The Illusion of Isolationism |
Citing his contempt for allies and his hostile attitude toward immigration, analysts and commentators often paint U.S. President Donald Trump’s leadership style as a throwback to the isolationist ways of the nineteenth-century United States. This argument is half right. The essence and emphasis of Trump’s national security policy does hark back to a number of early U.S. presidents, including James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, James Polk, William McKinley, and, at the turn of the twentieth century, Theodore Roosevelt. But none of those presidents were isolationist, and neither is Trump. The similarities, to the extent they exist, are of a different type, and they have more to do with maximizing American power than minimizing the U.S. role in the world.
Understanding Trump in historical perspective may at least provide modest solace for those who see his foreign policy as radical and unprecedented. Doing so should also remind Americans that they have always been highly audacious on the global stage. That can be a good thing, when the United States is resolute in defense of interests and allies. It can also, however, get the country into trouble—as it has in the past—if Americans forget their proclivity for muscular action and delude themselves into thinking they are somehow an inherently peaceful people.
The United States has poked its nose into international affairs since its earliest days, waging a quasi war with France and its sponsored pirates in the Caribbean from 1798 to 1800 and facing Barbary pirates in the Mediterranean from 1801 to 1815. It spent the nineteenth century expanding its territorial borders while also becoming increasingly active in the Pacific Ocean and Asia. After a few land wars and a more serious buildup of its navy, by the turn of the twentieth century the United States was consciously entering the club of great powers, sizing its naval buildups by reference to other powers’ capabilities. Washington did try to stay out of European wars, but it was still dragged into World War I in 1917. The only time the United States can be said to have truly attempted a form of isolationism was in the 1920s and 1930s, when it dismantled most of its military capabilities and disengaged from global affairs. But even though U.S. grand strategy may have tended toward isolationism in that period, U.S. defense strategy still progressed, with new concepts and technologies developed for carrier warfare, aerial combat, and amphibious assaults. As the United States got wrapped up in World War II, those advances proved crucial. Once the war ended and the Iron Curtain began to descend, proponents of American isolationism became and remained rare.
Like almost all of his predecessors, Trump has revealed himself to be a highly assertive internationalist rather than an isolationist. Since taking office in January 2025, he has claimed to have resolved eight global conflicts; engaged in persistent efforts to end the war in Ukraine; recommitted to NATO at the alliance’s 2025 summit; conducted a brief but significant bombing of Iranian nuclear sites; advanced a modest but real buildup of the U.S. military; and, most recently, captured Venezuela’s president and taken a regrettably lethal approach toward suspected drug smugglers in and around Venezuelan waters. Increasing American power is thus the centerpiece of his national security policy, paralleling nineteenth-century expansionist ideals and early-twentieth-century naval and industrial ambitions.
Fortifying American power is not in itself a bad thing. But it is not enough to succeed in building a peaceful world or to protect the United States in today’s world. And the mere fact that Trump’s national security policies........