Why Trump and Vance Aren’t Really Isolationists

With the Republican presidential ticket now set, foreign policy commentators and editorial pages have come to characterize Donald Trump and J.D. Vance as staunch isolationists who would pull up America’s drawbridge, shatter Washington’s traditional alliances, and give the world’s autocrats more license to run roughshod over the so-called rules-based international order. This is a profound misread of the two men.

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It’s easy to see why so many Americans and Europeans are worried, if not petrified, about Trump and Vance’s worldview. The two are extremely skeptical of the transatlantic alliance in its current formulation, so much so that Trump has flirted with withdrawing the U.S. from NATO if Europe doesn’t spend more on its defense. Trump and Vance haven’t minced words: they see Europe as too complacent given its security environment and perfectly comfortable with outsourcing its defense to the U.S. all while taking advantage of the American worker through lopsided trade terms. On Ukraine specifically, the Trump-Vance ticket is unified in its belief that continuing the status-quo policy not only brings added strain on the U.S. defense industry but delays the inevitable diplomatic settlement Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will eventually have to work out with Russia to end the war.

But it’s outside of the European theater where Trump and Vance’s instincts are far more hawkish than the conventional wisdom suggests.

In the Middle East, Trump and Vance decry America’s military entanglements and consistently boast about their strong opposition to the war in Iraq (Vance was a Marine who served a tour of duty there), arguably the worst U.S. foreign policy catastrophe in decades. Yet Trump’s four years in office was full of U.S. military engagements that candidate Trump would likely have denounced. He bombed Syrian regime facilities twice, in 2017 and 2018, in response to chemical weapons attacks on civilians. He frequently increased the U.S. force posture in the region, including by sending more U.S. missile defense units and thousands of additional troops to Saudi Arabia after a 2019 attack on the kingdom’s oil facilities claimed by Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthis (Tehran denies involvement). He notably approved the assassination of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani in Iraq in 2020, a decision that could have sparked a region-wide conflagration. And despite Trump announcing via tweet that he was withdrawing U.S. troops from Syria, that never happened. Instead, the U.S. military presence in northeastern Syria was consolidated as hawks inside his administration broadened the U.S. mission there. Trump is also quite bullish on the ongoing war in Gaza, stressing that Israel needs to “finish the job.”

For all of Vance’s talk about shedding foreign entanglements—including co-sponsoring the End Endless Wars Act—he doesn’t seem to want the U.S. to get out of the Middle East. He wants to get tough on Iran, pointing to the Soleimani assassination as successful deterrence (Iran responded to the assassination days later by sending missiles into two different U.S. military bases in Iraq, wounding over 100 U.S. troops in the process). He also wants the U.S. to build on the Trump-era Abraham Accords by brokering a diplomatic agreement between Israel and the Gulf States, both to smooth Israel’s place in the region and to bolster the containment strategy against Iran. How he would do that is a mystery; as long as the war in Gaza persists and Palestinians continue to die in Israeli bombings, normalization is off the table.

Trump and Vance are even more hawkish on Asia. During his first term, Trump elevated China as an aspiring hegemon in key U.S. national security documents, withdrew from the Cold War-era Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) in part to preserve the option of deploying ground-based long-range 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 those missions came within 12 miles of features claimed by China.

On Taiwan, the Trump Administration rolled out new guidelines that permitted U.S. diplomats to interact directly with their Taiwanese counterparts, exchanges that were previously stymied by long-standing State Department rules. Trump didn’t jettison the four decade-old U.S. policy of strategic ambiguity on Taiwan but accelerated defense sales—totaling more than $18 billion—to Taipei to deter China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) from using force to reunify the self-governed island with the mainland. That included F-16 fighter aircraft, harpoon missiles, HIMARS launchers, and torpedoes.

Vance is no dove on Taiwan, either. A good chunk of his isolationist streak on Ukraine is so U.S. defense manufacturers have the resources and flexibility to fulfill orders Taiwan has already placed, much of which has been in limbo.

One can agree or disagree with any or all of these positions. While China may now be Washington’s core global competitor, the U.S. 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 indisputable hegemon. Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Vietnam are already on their way toward balancing Chinese military power through larger defense budgets and bilateral defense arrangements. 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, meanwhile, should be deprioritized in U.S. grand strategy; the U.S. can afford to do so because Iran is weak in conventional terms and U.S. deployments in Syria and Iraq have outlived their usefulness. In addition, the U.S. should start treating Israel as a normal country, supporting it when its goals align and dissociating itself when Israeli leaders pursue policies that undermine U.S. interests.

Regardless of how one may view the issues, one thing is clear: Trump and Vance aren’t isolationists. It is a word thrown around so liberally that it’s lost its meaning.