Donald Trump campaigned as someone who wanted to get America out of the Middle East. But he also cast himself as a tough guy, and his initial instincts in office were to show force — added troops, more aggressive rules of engagement, bigger bombs — in America’s war zones. “These killers need to know they have nowhere to hide,” he said when announcing a troop surge in Afghanistan.
When Roosevelt was beginning to design his system, he was the dissenter. The dominant foreign policy ideas in America at the time were represented by a movement called “America First.” Nativist, isolationist and anti-Semitic, the movement held that an outward-oriented America was a policy for suckers. It took Hitler and World War II to make Americans recognize that, for a country of America’s size and scale, isolation and narrow self-interest would lead to global insecurity and disaster. One wonders what it will take to make today’s America Firsters relearn that same lesson.