Why Donald Trump and JD Vance Aren’t Really Isolationists

Wwith the Republican presidential ticket now defined, foreign policy commentators It is editorial pages began to characterize Donald Trump and J.D. Vance as staunch isolationists that would raise America’s drawbridge, destroy Washington’s traditional alliances and give the world’s autocrats more license to trample the so-called rules-based international order. This is a profound misreading of the two men.

See more information: How far would Trump go?

It’s easy to see why so many Americans and Europeans are concerned, if not petrified, by Trump and Vance’s worldview. Both are extremely skeptical of the transatlantic alliance in its current formulation, so much so that Trump flirted with withdrawal the USA from NATO if Europe does not spend more on its defense. Trump and Vance don’t mince words: they see Europe as very accommodating given its security environment and perfectly comfortable with outsourcing its defense to the US, at the same time taking advantage of the American worker through unbalanced terms of trade. Specifically in the case of Ukraine, the Trump-Vance ticket is unified in its belief that the continuation of status quo politics not only brings additional pressure on the US defense industry but it delays the inevitable diplomatic agreement. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will eventually have to work with Russia to end the war.

But it is outside the European theater that Trump and Vance’s instincts are far more aggressive than conventional wisdom suggests.

In the Middle East, Trump and Vance condemn US military entanglements and consistently boast of their strong opposition to the war in Iraq (Vance was a Marine who carried out a mission there), arguably the worst US foreign policy catastrophe in decades. However, Trump’s four years in office were filled with U.S. military commitments that candidate Trump would likely have denounced. He bombed Syrian regime facilities twice, in 2017 and 2018, in response to chemical weapons attacks against civilians. He frequently increased U.S. force posture in the region, including sending more US missile defense units and thousands of additional troops for Saudi Arabia after an attack in 2019 the kingdom’s oil installations claimed by Yemen’s Houthis, supported by Iran (Tehran denies involvement). He notably approved the assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in Iraq in 2020, a decision that could have triggered a region-wide conflagration. And despite Trump announcing via tweet that he was withdrawing US troops from Syria, that never happened. Instead, the US military presence in northeastern Syria was consolidated like hawks within your administration expanded the US mission there. Trump is also quite optimistic about the ongoing war in Gaza, stressing that Israel needs to “finish the job”.

For all of Vance’s talk about extricating himself from foreign entanglements – including co-sponsoring the End of Endless Wars Law–he doesn’t seem to want the US to leave the Middle East. He wants to be tough on Iranpointing to the assassination of Soleimani as a successful deterrent (Iran responded to the assassination days later by sending missiles against two different US military bases in Iraq, injuring more than 100 US soldiers in the process). He also wants the US to develop the Trump era Abraham Accords mediating a diplomatic agreement between Israel and the Gulf States, both to soften Israel’s position in the region and to reinforce the containment strategy against Iran. How he would do this is a mystery; As long as the war in Gaza persists and Palestinians continue to die in Israeli bombings, normalization will be out of the question.

Trump and Vance are even more aggressive toward Asia. During his first term, Trump elevated China as an aspiring hegemon in key US national security documents, withdrew from the Cold War-era Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, in part to preserve the option of deploying long-range land-based missiles to Asia, warned about Beijing’s nuclear weapons development and military modernization, and institutionalized U.S. freedom of navigation exercises in critical waterways in the South China Sea and Taiwan Strait. Some of these missions took place less than 12 miles from sites claimed by China.

In Taiwan, the Trump administration released new guidelines that allowed U.S. diplomats to interact directly with their Taiwanese counterparts, exchanges that had previously been hampered by long-standing State Department rules. Trump did not discard the US policy of strategic ambiguity towards Taiwan, which has been in force for four decades, but he accelerated defense sales – totaling more than US$ 18 billion—to Taipei to dissuade the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) from using force to reunify the autonomous island with the mainland. This included F-16 fighter planeharpoon missiles, HIMARS launchers and torpedoes.

Vance is no dove in Taiwan either. A good part of his isolationist streak in Ukraine is so that US defense manufacturers have the resources and flexibility to fulfill orders Taiwan has already taken a stance, much of which is in limbo.

One can agree or disagree with any or all of these positions. While China may now be Washington’s main global competitor, the US foreign policy establishment tends to overestimate Beijing’s military power and underestimate the power of China’s immediate neighbors – none of whom want to see China emerge as Asia’s undisputed hegemon. Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and Vietnam are already on track to balance Chinese military power through larger defense budgets and bilateral defense agreements. Trump’s emphasis on burden-sharing in Europe is consistent with a long history of U.S. presidents dating back to Dwight D. Eisenhower. The Middle East, however, should be disenfranchised in US grand strategy; the US can afford to do so because Iran is conventionally weak and US deployments in Syria and Iraq have outlived their usefulness. Furthermore, the US should start treating Israel like a normal country, supporting it when its goals align and dissociating itself when Israeli leaders pursue policies that harm US interests.

Regardless of how you view the issues, one thing is clear: Trump and Vance are not isolationists. It is a word used so liberally that it has lost its meaning.