Isolationism

A US government-affiliated Ukrainian NGO, texty.org.ua, published a list last week of all the Americans “impeding aid to Ukraine.” There are 388 individuals and seventy-six organizations on the list, including members of the conservative media Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson, members of Congress and a few Spectator writers. The piece is titled “Rollercoaster: From Trumpists to Communists. The forces in the US impeding aid to Ukraine and how they do it.” “The title of this article oversells the product: it is a substantively thin piece, largely an excuse to smear a large group of Americans who have been skeptical of aid to Ukraine in one form or another,” Senator J.D. Vance and Representative Matt Gaetz wrote in a letter to secretary of state Antony Blinken on Tuesday.

Former president Donald Trump is in a world of legal trouble. Not only is he the first president in history to be impeached twice, he holds the unenviable distinction of being the first president to be indicted. He doesn’t do things by half-measures — he’s been indicted twice. So far he faces a total of seventy-one criminal charges of various severity in two separate investigations, from falsifying business records and retention of national defense information to obstruction of justice. And as this magazine goes to press, we still haven’t heard from Fani Willis in Georgia, or from the second Jack Smith investigation. Yet despite his legal woes, Trump remains a top contender for the highest office in the land.

Traditionally, the GOP has been the favorite of those concerned with safety and national security. The party of Ronald Reagan emphasized the need for strong engagement abroad, a willingness to project power when necessary, and a commitment to the free world. Yet the contours of the conservative movement have begun to change in recent years, calling into question the GOP’s credibility on the issue of security. The growing support for a sort of soft isolationism is a problem. It is also fundamentally not conservative. Prominent voices from the American right have been carrying the banner of soft isolationism for years, from Tucker Carlson and J.D. Vance to Senator Josh Hawley and former president Donald Trump.

The new year begins a new chapter in American foreign policy. For the first time since 2001, we are not at war in Afghanistan. More than that, we no longer have an architectonic strategy for our role in world affairs. We had one during the Cold War: to win it. And we had one afterward, too: a decade before 9/11, our policy elite had already committed to the idea that we must police the world for the good of the liberal international order. The lead-up to the first Gulf War was the opening paragraph of that chapter, the ignominious retreat from Afghanistan its last line. Our policy mandarins have not changed their minds, but the world has changed too much for their grand design to have any meaning in 2022.