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It’s dangerously naive to view former U.S. President Donald Trump as simply another “isolationist” whose foreign policy echoes nothing darker than Americans’ historical urges to pull back from the world.
Charles Kupchan offered such reassurances in a recent essay titled “The Deep Roots of Trump’s Isolationism.” He argued that Trump’s unilateralism strongly resembles the United States’ isolationist grand strategy first articulated in President George Washington’s 1796 farewell address, which set out a “policy to steer clear of permanent alliances” that more or less lasted until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Even as he acknowledged that “Trump’s return to office could be disastrous,” Kupchan framed Trump as a modern isolationist similar to conservative commentator Patrick Buchanan and former Republican lawmaker Ron Paul. Kupchan tried to theorize “Trump’s approach to grand strategy” by heavily quoting words Trump read off teleprompters at the United Nations General Assembly, his inaugural address, and during other prepared speeches.
It’s dangerously naive to view former U.S. President Donald Trump as simply another “isolationist” whose foreign policy echoes nothing darker than Americans’ historical urges to pull back from the world.
Charles Kupchan offered such reassurances in a recent essay titled “The Deep Roots of Trump’s Isolationism.” He argued that Trump’s unilateralism strongly resembles the United States’ isolationist grand strategy first articulated in President George Washington’s 1796 farewell address, which set out a “policy to steer clear of permanent alliances” that more or less lasted until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Even as he acknowledged that “Trump’s return to office could be disastrous,” Kupchan framed Trump as a modern isolationist similar to conservative commentator Patrick Buchanan and former Republican lawmaker Ron Paul. Kupchan tried to theorize “Trump’s approach to grand strategy” by heavily quoting words Trump read off teleprompters at the United Nations General Assembly, his inaugural address, and during other prepared speeches.
If the better way to get into Trump’s head is not speeches written by his advisors but rather his own extemporaneous words and unvetted actions, a darker portrait emerges: a would-be autocratic strongman who looks to realign U.S. foreign policy away from democratic allies and toward the dictators whom he clearly admires—and whose ranks he yearns to join. Quite the opposite of isolationism, Trump’s instincts betray a perverse form of internationalism: eagerly picking and choosing the other side in the ongoing global struggle between democracy and autocracy.
When Trump sat down in the comfort of Mar-a-Lago with journalists Peter Baker and Susan Glasser to look back on his presidency, he only expressed one regret: failing to push through tougher policies against the United States’ allies. He wished he had imposed tariffs on German cars and a $5 billion bill on South Korea—turning U.S. troops stationed there into a protection racket. Trump promised to pursue these preoccupations through more pliant yes-men in a second term. Multiple former advisors to Trump have warned that he would pull the United States out of NATO, as he came close to doing in 2018.
The only formally written presidential order that then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper ever received was Trump’s June 2020 directive to withdraw 9,500 of the 34,500 U.S. troops permanently stationed in Germany by September. The order had not gone through any policy-vetting process and was triggered by Trump’s outrage over German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s refusal to flout European Union COVID-19 rules and travel to Washington, D.C, for a face-to-face G7 summit; Trump had hoped the meeting would help his reelection bid by showing that the pandemic was nothing to worry about. Beyond the COVID issue, Merkel was uninterested in yet another summit at which Trump berates the allies and blows up the communiqué.
Trump also tried to invite Russian President Vladimir Putin to the G7 summit, which was a nonstarter for Britain and Canada. This was around the time when Trump secretly sent Putin scarce COVID tests for his personal use. Asked by Baker and Glasser about his accomplishments as president, Trump waxed nostalgic about his “excellent” U.S.-Russia summit in Helsinki in 2018—the one where he sided with Putin against the U.S. intelligence community. Trump has maintained his personal relationship with Putin since leaving office, reportedly speaking by phone at least seven times.
Trump’s alignment with dictators extends beyond Putin. Trump told Bob Woodward, “The tougher and meaner they are, the better I get along with them. Explain that to me someday, okay?” Advisors who were in the room when Trump met with foreign leaders explain it as a case of “autocrat envy,” in the words of Fiona Hill. David Cornstein, Trump’s longtime friend who served as U.S. ambassador to Hungary, admitted that Trump “would love to have the situation that Viktor Orbán has.” Former U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton thought that by blocking the prosecution of Turkey’s Halkbank, Trump sought to impress Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan—whom Trump admiringly nicknamed “the sultan”—with how he, too, could interfere in legal cases. Trump remarked how North Koreans “sit up at attention” when the country’s dictator, Kim Jong Un, speaks and how he wants his “people to do the same.” Trump called Chinese President Xi Jinping “king” because he made himself “president for life.” To the extent Trump has a foreign policy ideology, it’s a craving to project himself as a strongman who wields as much power as any dictator.
