MAGA’s Vision for America in Retreat

In his second term, Donald Trump’s approach to foreign policy has departed from the vision he and his interpreters promoted on the campaign trail.

The president entered office promising to confront China and tie up America’s loose ends in Europe to facilitate the rebalancing of its commitments from the continent. So far, he has largely avoided the former while failing at the latter — an unsurprising outcome that has so far mirrored Barack Obama’s failure in pursuit of that same goal. Trump, who had long mouthed the Jacksonian platitudes his advisers wrote for him about the undesirability of “international unions that tie us up and bring America down,” evinced none of that skepticism when conducting strikes on Iran’s nuclear program alongside Israel. Indeed, only the truest of true believers in the effort to create an intellectual framework around populist isolationism seemed to care that Trump betrayed his own credo.