In 1941, as President Franklin D. Roosevelt marshaled support for the fight against fascism, his chief antagonists were isolationists at home. “What I seek to convey,” he said at the beginning of an address to Congress, “is the historic truth that the United States as a nation has at all times maintained clear, definite opposition to any attempt to lock us in behind an ancient Chinese wall while the procession of civilization went past.” Roosevelt prevailed, and that victory expanded America’s relationship with the world in ways that remade both.
Eighty-four years later, President Trump is systematically severing America from the globe. This is not simply a shift in foreign policy. It is a divorce so comprehensive that it makes Britain’s exit from the European Union look modest by comparison.
Consider the breadth of this effort. Allies have been treated like adversaries. The United States has withdrawn from international agreements on fundamental issues like health and climate change. A “nation of immigrants” now deports people without due process, bans refugees and is trying to end birthright citizenship. Mr. Trump’s tariffs have upended the system of international trade, throwing up new barriers to doing business with every country on Earth. Foreign assistance has largely been terminated. So has support for democracy abroad. Research cuts have rolled back global scientific research and cooperation. The State Department is downsizing. Exchange programs are on the chopping block. Global research institutions like the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Wilson Center have been effectively shut down. And, of course, the United States is building a wall along its southern border.
Other countries are under no obligation to help a 78-year-old American president fulfill a fanciful vision of making America great again. Already a Gaza cease-fire has unraveled, Russia continues its war on Ukraine, Europe is turning away from America, Canadians are boycotting our goods and a Chinese Communist Party that endured the Great Famine and the Cultural Revolution seems prepared to weather a few years of tariffs. Travel to the United States is down 12 percent compared with last March, as tourists recoil from America’s authoritarian turn.
The ideologues driving Mr. Trump’s agenda defend their actions by pointing to the excesses of American foreign policy, globalization and migration. There is, of course, much to lament there. But Mr. Trump’s ability to campaign on these problems doesn’t solve them in government. Indeed, his remedies will do far more harm to the people he claims to represent than to the global elites that his MAGA movement attacks.
Start with the economic impact. If the current reduction in travel to the United States continues, it could cost up to $90 billion this year alone, along with tens of thousands of jobs. Tariffs will drive up prices and productivity will slow if mass deportations come for the farm workers who pick our food, the construction workers who build our homes and the care workers who look after children and the elderly. International students pay to attend American universities; their demonization and dehumanization could imperil the $44 billion they put into our economy each year and threaten a sector with a greater trade surplus than our civilian aircraft sector.
The outlook gets worse with time. Why would other countries choose to invest in a country where the president roils global markets through social media posts, profits from crypto schemes that fleece ordinary people and undermines the rule of law upon which commerce depends? It’s far more likely that nations will make trade deals and forge supply chains without the United States while China and its growing list of partners accelerate a movement away from the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.
In the short term, treating international relations like a protection racket could yield some bilateral transactions. Yet something more fundamental is being lost: trust. An America that, for all its mistakes abroad, guaranteed the security of its allies. An America that, for all its nativism, took in refugees and educated countless world leaders through its universities and exchange programs. An America that, for all its hubris, responded to humanitarian crises and showcased an appealing cultural openness. An America that people around the world liked more than its government.
The destruction of that trust will hurt us more than the rest of the world. This was certainly the case with Brexit, a project animated by the same blend of nationalism and nostalgia that has propelled Mr. Trump. Nearly a decade after voting to divorce Europe, Britain finds itself wrestling with a predictable incapacity to generate growth, a diminished position in its own region and a growing factionalism in its politics. Less than a third of Britons now believe they made the right decision.
We are following that course on a global scale. After 250 years of growing more diverse and more connected to the world, Mr. Trump and his cohort are imposing the staid insularity of self-imposed decline. The draining of democratic values from our national identity will leave America defined by its size, power and quixotic lust for profit: a place, not an idea. Roosevelt left us the inheritance of believing we were the good guys. Mr. Trump is eviscerating that pretense as cuts to U.S.A.I.D. have almost certainly caused more civilian deaths than Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Here is the good news: A nation’s relationship with the world is not defined solely by its government, particularly one as big and multifaceted as the United States.
In the first Trump term, state and local governments remained committed to combating climate change, welcoming immigrants, protecting higher education and sustaining global ties. All those efforts will be harder in our new reality, but that only makes them more important. As Republicans often remind us, we live in a federal republic, and communities that maintain connections to the world will be better positioned to succeed than those that choose to follow Mr. Trump down the rabbit hole of isolationism.
Our institutions also have a choice. Part of what has shocked the world about their capitulation to the Trump administration is the failure to grasp that the moral choice is the best path to self-preservation. Law firms can choose to care more about the law than whether a callous competitor will pick up some of their business. Universities can build credibility within an interconnected world instead of validating the lie that a few students chanting “Free Palestine” is more dangerous than a far-right takeover of academic freedom. The entertainment sector can tell compelling stories about a consequential era instead of algorithmically designed superhero junk. Billionaires can spend money on STEM education for girls instead of financing celebrity trips into a higher part of the atmosphere.
At a more individual level, Americans can demonstrate that they don’t want to be defined by Mr. Trump’s xenophobia. There are international students who fear for their safety; defend their right to be here. There are colleagues and customers around the world; American businesses should engage them in new ways. There are enormous shortfalls in humanitarian assistance; American philanthropy should fill as much as it can. There are Republican members of Congress whose constituents will be devastated by Mr. Trump’s policies; make them more afraid of losing their voters than the threats of a lame-duck president.
The wrong way to respond to our current emergency is to promise, as President Joe Biden did, that America will be “back.” That ignores the enormous mistakes elites made over the last three decades and the political context that allowed Mr. Trump to return to power with the mind-set of an arsonist. We’re not coming back, and that’s OK. Indeed, it’s an opportunity.
Our intention should be to return to the world as a different country. That requires something that Americans have not always done well: listening. We have much to learn. And ironically, we now have more in common with people in other countries living under corruption, autocracy and oligarchy. Perhaps this chapter in our national experience can be a moment when we find a new kind of solidarity with others who have been through versions of what we are now experiencing.
The United States will never be a normal country, if there is such a thing. Like China and Russia, it is too big, too shaped by a revolutionary and imperial past, too rived by traumas that it has inflicted and absorbed. What Roosevelt understood is that America’s peculiarities could stir us to a more enlightened form of self-interest. As a multiracial nation connected to the world and committed to a set of freedoms core to our identity, we could never afford to follow the foolish path of America First — a slogan that amounted to capitulation to fascism.
America’s strength has always been connected to the fact that it comprises people from everywhere who chose not to be defined by a ruler or to fear the future. At a time when power in the world is becoming more diffuse, our shifting demographics should be seen as a strength — not something to be feared or suppressed through a reactionary politics that shuts out the world. If we continue down that path, the procession of civilization will leave us behind, in a fearful, diminished and impoverished place. If we recover our sense of agency, we can re-engage the world as a part of it — neither hegemon nor hostile.
Ben Rhodes is a contributing Opinion writer and the author, most recently, of “After the Fall: The Rise of Authoritarianism in the World We’ve Made.”
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