Donald Trump presents himself as the man uniquely qualified to “remasculate” U.S. foreign policy, to sweep aside those who believe leadership depends as much on patience, discipline, generosity and imagination as on military muscle and an iron will. He wants…
As for Trumpism vs. Bushism, one will be no less dependent on “populist nationalism” than the other, to whatever extent it is also successful: In a mass electoralist national system under popular sovereignty, the winner will always be the truest national populist, by definition, if not necessarily the purest national populist according to some external or merely intellectual standard.
Soon, in whatever state or state of states or unstate we are found, today’s neo-isolationists of left and right may find themselves exposed to ironies mirroring those now felt by the neo-conservatives of just the other day, who thought they were advancing a needed heightening, deepening, and expansion of engagement, but instead reinforced an older impulse to wash one’s hands of it all.
“Resolving conflict worldwide” and “changing dictatorship into democracies” count in this context as simplistic, even childish reductions of any questions truly before us. When we focus on such simplisms instead of treating them for what they are, every movement of any kind falls subject to strategic hypochondria, a condition under which even a move consequentially “inward” also becomes impossible: A hypochondriac nation will resist turning consequentially in any direction at all.
