Donald Trump Was Never an Isolationist
There aren’t many moments in Donald Trump’s political career that could be called highlights. But one occurred during the 2016 Republican primary debate in South Carolina, when Trump addressed the thorny issue of the Iraq War. It had been a “big, big mistake,” he accused. And the politicians who launched it? “They lied.”
The public hated it. Trump’s fellow debaters Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio argued that George W. Bush, Jeb’s brother, kept the country safe. Trump continued loudly despite the boos. It was as if an “angry Code Pink-style protester” had derailed the Republican debate, journalist Michael Grunwald wrote.
Trump did not oppose the Iraq War from the start, as he has often claimed. (When asked before the invasion if he supported it, he replied, “Yes, I suppose so.”) But by 2004, he was genuinely opposed to it. He scoffed at the idea that the war could achieve anything. What is the point of “people coming back without arms and legs” and “all these Iraqi children who have been blown to pieces?” » he asked. “All the reasons for the war were demonstrably false. »
Skepticism came easily to Trump, who had long been hostile to mainstream foreign policy. He made his political debut in 1987, taking out full-page ads in several newspapers complaining about Washington’s “monumental defense spending” on allies like Japan and Saudi Arabia. The foundations of American supremacy since 1945 – the aid programs, alliances, trade deals and basic agreements that constitute what former Defense Secretary Robert Gates calls the “symphony of power” – have all seemed to Trump like a colossal waste.
Critics have called Trump an isolationist. Given his undisguised pleasure in dropping bombs on foreign lands (seven countries in 2025 alone), this can’t be right. A better diagnosis would be that Trump does not think the United States should seek to oversee world affairs, to take responsibility for how the system works. “America’s foreign policy elites have convinced themselves that continued American domination of the entire world is in our country’s best interests,” explains its recently released national security strategy. “Yet the affairs of other countries only concern us if their activities directly threaten our interests. »
At times, Trump has moved strangely close to the left, which has opposed trade deals (“neoliberalism”), military interventions (“warmongering”), bipartisan consensus on foreign policy (“the Blob”), and U.S. surveillance of the planet (“the empire”). During his race against Hillary Clinton in 2016, he scored points by highlighting his support for the war in Iraq. “In the end, the so-called nation-builders destroyed far more nations than they built,” he said last year, “and the interventionists intervened in complex societies that they themselves did not even understand.” »
What sets Trump apart from the left, of course, is his narrow nationalism and love of brute force. “I’m the most militaristic person there is,” he boasted. He renamed the Department of Defense the Department of War and appointed a secretary, Pete Hegseth, who promised to give “American warriors” the freedom to “kill people and break things.” Forget the symphony of power; Trump just wants to smash the cymbals.
Trump’s second term was cacophonous with threats: acquiring Greenland, ethnically cleansing Gaza, making Canada a state, throwing the world economy into convulsions. It is a conscious flight from principles towards what he calls the “iron laws which have always determined world power”.
Hence last weekend’s assault on Venezuela, in which US forces launched airstrikes on Caracas and arrested the head of state, President Nicolas Maduro. (At least a hundred people have been killed, according to local authorities.) Trump says his goal is to punish Maduro for leading a “vast criminal network” that brought “colossal quantities of deadly and illicit drugs into the United States.” But it’s hard to swallow. The killer drug, fentanyl, is almost entirely produced in Mexico, and the drug that Venezuela plays a (minor) role in transporting, cocaine, mainly goes from there to Europe. Furthermore, didn’t Trump simply pardon Juan Orlando Hernández, the former Honduran president, who was sentenced to forty-five years in federal prison for conspiring to import four hundred tons of cocaine into the United States?
