This article is taken from the December-January 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

How will the United States foreign policy establishment and their supporting commentariat respond to the shocking political resurrection of Donald Trump? Will they grapple with painful realities and examine the deficiencies of foreign and economic policy that helped lead to this point of crisis?

Or will they do what they did last time and tell self-serving and fictitious stories about the past, a morality tale of virtuous internationalists battling primitive isolationists — the old Good Old Ways versus Orange Man Bad?

An early indication is offered by David Sanger’s article in the New York Times which is so pervaded by standard liberal nostalgia it almost writes itself.

For Sanger, Trump’s win “ends a post-World War II Era of US Leadership”. As Sanger tells it, for 80 years there was a continuous tradition of American hegemony, noble and principled. And now time is intruding into Camelot in the form of a demagogic “isolationist”. The post-war order that Trump is about to terminate was a set of good things: free trade, regard for alliances and democracy promotion. Let’s see if this claim survives interrogation.

Free trade? According to Sanger, US world leadership oversaw “largely free trade”. “Largely” does heroic work here. At a stroke, Sanger erases President Ronald Reagan’s tariff and trade wars with Europe and Japan. He forgets the heavily protectionist Farm Bills and agricultural subsidies that aggrieved America’s allies. Tell New Zealand or Australian farmers about the grand old days of “largely free trade”. See if it passes the laugh test.

Also ignored is the recently-enacted Chip Act spearheaded by President Joe Biden, designed to kneecap China’s microchip industry via protectionist measures such as tariffs on electric vehicles. If free trade deals are being dismantled, that process was well underway under Biden. Almost as though US statecraft is shaped by structural forces larger — and causally prior to — Trump’s whims.

So the amnesiac tale spun by Sanger is confusing. Are there no search engines in the dream palace? Or is it only protectionism when white nationalists do it? When under-shielded industries were moved offshore, America’s great industrial cities were poorer and hollowed out, creating a constituency for populism.

Secondly, Sanger claims the tradition of US leadership was defined also by “alliances” and a consensus belief that they were a good thing, as opposed to Trump’s coarse transactionalism. Trump indeed is disparaging or worse about some allies, especially those he sees as delinquent. But in this, he has voiced crudely and out in the open traditional and mainstream fears about free-riding and burden-sharing, fears that earlier presidents expressed more privately or politely.

In office last time, Trump the so-called “isolationist” gave the liberal hawks and neoconservatives much of what they wanted, embracing America’s Middle Eastern allies and partners with gusto. There was little of the “isolationism” Sanger fears in the Abraham Accords, or Trump’s full-court campaign to contain and denuclearise Iran.

Historically, post-war Washington valued having allies as assets. But only recently did the Blob decide they were sacred things — ends as well as means — losing sight of the fact that the credible threat of abandonment is an important part of a superpower’s repertoire.

The wages of allowing tails to wag dogs are seen in Gaza. For 80 years, Washington practised ruthless power politics, wisely and unwisely. Alliances and partnerships were expendable and never above Washington’s blunt coercion or disregard. John F. Kennedy coerced West Germany with the threat of abandonment. Richard Nixon sold out Taiwan and Tibet to purchase détente with China. Eisenhower coerced Britain out of Suez via economic punishment, whilst his Sixth Fleet warships stalked British ships and fouled their radar and sonar.

President Bill Clinton chose Sinn Féin above London over Northern Ireland. President George W. Bush imposed “largely free” tariffs on British steel just as 45 Commando were touching down in Afghanistan. And George W. Bush’s secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld threatened to withdraw NATO headquarters from Brussels unless it cancelled war crimes prosecution legislation. None of this makes America bad, given the harsh ways of international politics. It makes it normal.

This was the era, too, of the Hague Invasion Act, authorising the President to use military force to extract US citizens from trial before the International Criminal Court, with the approving votes of internationalists in the Senate such as Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Joe Biden. All this makes a mockery of the Blob’s Bush/Cheney-era nostalgia, and Sanger’s tale of “leadership” with brutal power politics left out.

Some of us are old enough to remember when the New York Times denounced Bush II and his unilateralism, extraordinary rendition, torture and illegal war-making for destroying post-war leadership, claiming then that he was shredding a noble 60-year tradition of leadership. We have a theme.

