Trump-Pence "isolationism" and its ancestors

There is a widespread consensus that Donald Trump is a highly transactional figure who has no strategic sense—much less an actual strategy. That is not entirely correct. He does have a coherent strategy, but it is one that is firmly based on a nineteenth-century view of America’s role in the world. In that regard, his strategic perspective contrasts sharply with many of the men he professes to admire such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping. Like Trump, Putin is often mischaracterized as lacking a strategic worldview. Unlike Trump, however, both Putin and Xi are firmly rooted in the twenty-first century and both understand how they can best achieve their ambitions by drawing upon their respective nation’s human and material resources, which is the essence of strategy.

-Dov Zakheim, Trump's Perilous Path The National Interest 06/13/18

Mister Foreign Policy Establishment tweeted this the day after Christmas:

Israeli airstrikes in Syria, Saudi continuation of the war in Yemen, Turkey preparing to attack Syrian Kurds, Assad in power and Isis anything but defeated, Iran expanding its regional reach, Russia the most influential external power: welcome to the post-American Middle East.

— Richard N. Haass (@RichardHaass) December 26, 2018

This of course, implies what we've had before was an "American" Middle East, which will presumably surprise most everyone in the Middle East.

But Haass isn't a loon. In his book A World In Disarray (2017), he takes note of the unpromising state of the Middle East as it stood toward the end of Obama's Presidency.

... 2015 and the first half of 2016 were a time of considerable turbulence and difficulty in the world. The post-World War I order was unraveling in much of the Middle East. lran's nuclear ambitions and the growing reach of the Islamic State had put much of the region on edge. Syria, Iraq, Yemen, ancl Libya all shared many of the characteristics of failing or failed states. Syria in particular emerged as an example of what could go wrong: hundreds of thousands of Syrians had lost their lives and more than half the population had become internally displaced or refugees, in the process threatening to overwhelm not just Syria's neighbors but Europe as well. In part as a result, the number of refugees and internally displaced persons in the world swelled to rnore than sixty million. [my emphasis]

Haass doesn't share the neocon imagination of implanting freindly democracies in the Middle East through Trotskyist wars of liberation, of which Iraq 2003 was supposed to be the model. Not as influential as the neocons, some American anarchists profess to think it would be a good idea to leave a couple of thousand US troops in Syria to protect what they take to be a radical-democratic experiment in more-or-less anarchist government in the Kurdish YPG-controlled areas. But, as the neocons should have learned but most never will, putting a human-rights or democracy-promotion label on an American military expedition in the Middle East doesn't make the inevitable complications go away. Although anarchists advocating for the Trump-Pence Administration to keep US troops in Syria is a curious case of politics-makes-strange-bedfellows.

Haass followed up with a couple of further tweets that withdrawing American troops in itself isn't the fearful disaster for the US that some of the more caffeinated commentators make it lound like.

to term the emerging middle east "post-american" is not to say there was stability or US control. But US influence is down as local actors/govts are increasingly taking matters into their own hands w/o considering US interests-while the US has defined its interests more narrowly.

— Richard N. Haass (@RichardHaass) December 26, 2018

There is a legitimate view (one i disagree with, but legit all the same) that US right to exit Syria. What is not legitimate is to do so unilaterally (w/o consultation), unconditionally (w/o assurances from others re their behavior) and by twitter (w/o serious public explanation)

— Richard N. Haass (@RichardHaass) December 29, 2018

Trump's seemingly "isolationist" rhetoric in his Presidential campaign was something that some left-leaning peace advocates seized upon hopefully as a possibility that Trump would pursue a less aggressive foreign policy.

I never shared much of that hope. Although I do try to remember the Rick Perry Principle: Even a stopped clock is right once a day.

In the wake of the Trump-Pence Administration's decision to withdraw troops from Syria, foreign policy gurus and commentators from liberal hawks to war-minded conservatives to professional neocon warmongers have sounded the alarm that the American world order was falling down.

The latest round of handwringing over the Trump-Pence foreign policy is a reminder that it isn't "isolationist." Isolationism acquired a very negative connotation in the US from the pre-World War II experience, just as "appeasement" did. In the early Cold War period, both left and right critics of the Truman Doctrine that involved "containment" of the supposedly chronically expansive Soviet Union were dismissed as isolationists. The respectable foreign policy outlooks broadly fell into the categories of liberal internationalists and conservative Cold Warriors.

But the people who identified as isolationists were what later become known as the Old Right. Terms like "old right" and new left" are of course relative to the historical moment. But the group to which I'm referring was the continuation of the outlook and argumentation of the prewar America First movement, which was predominately made up of hardcore righttwingers and admirers of Mussolini and Hitler. Charles Lindbergh is probably the best-known prewar example.

The thing about Old Right isolationists-militarists is that their arguments against overseas commitments often bear a resemblance to those of left anti-interventionists. Particularly when they make Constitutional arguments about war powers. Ron Radosh published a book called Prophets on the Right: Profiles of Conservative Critics of American Globalism (1975) that illustrates the point. Radosh later went the route of being a repentent former leftist who became a flaming rightwinger warning against the dangers of the left, a posture which is still marketable on the right. That book probably represents a stage in that shift. Because it presents Old Right isolationists as making reflective, good-faith arguments that happen to coincide with later New Left anti-imperialist arguments. But it's pretty disingenuous.