This pro-authoritarian, pro-dictator U.S. foreign policy is championed by other MAGA leaders, from the Conservative Political Action Conference holding events in Budapest to Tucker Carlson exonerating Nazi Germany by blaming World War II on Winston Churchill. Not all Republicans—certainly not key congressional leaders—embrace this far-right bid to pivot 180 degrees from the Reagan-Republican tradition of standing up to the enemies of political freedom, rule of law, human rights, and other values of liberal democracy. But in Trumpworld, setting up an antidemocratic foreign policy to outlive Trump was likely a key reason for selecting J.D. Vance as a running mate. Donald Trump, Jr., recommended Vance for the “MAGA bench for the future so that after my father’s second term it doesn’t revert back to the neocon warmongering that we’ve seen from the Republican Party.” Based on Vance’s statements, his foreign policy would likely open by granting Putin his wish to control much of Ukraine, stopping aid to Kyiv, and freeing Moscow to rearm until it’s ready to make a run at conquering the rest of Ukraine.
As with Trump’s foreign policy, the original “America first” movement came with a darker side than the seemingly patriotic language written into official speeches to exploit popular isolationist impulses. Then and now, populist isolationism genuinely resonates with millions of grassroots Americans. But the politicians driving the movement often harbor higher ambitions and a disdain for democracy. During the 1930s and early 1940s, many of the original “America first” leaders were just as pro-Nazi as they were anti-war. And some prominent Nazi sympathizers were correspondingly willing to overthrow democracy at home. The Christian Front and other militias aligned with Charles Coughlin, a rabidly antisemitic priest and radio host who glorified foreign dictators—the Proud Boys and Tucker Carlson of their day—were caught by the FBI as they plotted to incite a revolution and establish a Hitler-esque regime in Washington. The militias meant to sow violence in the weeks after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1940 reelection, triggering chaos that they would exploit to install a dictator. It was a precursor of what Trump and his MAGA extremists effectively tried to do on Jan. 6, 2021.
Americans cannot safely assume that the MAGA drive toward an antidemocratic foreign policy and autocratic domestic power will run its course and fizzle out like the fascism-cum-isolationism movement of 1933 to 1941 did. The kind of antisemitic, Nazi-aligned regime that Charles Lindbergh might have installed had he run for president and won in 1940 was portrayed in Philip Roth’s alternate history, The Plot Against America. If history didn’t play out that way, the reasons for that don’t apply today. One is that Republican Party insiders kept pro-dictator demagogues like Lindbergh and Henry Ford off the presidential ticket and distanced themselves from other extremists like Coughlin and his seditious militias. Another is that the movement’s antidemocratic designs became politically untenable when the attack on Pearl Harbor pulled the United States into an existential war against fascist dictatorships.
Normalizing Trump by misdiagnosing his version of “America first” as just another isolationist phase also has serious foreign-policy implications. Kupchan seems to have resigned himself to the idea that most Americans agree with Trump that aiding foreign nations is a wasteful distraction. But Trump’s aims are clearly different from merely pulling back U.S. commitments, as his comments inviting the Russian military to attack NATO allies made clear. Kupchan suggests Vance is right to oppose offering Ukraine NATO membership, but Vance’s plan for Ukraine largely echo Putin’s. Kupchan’s confidence that Ukraine could live peacefully next door to Putin’s Russia without strong protection is as naive as viewing Trump and Vance as representatives of traditional U.S. isolationism.
Foreign and domestic autocrats have basic political freedoms in their crosshairs. In this election, the stakes are just as high as they were at other turning points in U.S. history—the 1770s, the 1860s, and the 1930s—although most Americans don’t know it yet. This is no time for defenders of democracy to do less just because wannabe autocrats are having some success in exploiting the popular impulse of isolationism. And it certainly doesn’t help to take such narratives at face value.
At some point soon—possibly after the 2024 or 2028 U.S. elections—the struggle for the survival of democracy in the United States and around the world will become unavoidably clear. Existential crises on this order have recurred every 80 years or so throughout U.S. history, each forging one of the nation’s three greatest presidents: Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Roosevelt. Their unifying leadership called on Americans’ better angels and mobilized the sleeping giant of a people invested in their freedom—who then stood together and defended democracy with a power they didn’t know themselves capable of. But getting through the currently rising crisis as one free nation will be a tall order if, instead of being led by a president inclined toward cohesion and democracy, it’s a would-be autocrat who divides the population and aligns himself with foreign dictators.