Speaking of the Bush II era, consider Sanger’s third claim:

Moreover, the American mission that George W. Bush declared at his second inaugural, almost two decades ago, “to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture”, is now officially over.

So much for Egypt, whose military dictatorship George W. Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, supported after a brief dalliance with supporting the Arab Spring, a revolutionary wave Washington gradually abandoned. Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden, had earlier publicly insisted that the tyrannical strongman President Hosni Mubarak, was an “ally”, not “a dictator”. Where has Sanger been?

In truth, the Bush-era democracy drive did not even survive Bush’s second term. Democracy, policymakers realised, could also threaten US interests when Hamas won the Gaza elections of January 2006, against the US-backed Fatah authority. In government, a consensus formed that American interests were too varied, its partnerships with some despots too important, to prize liberty over stability so categorically. Quietly, Bush turned away from the pro-democracy visionary hawks. If this was a “mission”, it was brief.

To be sure, in 2011 there was, once again, an experiment to midwife democratic regime change in a fractured, crisis-ridden state. It was in Libya and resulted in economic meltdown, rival parliaments, destabilising mass exodus and open-air slave markets. And yet, we still receive advice on foreign policy prudence by those who triumphantly announced it was a “model intervention” and “tremendous success story”, or who forecast that “Iraq can’t resist us”.

Many things feed Trumpism. Disillusion with failed wars is part of the revolt

There are many things that feed Trumpism; it is not a simple story. But disillusionment with failed wars and their self-assured supporters is part of the revolt under way. Sanger warns that Trump may cut off aid to Ukraine and sell it out. Perhaps so, but if it is now harder to build mass support for efforts to check adversaries’ aggression, whose fault is that?

All of this matters because the memory of the past conditions our response to the present. What’s on offer from Blob nostalgists is not so much foreign policy as theology. Sound strategy requires the hard-nosed assessment and adjustment of means and ends. By contrast, Blob theology treats arrangements that are provisional as absolute and beyond question. Their central nostrum, that America must “lead”, is built on highly contentious assumptions about the distribution of power in the world, derived from fleeting historical conditions somewhere in the late unipolar 1990s.

“Leadership” presupposes willing followers, and as the Ukraine crisis reveals, many countries outside America’s protective wing do not wish to be led. They are ruthless states seeking not to be directed but to do business.

The US itself is overloaded and not positioned for armed supremacy across multiple theatres. Its defence industrial base scrambles to produce enough munitions, its embassies lack enough skilled ambassadors and staff, its security commitments depend on ever more dangerous levels of borrowing, and its crisis-management bandwidth is stretched to the point where it recently asked China to ease off in the Indo-Pacific.

America has long abandoned its old measure of preponderance, the capacity to fight two regional contingencies simultaneously. Building greater relative strength remains possible. Restoring a misremembered world hegemony, with moral authority and widespread deference, is not.

The true choice is not noble internationalism versus regressive isolationism. It is between those who believe the United States should still seek primacy, and those who would prioritise and husband its power. The Biden–Harris offering was of primacy, presented as leadership. Trump offered not isolation but “greatness”, a kind of selective dominance without commitment.

Trump’s offering, especially as it lacks firm specifics, has a visceral power that the abstraction of “leadership” and “rules-based order” lacks. It is simple and appealing enough to have attracted a multiracial, multiclass electoral coalition, and vague enough to project all kinds of anxieties, insecurities and ambitions onto. If the orthodox believers in primacy, New York Times-style, are to oppose Trumpian foreign policy effectively, they will have to theologise less, and carry opinion more.

After Trump’s first presidential election victory in 2016, the Blob mostly refused to recognise the shock as symptomatic of a deeper crisis in which they were implicated. Instead, they revered the passing “order” of their imagination, purged of the brutal power politics that marks all international orders, and treated Trumpian MAGAs as malignant forces falling out of the sky to wreck Camelot.

Passing up the chance for a proper reckoning with failure, they instead attacked “isms” and accused those who advocated for a more restrained and prioritised foreign policy of being crypto-Trumpians. To the contrary, Trump is what you get when you ignore people, and when your only response to crisis is to mythologise the era of the War on Terror and the Global Financial Crisis. Something to consider for four more years.