Radosh includes among his prophets Lawrence Dennis, who was the best-known American advocate for what Dennis himself called "national socialism." And, yes, he meant the Hitler kind. Dennis made a big impression on Lindbergh and others in the prewar isolationist far right with his white supremacist ideology. There was one thing they didn't realize, though. "Lawrence Dennis ... had African 'blood' flowing in his veins — he was a walking example of 'blood dilution' — and had begun life as a celebrated 'Negro' child preacher." (Gerald Horne, The Color of Fascism: Lawrence Dennis, Racial Passing, and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism in the United States; 2006)

Yes, the far right in the 1930s and 1940s had no shortage of creepy, pathological characters. While respectable Republicans and Democrats embraced Cold War containment and a long series of foreign wars and lesser interventions, the Old Right tradition continued in not quite an underground existence. They were heavily influential on groups like the John Birch Society and other fringe groups. But the JBS in particular was nevertheless important among those Republicans who in the 1960s were the Goldwater-Reagan wing of the party.

Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman wrote about the early 1940s version of this particular tradition in Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator (1949). They give this description of the far-right agitators' xenophobic rhetoric:

Because he is endowed with immutable characteristics, the foreigner is essentially unassimilable. Aliens are not only responsible for ·"atheism, mental and moral decay, vulgarity, communism, imperialism . . . intolerance, snobbery, treason, treachery, dishonesty," [George Allison Phelps] but they bring with them asocial characteristics which no amount of exposure to clean American air can purge ...

While stressing how much of a danger aliens are because they "cleverly" divide "the American people ... into groups,"  [George Allison Phelps] the agitator identifies them with Jews, a device which reassures those among his listeners who may themselves be among the millions of foreign-born or descendants of foreign-born that he intends no harm against them. The concept of the foreigner is narrowed down to those who "inevitably bear a characteristic racial stamp." [Social Justice] The agitator declares that "we don't care whether you come from Italy or Czechoslovakia ... from Ireland or Wyoming .... Are you Christian and are you Aryan?" [Joseph McWilliams]

We see here an interesting development of the agitator's stereotype of the foreigner: from a specific external political threat to the country's economy, he is transformed into the perennial stranger characterized by irreducible qualities of foreignness. ... In the agitational image of the enemy, the foreigner tends to be transformed from a specific dangerous but tangible power into an uncanny, irreconcilable extra- or sub-human being. This role of the foreigner in the agitator's total image of the enemy is explicitly seen in his references to the refugee.

If that sounds uncomfortably familiar from the daily news now, check this out:

For the agitator, the refugee is the most fearsome version of the foreigner. The very weakness, the very plight of the refugees is an argument against them, since "they fled from the wrath of the treacherously outraged peoples of those nations, as they may one day flee as well from the wrath of a finally aroused populace in America." [Liberation; italics in original] The refugee becomes identified with the parasite who seeks dupes to do his dirty work:

A "Refugee" is a member of the male sex who comes boo-booing to the United States because he's "too cowardly" to fight like "real men" do, in Europe. He would establish himself in business or profession while the "real men" fight for HIS liberty. [X-Ray]

The refugee not only refuses to do dirty work, but threatens the economic security of native Americans:

According to the admission of our State Department, 580,000 Refugees had been admitted to the United States up to January, 1944, mostly on temporary permits. These Refugees have swarmed into positions formerly held by American professional men now absent on account of the war and constitute a serious threat of postwar unemployment for native Americans ...

If there are hungry to be fed abroad, let the spirit of Christ stimulate us to export our surpluses instead of destroying them. lt is not necessary or desirable that Refugees be brought to America to be fed. [The Cross and the Flag]

This is not a live-and-let-live, let's-find-peaceful-ways-to-make-the-world-a better-place sort of outlook. It's xenophobic, mean-spirited, and full of distrust and rage toward foreigners.

One of the best-known contemporary versions of this is provided by the "libertarian" perspective promoted by Ron "Papa Doc" Paul and his son, Sen. Rand "Baby Doc" Paul. In general, it's a view that sometimes opposes individual wars, but is fundamentally distrustful of any kind of formal alliances or treaties other than trade treaties, combined with reactionary positions on social and economic issues and a puffed-up, blowhard brand of performative patriotism.

Examples of this kind of thought can be found at sites like Antiwar.com (which also includes some left antiwar commentators), LewRockwell.com (a neo-Confederate site), Chronicles, The American Conservative (which also runs some non-crazy articles), and Taki's Magazine. Warning: the signal-to-noise ratio on some of those sites can be very low!

Let's call the Trump-Pence foreign policy outlook America First. An America First policy can include isolationist-sounding decisions like withdrawing troops from Syria along with contempt for other countries' sovereignty, militarism, and reckless belligerence. This is the kind of throwback to the past, a past both idealized and imagined, that Dov Zakheim describes in the Trump-Pence approach in the opening quotation.

Zakheim also mentions actions of the Trump-Pence Administration that don't fit easily with a simply "isolationist" or even pro-Russian foreign policy, but do fit with America First belligerance:

It is certainly the case that the Trump administration has produced a National Security Strategy that establishes security priorities, confirms the importance of America’s alliances and identifies both Russia and China as major threats to U.S. and allied interests. Consistent with that strategy, Trump has successfully pressed the case for a major boost in defense spending, which should help the armed forces reverse critical readiness and modernization shortfalls. In particular, he has authorized a significant funding increase for what is now called the European Deterrence Initiative, which aims both to deter Russian encroachment and/or disruption of the small Baltic states, and to reassure those vulnerable NATO Eastern European allies. He has also authorized a significant modernization of America’s strategic nuclear forces, while increasing spending on missile defense, thereby signaling to Russia that he was serious when he asserted that the United States would maintain its nuclear superiority indefinitely. [my emphasis]