278 - Isolationism and Nativism: Dangerous Retreats into Our Past

         Beware the nattering nabobs of nativism. Isolationism grows out of nativism and the latest arousals of identity chauvinism. Nativism and identity particularism are both akin to what is often labelled populism, but they are much stronger and more pernicious sentiments. One of the presidential candidates embraces and stimulates such notions. The other – the embattled legitimate one – roundly rejects such prejudices.

         President Franklin D. Roosevelt saved Europe and the world from Hitler’s Nazism. His lend-lease steadied Britain at crucial junctures despite the American fellow traveling crypto-fascists like aviator Charles Lindbergh, who preached rabid isolationism.

         A pro-Nazi anti-Semite who had spent years touring Europe, Lindbergh strongly advocated non-intervention as a promoter of America First --- the forerunner in so many ways of “Make America Great Again.” In 1939 and 1940 an estimated 80 percent of Americans joined Lindbergh in opposing “becoming entangled in European alliances.” But Roosevelt was wiser and much more aware of what was best for the world and for Americans.

         Trump, aligned with Putin, is Lindbergh’s lineal ideological descendant, whether or not our ex-president has or has not ever heard of Lindbergh. And it is a similar nativist message that Trump pushes, to the detriment of freedom in the world and our responsibility to support Kyiv in order to cause our own freedoms to endure.

Isolationism is the antithesis of engagement. And we need the kinds of engagement that Trump and the Heritage Foundation disdain more than ever in 2024 and beyond.

         President Biden faces those same nativist isolationists as he and Europe confront Putin’s Stalin-like aggressions. Biden is intent on keeping Ukraine free in order to strengthen what is left of the globe’s post-World War II liberal order and its respect for sovereign rights and the rule of law.

         Biden has done enormous good by shoring up the North Atlantic Organization Alliance (NATO), making it stronger, more self-confident, more focused on the immense task of countering Putin’s invasion and his many other pretensions.  NATO’s power, said Biden, is a testament to the remarkable progress that its thirty-two members have made – together and united. U.S. support shows that, as Biden enunciated, “our commitment is broad and deep, that we’re ready, that we’re willing and we’re able to deter aggression and defend every inch of NATO territory across every domain: land, air, sea, cyber and space.”

         Trump, however, has made it evident that any administration of his in Washington would abandon “delinquent” members of NATO to the mercies of Russian invaders. In a Florida speech recently, he slammed the alliance as a waste of time and a collection of  “deadbeats.”  “I will not protect you from Russia,” he repeated what he had told NATO leaders several years ago. Why protect “deadbeats?”

But our allies are hardly deadbeats. Twenty-three NATO nations now spend more than 2 percent of their annual GDPs on defense. Canada is the only standout laggard. The notion that the United States would abrogate its mutual defense obligations under Article V of the NATO treaty – as Trump threatens -- has roiled the alliance and excited Putin and Xi Jinping.

“I didn’t know what the hell NATO was too much before,” Trump told cheering supporters in Florida. “But it didn’t take me long to figure it out, like about two minutes. And the first thing I figured out was they were not paying. We were paying, we were paying almost fully for NATO. And I said that’s unfair.”

Trump, ever the isolation-minded transactionalist, has called NATO a “protection racket” when it is truly a value-driven alliance of democracies and a critical centerpiece of the global architecture of freedom.  No component nation pays the U.S. to give it protection.

Trump panders to the inbred isolationist impulses of Americans that still linger, especially in the far backwoods. He may even be a deep-down isolationist himself, but it is equally likely that – as with so much else – his principles are less pronounced than is his ability to know what plays well in the hinterland. And so isolationism and nativism are impulses that strongly resonate with sections of America that resent others getting anything that they do not have or cannot receive.  Or maybe it is the same impulse that causes descendants of immigrants (even recent Latino ones) to want to close the door after themselves – to deny newcomers the opportunities that they or their grandparents and great-grandparents enjoyed.

Lindbergh was not alone in wanting to keep the Atlantic Ocean between us and the difficult problems of the rest of the world.  Why should we pay real money to help foreigners save their ways of life? Why should we re-arm Ukraine? Does it matter to us if Russia rules Ukraine and goes on to conquer Moldova and threaten Poland?

Those are among the biased questions that Trump, speaking for isolationists and nativists, still asks. Only Biden and his administration speak for and about the larger needs and our responsibility as the privileged leaders of the free world to back NATO, back Ukraine, and support all of those foreign groups who seek to overcome tyranny  - the Uyghers in Xinjiang, the Karen and Karenni (and others) in Myanmar, the Ennahda Party in Tunisia, the embattled democrats in Kenya and Zimbabwe, and those patriots hoping for a free election today in Rwanda.

There is a cohort of contemporary Americans who have disdained the rest of the world, just as Trump has bad words to say about outsiders. The rest of us ought to join Biden and the spirit of Franklin Roosevelt in embracing the turmoil and existential crises of the world. We cannot turn our back on freedom strivings across the globe.  Had Roosevelt failed to heed his inner sense of justice, fascism could very easily have triumphed in Europe.  Just as Roosevelt protected us and our ideals then, so Biden protects them now. Trump would not. Like Putin, his instincts and ambitions are dangerous rather than reassuring.