations amidst fuzzy uncertainty. Which is exactly how Vlad decided to invade Ukraine.

Donald Trump’s comments didn’t simply embarrass NATO as an institution. They turned a certainty into a maybe, undermining the logic that is NATO’s very reason for being. In doing so, they increased the probability of war.

One of the wrinkles of this controversy is that Trump keeps referring to NATO members as not paying their bills, and news reports keep noting that NATO members do not, in fact, have bills to pay. NATO members have simply agreed that each member should spend at least two per cent of its GDP on its own national military. Most members now meet or exceed that target, or are on track to meet it. Only a small number of holdouts (including Canada, to this Canadian’s chagrin) have no plan to get to the target. Trump’s constant misrepresentation of how NATO is funded is treated like an odd little quirk, as if he’s got a mental block, or he’s just not interested in learning details.

I think that’s wrong. I think Trump’s constant references to making NATO allies “pay up” is a telling detail: It reflects how he sees the relationship between the United States and other countries, including allies.

His views are neither internationalist nor isolationist. They are Mafia.

As I noted recently, Trump’s thinking hasn’t evolved one bit since he expressed them in a full-page in three major newspapers. That was in 1987, when Ronald Reagan was president.

The world was “laughing at” America’s politicians, Trump claimed. But Trump knew what to do about it.

Make Japan, Saudi Arabia, and others pay for the protection we extend as allies. Let’s help our farmers, our sick, our homeless by taking from one of the greatest profit machines ever created — machines created and nurtured by us. “Tax” these wealthy nations, not America. End our huge deficits, reduce our taxes, and let America’s economy grow unencumbered the cost of defending those who can easily afford to pay us for the defense of their freedom. Let’s not let our great country be laughed at anymore.

A traditional American isolationist would have said, “why are we paying to secure shipping in the Persian Gulf so oil can flow to Japan? Let’s bring our ships home. And cut the Navy’s budget.” But not Trump. He wanted to squeeze Japan for cash.

Trump wasn’t describing an alliance. He was describing a protection racket. That’s why “pay up” is a telling detail: It’s what the thug says to the shopkeeper.

With that perspective in mind, Trump’s foreign policy — including his fetish for dictators and his weird attraction to nuclear weapons — starts to make sense.

It’s not internationalist in the sense that he wants to develop relationships with other countries, lead friends and allies, and advance American interests and ideals. Nor is it isolationist in the sense that he wants America to stay home and mind its own business.

Instead, Trump would throw out the US-led alliances that have been the bedrock of the international order for three-quarters of a century while maintaining, or even expanding, the military apparatus created to sustain that international order. The United States would no longer be the world’s policeman. But it would still have armed men on every street corner — to shakedown the locals and be the strong arm of the capo di tutti capi.

It’s an insult to isolationists to describe this as isolationism. A more accurate description would be “gangster isolationism.”

Or we could shave off a few syllables and give it an apt new name: “gangsterism.”