Ever since Donald Trump arrived on the world stage, liberal internationalists have thrown one particular insult his way: “Isolationist!” Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s representative on foreign affairs, attempted to give Americans a history lesson on their own country by lecturing that isolationism – her idea of Trump’s policies – “never worked well for America.” Just weeks ago, Bloomberg’s Brussels team declared that the “EU backs global engagement against Trump’s isolationism.” And just recently, a hit piece ran on Trump’s Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Elbridge Colby, after Colby temporarily blocked shipments of weaponry to Ukraine. In the piece, an anonymous official smeared Colby as having “decided that he’s going to be the intellectual driving force behind a kind of neo-isolationism that believes that the United States should act more alone, that allies and friends are kind of encumbering.”
The issue with all of this is that it’s simply not isolationist. Isolationism is quite rare and involves truly closing oneself off from the world: pulling all troops home, closing off trade, and effectively making one’s country “isolated” in all respects.
But these policies are something else: nationalism. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni described her views as “patriotism”, shying away from the term “nationalism”, but President Trump has gone further in declaring himself a nationalist. Nationalism is simply putting one’s country first (as Trump’s refrain of “America first” demonstrates). It does not require the closing off of one’s country; plenty of nationalists have had allies and have made trade deals.
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