The American public deserves a sober and realistic debate about the nature and salience of the U.S. interests at stake in #Ukraine. The American electorate also deserves to be told the truth: that Ukraine is highly unlikely to succeed in expelling Russian forces from its territory, even with the continuation of strong support from the West. Trump’s readiness to seek a negotiated settlement is not capitulation: it is pragmatism.
Trump’s skepticism toward nation building and the promotion of democracy abroad also resonates with the isolationist posture of early America. To be sure, Americans from the founding era onward believed that they were embarking on a unique experiment in building republican government, an experiment that they were ultimately destined to share with the rest of the world. Yet the founders and their successors were appropriately doubtful of the United States’ ability to engineer political change abroad and therefore understood that they needed to spread democracy primarily by example. As then Secretary of State John Quincy Adams famously stated in 1821, the United States “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.”
So, too, did successive U.S. presidents appreciate the need to operate in the world as it is, working with democracies and nondemocracies alike in the pursuit of U.S. interests. Even as President James Monroe warned Europe’s great powers in 1823 against any “future colonization” in the Western Hemisphere, he acknowledged and accepted Europe’s political preferences. It was the policy of the United States, he asserted, “not to interfere in the internal concerns of any of its powers; to consider the government de facto as the legitimate government for us; to cultivate friendly relations with it.”
Trump took this ideological variant of isolationism too far during his presidency, exhibiting a fondness for autocrats such as Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jung Un while giving a cold shoulder to the leaders of allied democracies. But Trump’s approach to grand strategy does exhibit due caution to the promotion of democracy abroad. He correctly traced the United States’ overreach in the Middle East to the “dangerous idea that we could make Western democracies out of countries that had no experience or interests in becoming a Western democracy.”
#Trump’s brand of U.S. statecraft has deep roots in the American experience and, like the original version of isolationism, has something for almost everyone, giving it broad appeal across the American electorate. Democrats dismiss his “America first” agenda as strategic delusion at their own peril. Instead, they should preempt it by embracing its best elements.
#Democrats need to find the middle ground between an expansive liberal internationalism that is no longer sustainable at home or abroad and the dangerous isolationist excesses that would likely accompany Trump’s return to the presidency. That middle ground entails standing by Biden’s multilateralism and his investment in old alliances and new partnerships, moves that have resuscitated U.S.-led collective action and restored the nation’s image as a team player. At the same time, the United States must avoid the bouts of strategic overreach, such as in Afghanistan and Iraq, that encourage the electorate to gravitate toward isolationist alternatives.
In Ukraine, that middle ground requires working to broker a cease-fire and focusing on ensuring that the 80 percent of the country still under Kyiv’s control is secure, prosperous, and stable. With Ukraine up against relentless aggression from a much larger neighbor, that outcome would qualify as a success by any reasonable measure. In the Middle East, Washington should seek to end the violence in Gaza and then lay out a pathway to Palestinian self-determination and normalization of Israel’s relationships with its neighbors. The United States should stand up to Chinese ambition, but also avoid unnecessary provocations that could lead to an irreversible geopolitical rupture. Washington should work intently to cooperate with Beijing to tame rivalry and advance joint efforts to tackle global challenges.
The United States cannot afford to run away from the world, as it did during the long era of isolationism. But it can no longer seek to run the world, which it has neither the power nor the domestic consensus to do. Instead, Americans need to learn to live in a world of ideological diversity and multiple conceptions of order, working alongside other centers of power, democracies and nondemocracies alike. Pragmatic realism should guide U.S. statecraft.
Notice, in particular, the assumption that Americans “need to learn” whatever it is that Clown World is preaching at the moment. Thirty years ago, Americans “needed to learn” that they had a responsibility for pushing democracy, free movement, and independent central banks everywhere around the #world. Now, they are being told that they “need to learn” the limits of what they can do.
