Please Stop Calling Trump "Isolationist"

What he's advancing is much worse than isolationism

A new essay by McKay Coppins in The Atlantic describes how European officials are treating another Trump presidency as a given. And the end of the world as we know it.

That much isn’t surprising. I think those officials are wrong about the likelihood of a Trump victory in November — I would still give a substantial edge to the incumbent — but a second Trump administration really would shatter the fundamentals of American leadership as the world has known it since the end of the Second World War. “Foreign counterparts would say it to me straight up,” recalls American foreign service officer Victoria Nuland in The Atlantic. “‘The first Trump election—maybe people didn’t understand who he was, or it was an accident. A second election of Trump? We’ll never trust you again.’”

Like I said, not surprising. Apocalyptic, but not surprising.

What did shock me — I stopped reading and gazed in amazement — was something the author wrote.

Whether Trump wins or not, there’s a growing consensus in Europe that the strain of American politics he represents—a throwback to the hard-edged isolationism of the 1920s and ’30s—isn’t going away. It’s become common in the past year for politicians to talk about the need for European “defense autonomy.”

See that? “A throwback to the hard-edged isolationism of the 1920s and ‘30s.”

Coppins doesn’t go on to qualify that. Apparently, he thinks it is a simple fact. Presumably, so do all the editors who read those words and didn’t raise an eyebrow.

Which is astonishing. Because it is wrong in a highly consequential way.

President Calvin Coolidge with one of the tiny number of US military service members in the 1928. (Lieutenant Christian Schilt was awarded the Medal of Honor for flying supplies to Marines besieged in Nicaragua. “Isolationism” never applied to the Americas.)

Regular readers will know I’ve written a few times about isolationism, including this brief survey of the isolationist tradition in American foreign policy. And regular readers will know why I concluded that it’s deeply misleading to call Trump & Co. “isolationist.” It’s true they have little regard for the multilateralism practiced by every American president since the Second World War, or for the architecture of internationalism that the United States created and still dominates, or for the “Pax Americana” and the American role as its guarantor. In that sense, they’re “isolationist.”

But that omits one of the biggest dimensions of traditional American isolationism — a dimension which reached its apogee in “the hard-edged isolationism of the 1920s and ‘30s.”

Isolationists hated overseas militarism.

In the event of war, they believed, the military could be rapidly expanded. When peace returned, the military must shrink down to a tiny core. Large standing militaries are expensive and unnecessary. Worse, they are hallmark of tyrants, who use their armies to suppress their own people and threaten others. In the American isolationist tradition, large standing military forces are antithetical to a free and democratic nation.

The “hard-edge isolationism of the 1920s and ‘30s” was the perfect expression of this view: After fielding a massive force in the First World War, the United States walked away from the Treaty of Versailles and rejected an international leadership role in the election of 1920. And it radically cut its massive wartime military.

From American Military History, written and published by the US Army:

In the first full month of demobilization the Army released about 650,000 officers and men, and within nine months it demobilized nearly 3,250,000 without seriously disturbing the American economy. A demobilization of war industry and disposal of surplus materiel paralleled the release of men, but the War Department kept a large reserve of weapons for peacetime or new emergency use. Despite the lack of much advance planning demobilization worked reasonably well. The Army was concerned at the outset because it had no authority to enlist men to replace those discharged. A law of February 28, 1919, permitted enlistments in the Regular Army for either one or three years; and by the end of the year the active Army, reduced to a strength of about 19,000 officers and 205,000 enlisted men, was again a Regular volunteer force.

But that was just the beginning of the cuts.

When the National Defense Act was adopted in June 1920, the Regular Army numbered about 200,000 about two-thirds the maximum strength authorized in the act. In January 1921 Congress directed a reduction in enlisted strength to 175,000, and in June 1921 to 150,000, as soon as possible. A year later Congress limited the active Army to 12,000 commissioned officers and 125,000 enlisted men, not including the 7,000 or so in the Philippine Scouts, and Regular Army strength was stabilized at about this level until 1936.

By the late 1930s, the US military was a shadow of what it had been. The US Army was smaller than Portugal’s. And the military was as poorly equipped as it was small in numbers.

For almost two decades ground units had to get along as best they could with weapons left over from World War I. The Army was well aware that these old weapons were becoming increasingly obsolete, and that new ones were needed. For example, General MacArthur in 1933 described the Army's tanks (except for a dozen experimental models) as completely useless for employment against any modern unit on the battlefield.

