President Donald Trump’s foreign policy, like all his policy, is a political instinct made up on the fly, but is American isolationism not seen since the Great Depression.
To make America great again, Trump will isolate it from the rest of the world, even from Mexico and Canada, by building a physical wall and tearing up the North American Free Trade Agreement.
The protectionism of his anti-free trade policy and his personal attack on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau after Trudeau expressed his dismay at new steel and aluminum tariffs, is the new isolationism.
Before Trump, President Herbert Hoover was the last advocate of isolationism and he fashioned it after the ravages of the Depression cut his presidency to one term, from 1929 to 1933.
A man more unlike Donald Trump would be hard to find. Hoover was an accomplished global mining engineer and a conservative intellectual who authored several books.
Before he was the president, Hoover was an able public servant who had been the cabinet minister in President Warren Harding’s administration known as “the Secretary of Commerce and deputy secretary of everything else.”
Hoover’s isolationism was well-informed. He had headed the American relief initiative to feed Europe after the devastation of the First World War. As president, he spent a weekend with Adolf Hitler at Herman Goering’s hunting lodge after the Nazi regime came to power in Germany.
After he left office, Hoover opposed further American involvement in Europe. He fought against American participation in the Second World War in Europe.
The isolationism of wealthy American conservatives like Hoover, with its popular support, kept the U.S. out of the war until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.
To keep his campaign promise of “make America great again,” Trump is withdrawing from the Pax Americana that began with the Marshall Plan to restore Europe’s post-war economy and U.S. participation in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, created to defend against the Soviet Union, and from the G7.
Trump is also ending the United States’ role as policeman of the world, which has cost 100,000 American lives on the Korean Peninsula, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq and the nasty little wars of peace that have flowed from American intervention.
At his summit with Kim Jong-Un in Singapore last week, his achievement was to make the first move in disengagement from the Korean Peninsula by ending annual joint American-South Korean military exercises.
In his shadowy dealings with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Russia is a business opportunity. To “normalize” relationships with the Russians, Trump is willing to play by their business rules, which include corruption and self-dealing of the elite that is bewildering to North Americans.
In Trump’s more-transparent relationship with China’s leader, Xi Jinping, China is treated as an economic competitor.
In the 1960s, President Lyndon Johnson feared the fall of dominoes – nations like Laos, Vietnam, Peru and Greece – to communism.
Under Trump, let the dominoes fall, as long as they fall outside Fortress North America.
- Frank Dabbs is a veteran political and business journalist and author.
