Let’s think back to 1951. Senator Robert Taft was the front-runner to be the next Republican Party nominee. The Democrats had owned the presidency for almost 20 years.
Taft had waited for this opportunity for at least a decade. He was waiting to become the next president of the United States.
But Taft was an isolationist who wanted to withdraw U.S. Forces from Europe and Asia. He was overwhelmed by the internationalist goodwill and charming smile of Dwight Eisenhower, the man who had planned and won the D-Day landings. Isolationism lost in 1952.
A variety of it won in 2016. It’s just how much of a variant that we need to define right now.
Beneath all the dust of the last few weeks, as Trump increasingly acts as the arbitrator of world peace and security, the question remains: just what role was he playing in the last presidential election campaign when he presented himself as the neo-Isolationist who was going to spend all those millions of dollars that we then spent on bombing third-world countries into building American infrastructure?
Don’t get me wrong. I love a good American cruise missile strike as much as anyone. I cant think of of any American intervention since Truman that I wouldn’t have supported. Of course I love the Republican interventions more than the Democratic ones but that’s only because the Democrats tend to get bogged down into extenuating wars and the Republicans get them out of them.
But I thought we had something different in Trump. This was not a mere adversary of eight years of Obama’s internationalist inertia; he was actually agreeing that the desires of American foreign policy could no longer overtake the realities of its domestic policy; we were tired of paying for endless foreign wars when we could no longer afford to pay for bridges and highways.
But that might have ended this month in Syria — in the sands of Syria, which are much like the sands of Iraq and Afghanistan and so on. It’s not that dictator’s like Bashar al-Assad shouldn’t be pushed out of power, it’s just that I’m not sure the United States has either the will or the economic means to finish the job.
I would never doubt our military resolve. But sometimes that is not enough — as Vietnam so tragically proved. And there are millions of other Americans who would never doubt that military resolve either but would question our economic means to finish it.
As Trump continues to murmur about his economic plan, about walls that will someday be built and healthcare that just crashed and burned in Congress, it is important to get back to priorities.
It is far easier to make a show of foreign hostility than win over opposition intransigence, but some presidents, both Democrat and Republican, have managed to do so.
Trump is apparently caught between both examples right now. He needs to remember that one might support you between elections but the second enables you to win elections.
And Trump needs to remember the latter. He came to power with a bizarre but effective combination of isolationist, protectionist and anti-establishment Americans. Had he not been facing off with such a pathetic, national security and all-around failure as Hillary Clinton, it is doubtful that he could have pasted together enough of a collation to win the election.
But ultimately, you have to remember somebody and you have to leave something to your successor. Within those mythic 100 days of a presidency , Trump has managed to defy his positions on NATO, China and American intervention: did I say 100 days? He’s done it in the last week!
There is much to be left with Donald Trump. But if he wants to be reelected in 2020 he had better start enunciating one foreign policy that defines at least something of vision for America in this new century.
To do otherwise would be to be another Obama.