American forces overseas shrank almost to nothing.

Abroad, a newly activated United States Third Army moved into Germany on December 1, 1918, to occupy a segment of territory between Luxembourg and the Rhine River around Coblenz. As many as nine divisions participated in the German occupation during the spring of 1919. Similarly, an Army regiment sent to Italy before the end of hostilities participated for four months in the occupation of Austria. In Germany, American troops had no unusual difficulties with the populace, and soon after the peace conference ended in May 1919 the occupation forces were rapidly reduced. They numbered about 15,000 at the beginning of 1920. After rejecting the Treaty of Versailles, the United States remained technically at war with Germany until the summer of 1921, when a separate peace was signed. Thereafter, the occupying force was gradually withdrawn, and the last thousand troops left for home on January 24, 1923.

Revolutionary turmoil in Soviet Russia induced President Wilson in August 1918 to direct Army participation in expeditions of United States and Allied forces that penetrated the Murmansk-Archangel region of European Russia and into Siberia via Vladivostock. The north Russian force, containing about 5,000 American troops under British command, suffered heavy casualties while guarding war supplies and communication lines before being withdrawn in June 1919. The Siberian force of about 10,000 under Maj. Gen. William S. Graves had many trying experiences in attempting to rescue Czech troops and in curbing Japanese expansionist tendencies between August 1918 and April 1920. Together these two forces incurred about as many combat casualties as the Army expeditionary force of similar size had sustained in Cuba in 1898. After the withdrawals from Germany and Russia, the only Army forces stationed on foreign soil until 1941 were the garrison of about 1,000 maintained at Tientsin, China, from 1912 until 1938, and a force of similar strength dispatched from the Philippines to Shanghai for five months' duty in 1932. The Marine Corps rather than the Army provided the other small foreign garrisons and expeditionary forces required after World War I, particularly in the Caribbean area.

Oceans played a big role in isolationist thinking. America is protected on either side by the Atlantic and Pacific. Manning these natural defences, isolationists argued, should be America’s priority. That meant favouring the Navy over the Army.

So as the Harding administration rejected internationalism and international leadership, and returned the United States to traditional isolationism, what did it do about naval forces?

It called an international conference — the world’s first disarmament conference.

The Washington Naval Conference of 1922 brought together the leading military powers of the day to see if they could agree on a formula for the size of navies. Officials knew that Germany’s push to rapidly increase its naval power had sparked an arms race that contributed to the outbreak of the First World War. They knew that the American, Japanese, and British navies were balanced precariously and any move by one country could spark another arms race. So American officials sought to stop that race before it began.

And they did. The Washington Conference got an agreement to cap naval forces at relatively low levels and that held well into the 1930s. It was a brilliant success.

Now: Does any of that sound remotely like Donald Trump and today’s Republican Party?

When he became president in 2017, Donald Trump took charge of an American military that is truly a global institution. The Pentagon divides the whole world into commands overseen by generals whose power is not unlike that of Roman proconsuls in distant provinces. It has major forces on all continents and is capable of projecting force literally anywhere on the planet in a matter of minutes. Its budget is bigger than that of the next eight militaries — combined.

Why is the US military permanently enormous? To enforce the Pax Americana. It is the armed force of an international order led by the United States.

Donald Trump and his Republican Party loathe most things international. Their attitude toward allies is coldly transactional, at best. They show little or no desire to promote American values abroad — to be the “shining city on the hill,” as Reagan put it. “I gotta be honest with you,” said Senator J.D. Vance, who is a strong contender to be Trump’s VP pick “I don't really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.”

All that is indeed hardcore isolationism.

But after taking office, what did Trump do with the gargantuan American military which is the physical expression of American multilateralism and international leadership and whose very existence is offensive to traditional American isolationism?

He substantially increased its budget. And he didn’t curtail its vast scope in the least. In fact, he created a new branch of the military, the Space Force.

Harding, Coolidge, and all the other Republican isolationists of a century ago would have been astonished. And horrified.

Yet even top journalists writing in leading publications think Trump & Co. are a throwback to “the hard-edged isolationism of the 1920s and ‘30s.” How is that possible?

I suspect it’s because Americans have grown so used to having a permanently colossal military that the long American tradition of shrinking the military in peacetime has been entirely forgotten.

As a result, people misunderstand what is brewing in Trump’s brain and within the Republican Party.

It is not “the hard-edged isolationism of the 1920s and ‘30s.”

It is much worse than that.

As I wrote earlier:

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.”