Trump’s isolationist foreign policy will not ‘make America great again’ 

If Donald Trump wants to make America great again, he would do well to learn from America’s “Greatest Generation,” which united in resisting the evil that victimized friends in Europe and Asia and threatened us all during a time of war.  

In 1947, Republican Sen. Arthur Vandenberg dropped his former isolationist stance and pledged his support for President Roosevelt’s resistance to Nazi tyranny and Japanese imperialism, declaring famously that “politics must stop at the water’s edge.” 

But bipartisanship began to show cracks as the subsequent Korean war entered its third year, with complaints about America acting as “policeman of the world.” Dissent and debate over the U.S. role in world affairs erupted into open domestic discord during the later phases of the Vietnam War. North Vietnam responded by escalating its invasion of South Vietnam. 

Richard Nixon was elected president in 1968 by supporting the resistance to Asian Communist expansionism undertaken by John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson in Indo-China. By the time he was running for re-election in 1972 against antiwar candidate George McGovern, most Americans had formed a definite impression of the Democratic Party as weak on foreign policy and national security.  

Those who believe national security is the determining factor in choosing and judging a president welcome the support Joe Biden has provided Ukraine — limited, late and grudging, as it has been in minimally ensuring Ukraine’s survival but not its victory. 

As weak and fearful of Russian President Putin as Biden’s policies have been, Trump threatens to abandon support for Ukraine altogether. He claims he will end the conflict “within 24 hours,” which can only mean he will cut off U.S. aid unless Volodymyr Zelensky agrees to reward Russian President Putin’s criminal aggression by relinquishing sovereignty over at least part of Ukraine. 

Trump’s vice presidential choice, JD Vance, is even more cavalier about Ukraine’s fate, saying in 2022, weeks before Putin’s second invasion of Ukraine, “I gotta be honest with you. I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.” It ranks with the statement by Ron DeSantis, reminiscent of Neville Chamberlain, that the Russia-Ukraine war is a mere “territorial dispute” that doesn’t involve America’s strategic interests. For these Yale and Harvard lawyers to display such a flawed understanding of history and geopolitics reflects a sad departure from the Republican Party’s strong record on national security.  

Unfortunately, their cramped view of what is at stake in Ukraine is shared by a bloc of congressional Republicans who followed Trump’s instruction and blocked a Ukraine arms package for six months at great cost in Ukrainian (and Russian) lives, and the destruction of Ukraine’s vital infrastructure. It is a disturbing reminder of the discredited policy of isolationism on foreign policy that encouraged the European and Asian aggressors of that earlier era and brought us World War II. 

Granted, some of the opposition to support for Ukraine is not pure isolationism but a concern that it diverts attention and resources from the greater challenge to U.S. interests posed by communist China. But that thinking ignores the reality that political resolve is even more important than resources, as the people of Ukraine have demonstrated for almost three years. A faltering U.S. and Western will on Ukraine will send a message of weakness to Beijing, Teheran and North Korea and encourage their own aggressive moves against the West.  

China and Russia have already openly declared their “no-limits strategic partnership” and supported each other’s regional ambitions. Now Beijing’s junior partner, North Korea, has made a similar pact with Moscow. Both aggressor powers, along with Iran, are providing significant material and diplomatic support for Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. The echoes of the Axis assault on the values and interests of Western civilization grow louder by the day.  

It is too late for aides to educate Trump on the moral and geopolitical realities implicated in the Ukraine war. The national security team of his first four years struggled mightily to do so on issues related to China and Taiwan, and largely succeeded, though Trump needed little coaching on the trade aspects of the relationship — a mostly transactional matter that he understood quite well. Now, unrestrained by his former advisers, he has added Taiwan as a target of his trade grievance, complaining, “They took almost 100 per cent of our chip industry.” He also said it would be “very, very difficult” for the U.S. to defend Taiwan, ignoring the moral and strategic reasons for doing so. 

Putin and Xi Jinping and their Iranian and North Korean anti-Western allies will surely welcome a return of Trump to the White House. But America’s friends and allies around the world have cause to worry about a Trump-Vance foreign policy. 

After the failed assassination attempt against him, Trump had a unique, even historic, opportunity to unite the country in his Republican Convention acceptance speech, which he said he had completely re-written in light of that tragic event, and in his choice of a running mate. Instead, he doubled down on his divisive rhetoric and selected the isolationist Vance — the very opposite of the Vandenberg model of bipartisan unity against foreign threats. 

Trump should withdraw his candidacy now that Biden, his professed reason for running, has done so. If he does not, there is ample time for Nikki Haley or another moderately conservative Republican to launch a national write-in campaign. It has never had a better chance of succeeding. 

Joseph Bosco served as China country director for the secretary of Defense from 2005 to 2006 and as Asia-Pacific director of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief from 2009 to 2010. He is a nonresident fellow at the Institute for Corean-American Studies and a member of the advisory board of the Global Taiwan Institute.