What Trump really believes is far more dangerous.
.. The problem is, Trump isn’t an isolationist. He is a militarist, something far worse. And calling Trump an isolationist isn’t an effective critique... What united them was their opposition to entering the Second World War after the devastation of the First. Judging the United States capable of repelling any outside invasion, they wanted to steer clear of armed entanglement in Europe and Asia... The first America Firsters, then, were antiwar more than anti-Semitic or pro-fascist, strains that recent critics of Trump overemphasize. True, the group’s spokesman, aviator Charles Lindbergh, railed against “Jewish influence” months before Pearl Harbor. But the anti-Semitic diatribe crippled the movement rather than advanced it, and few America Firsters favored the Axis... Ever since, foreign policy elites have deployed the “isolationist” tag to expel anti-interventionists from the bounds of legitimate debate... It’s often an unfair label, but it’s especially nonsensical when it comes to the current commander in chief: Trump is no isolationist, whether caricatured or actual. Rather than seeking to withdraw from the world, he vows to exploit it. Far from limiting the area of war, he threatens ruthless violence against globe-spanning adversaries and glorifies martial victory. In short, the president is a militarist.Scholars define militarism, broadly, as the excessive use and veneration of force for political ends, or even for its own sake, extending at times to full military control of the state. (Trump has appointed two Marine generals, Jim Mattis and John F. Kelly, to his Cabinet.) Militarism, the pioneering historian Alfred Vagts wrote in 1937, promotes values “associated with armies and wars and yet transcending true military purposes.”.. Not even the European Union escapes Trump’s zero-sum squint: He casts it as a German vehicle to “beat the United States on trade,”.. Previous presidents — Theodore Roosevelt, Richard Nixon — have scorned non-Western cultures and accentuated divergent interests among states. But Trump is unique in seeing America as a victim nation, a net global loser that must now fight back.His single most consistent political conviction is that other countries have exploited the United States... Trump’s sense of abuse and humiliation is potent. “The world is laughing at us,” he endlessly repeats... Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany did not conquer territory for the thrill of it; their leaders acted out of perceived desperation, believing that they were losing a ruthless competition for power and status... He talks of grabbing wealth from other countries, most vividly in his mantra to “take the oil” in Iraq. “Maybe we’ll have another chance,” he said in a speech at the CIA. Trump may be posturing, but the posture is militaristic... To announce a lust for oil, to chest-thump about torture, to envisage military parades down Pennsylvania Avenue — these do not achieve strategic objectives so much as exalt brute force. “I’m the most militaristic person there is,” Trump said in the primaries. Perhaps he was telling the truth... Drawing a moral equivalencebetween the United States and Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Trump rejects America’s traditional identity as an exceptional nation shining the light of freedom to the world. What identity does he offer instead? While ignoring the Founding Fathers, he constantly invokes the “old days of General MacArthur and General Patton,” the most extreme generals of the mid-20th century... MacArthur and Patton are Trump’s new founders... Trump’s disavowal of nation-building offers little comfort. His predecessors said the same during their presidential campaigns. Trump will avoid large-scale conflict only if he sets limited objectives and acts prudently... “Our military dominance must be unquestioned,”.. Last year Trump’s chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, professed “no doubt” that “we’re going to war in the South China Sea in five to 10 years” — and that’s on top of the “global war against Islamic fascism” that he believes to be in its opening stages.
.. When critics seem to assail Trump for being too peaceful, for questioning military alliances and hoping to cooperate with Russia, they reinforce his message. They verify that he’s against not only the establishment but costly wars to boot... a peace candidate turned warmonger, a populist outsider serving arms dealers and autocrats.
A confrontation with China, and other foreign-policy complications, might force Washington to seek a rapprochement with Russia
Mr. Trump will have to find an accommodation with the Republican Party establishment. His administration’s foreign-policy and defense appointments may well become a bargaining chip in that difficult process. As a result, some very unexpected figures, including outspoken hawks, may be put at the helm of the State Department and the Pentagon.
.. On foreign policy, both Mr. Trump’s campaign and Bernie Sanders’s Democratic primary bid highlighted a renewed American proclivity toward isolationism. Large segments of the American public are tired of endless military campaigns in the Middle East, and weary of the burden of America’s foreign commitments.
.. The American political elite remains almost universally interventionist and supportive of globalization.
.. And Moscow has very little to offer to Washington at the moment. There are few areas for possible cooperation. Even if Mr. Trump does want to improve relations with Russia, he will find out when he moves into the Oval Office that the United States has little to gain from such an improvement.
.. The new president is unlikely to be willing to pay the steep domestic political price, especially since improving relations offers no tangible benefits to America.
.. The basic problems in Russian-American relations stem from Moscow’s fundamental aspiration to return to the global arena as a great power, and even to contemplate integration into the American-led, pro-Western world order only on the condition of being recognized as a great power that dominates most of its former Soviet neighbors.
.. A confrontation with China, and other foreign-policy complications, might force Washington to seek a rapprochement with Russia
Donald Trump’s Sham Patriotism
In his bid for the White House, Donald Trump is playing many roles: law-and-order strongman, sky’s-the-limit builder, dealmaker extraordinaire. But perhaps none is more emphatic than all-American patriot.
.. His patriotism brims with grievances...Last week he suggested to The Times’s David Sanger and Maggie Haberman that if Russia invaded a NATO ally that wasn’t pulling its weight financially, he might not rise to its defense...On one hand, it leads him to echo conservatives’ longstanding charge that President Obama belittles our country by apologizing too much for it. On the other, Trump told Sanger and Haberman that he’d refrain from reprimanding allies with poor records on civil liberties because the United States is no paragon.. And he attacked Ted Cruz anew, again mentioning the National Enquirer story that linked Cruz’s father to John F. Kennedy’s assassination and saying that the Enquirer deserves more respect than it gets... I’m suspicious of two of the most commonly used yardsticks. But by both of those measures — a readiness to serve in the military and a devotion to domestically made goods — Trump isn’t much of a patriot... And there’s nothing simple about a patriotism that’s really an amalgam of nativism, racism, isolationism and xenophobia and that denies this country’s distinction as a land of fresh starts, its arms open to a diverse world... Patriotism,” the 18th-century writer Samuel Johnson once said, “is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” It’s also a convenient cloak for a narcissist.
The Know-Nothing Tide
In the 1850s, at another moment of American unease, the Know Nothings swept Massachusetts and won mayoral elections in Philadelphia and Washington on a nativist platform to “purify” national politics by stopping the influx of Irish and German Catholics.
.. “South Carolina is too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum.”
.. American isolationism is an oxymoron because America is a universal idea.