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Your guide to what Trump’s second term means for Washington, business and the world
I take it we all agree now that he isn’t an “isolationist”. A word that should never have been applied to Donald Trump in the first place went up in smoke last weekend, along with an unknown amount of Iran’s nuclear programme. The US bombings were consistent with his strike against Syria in 2017, against the leader of the militant group Isis in 2019 and against Iran’s most senior general in 2020. Given all the abstract nouns that fit Trump well — jingoism, unilateralism, anti-Europeanism — it is a wonder that isolationism ever saw daylight. It is not even clear that he opposed the Iraq war as a private citizen in 2003.
What is true of one man might turn out to be true of the US as a great power. The lesson of the Iran intervention is that America’s dreaded retreat from the world is more talked about than strictly realistic, whoever is the president.
For a start, keep the “split” over the Iran bombing in some perspective. The most prominent dissenters are Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson, not administration officials or even a large group of congressional Republicans. Some of this is the slavishness of a Maga movement whose ultimate bond is to Trump himself, not to non-intervention or any other principle. (On the same theme, lots of vaccine sceptics revere a president who oversaw and promoted the Covid-19 jab). But it isn’t as if the Democratic revolt has been very thundering, either. Or the wider public one. The market for isolationism in the US tends to be exaggerated from outside, as it fits old stereotypes of an insular people.
A hugely overdone theme over the past decade or two is that of “war fatigue”. To be clear, what the fiascos of Iraq and Afghanistan turned voters against was ground wars, which are open-ended and liable to cost American lives. People are more serene about air strikes. Barack Obama bombed Libya, achieved some perverse outcomes and won re-election regardless.
Were US ground forces to be risked far from home, perhaps to secure an Iran whose state had collapsed, the domestic split would be real. But the US can still exert world-changing influence from the skies or, as Ukraine knows, through aid. And if mass commitment of land forces is the red line, how does that mark a change from the 1990s, when Washington shied from too much involvement in the Balkans? No one talked of the end of America’s global role then.
Even if there were a genuine isolationist in the White House, there is one reason to doubt that America could ever sheath its sword as the world’s enforcer. Habit. If we trace it back to the conquest of the Philippines in 1898, the US has had an empire for longer than it hasn’t. (“Why date it so late?”, a Mexican reader might ask.) That is a lot of muscle memory to unlearn, a lot of sunk cost to throw away. Closing or even much reducing the garrisons in east Asia, Europe, the Gulf, Djibouti and elsewhere isn’t like unwinding a property portfolio. As well as the logistical friction, there is amour propre and strategy involved: a backward step in one place would invite China into the vacuum.
The US has had too many interests and assets in too many places for too long to relinquish them with ease. In America, an isolationist is really someone who wishes the nation hadn’t acquired these burdens in the first place. Wanting to actively unload them several decades after the fact is another matter entirely. This is why Trump in what is his fifth year of power has had much less effect on America’s global hoofprint than some of his own fans had hoped.
It is a vice of journalism to underestimate the stickiness of things. Fourteen years after Obama’s fabled pivot to Asia, and even longer since the shale bonanza was thought to have freed the US from its long involvement in the Middle East, the White House is half-entertaining a regime change in Iran. Last month, Trump made the Gulf the first big trip of his second term as president — as it had been in his first too. That America still has assets in Qatar for Iran to target tells its own story. If the US can’t even extricate itself from one region, the idea of a wider world drawdown seems fanciful.
Incidentally, which empire ever voluntarily decommissioned itself? Britain and France ran out of juice, and even then the latter resisted the inevitable into the 1960s. Japan and Germany were defeated. The Soviets’ entire economic model had rotted from inside. The prospect of American withdrawal from the world is discussed as though great powers choose to do this kind of thing all the time. In fact, it would be a near unique act of self-abnegation. And to that extent, perhaps unlikely.
What people tend to mean by American retreat is American retreat from Europe. That is a shattering change, of course. Even the slightest question about the US commitment to Nato’s Article 5 — that an armed attack on one will be considered an attack on all — incentivises Russia to try its luck. But it is a parochial European who conflates this with a general American reticence abroad. Events in Iran should bring that home.
If nothing else, the US has a colossal defence budget that no politician of note wants to cut much. As long as that holds, those armaments will find a purpose often enough. “The iron draws the hand towards it,” is the Homeric way of saying that everything looks like a nail to a hammer-wielder. If even an America First president can’t resist a bash, don’t count on future US leaders to be any more coy.
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