Trump’s awful truth: the US can go it alone

One night in June 1942, a German U-boat dropped four Nazi saboteurs on a Hamptons beach. They took a train to New York, where their leader, George John Dasch, informed the FBI about them. Four other Germans, who had landed in Ponte Vedra, Florida, wearing swimming trunks adorned with swastikas, were caught too. The US executed six of the saboteurs, but spared Dasch. He died in 1992 in Ludwigshafen, Germany, aged 89.

The story, recounted by author Christopher Klein, marks the largest incursion into the American mainland by a hostile state this past century. (Pearl Harbor happened 2,000 miles off the mainland, and the 9/11 attacks were perpetrated by a terrorist group.) In short, the US is almost impregnable. Hardly any event off its shores affects it. This creates the American paradox: the US remains the “indispensable nation” for defending vulnerable countries such as Ukraine, yet it can treat them as dispensable. The free world needs the US, but the US may not need the free world. That’s the horrible logic behind Donald Trump’s worldview. If, as president, he abandons Ukraine and other democracies, the US will probably be just fine.

The US’s stint as global policeman peaked with the D-Day landings. D-Day saved Europe, but it was arguably an act of American altruism. Had Hitler won in Europe, the US might have thrived in isolation. The US then built a global postwar architecture — the UN, Nato, international financial and trade institutions — that benefited the world more than it did Americans. Global trade only enhanced American prosperity a little. Even today, the US’s trade-to-GDP ratio is just 25 per cent. China, Russia and Japan are between 38 and 47 per cent, France and the UK about 70 per cent, and Germany at 100 per cent, calculates the World Bank.

American military hawks long made two false arguments for intervening in the world. One, the US had to intervene for its own security and, two, it could do so successfully. In fact, the US won only one war after 1945 (against Saddam Hussein in 1991), yet the military failures in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan didn’t endanger its security. That’s largely because no country ever seriously contemplated attacking the US. The only genuine threat to it was from intercontinental nuclear missiles, but once a state got those, the US wouldn’t fight it anyway.

Thirty years ago, Madeleine Albright, then secretary of state, asked General Colin Powell: “What’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” The truthful answer would have been: it serves as a job creation scheme, virility symbol, stimulus package for politically powerful regions and state subsidy for arms companies.

Even when the military did fight, the death toll was always higher at home, from guns, drugs and mental health problems. The 7,000-plus American troops killed in wars since 9/11 are outnumbered by homicides in Chicago alone in that period, and outnumbered fourfold by suicides of military personnel.

Some domestic American conflicts look almost like wars. Local police forces deployed kit bought for use in Iraq and Afghanistan against Black neighbourhoods, while in 2020 Trump suggested troops shoot Black Lives Matter protesters. For him, the point of the military is to suppress domestic opponents.

He intuits something fundamental about Americans: their scariest enemies are within. That’s why every foreign war gets converted into an American culture war. In the 1950s, the belief that the Soviets were going to attack was transmuted into the McCarthyite hunt for mostly imaginary American communists. Today, Israel’s war in Gaza morphs into a Republican crusade against university presidents, while Ukraine’s fight for survival becomes a Trumpian weapon to bash the Democrats.

Trump’s political genius lies in expressing aspects of the American id that were taboo in Washington. Insofar as he thinks about the world beyond the US, he wants to hurt it. Nationalists elsewhere fantasise about ditching alliances and acting alone. Britain has tried this with Brexit, Russia with various invasions and Israel in Gaza. Trump realises that the impregnable US actually could go it alone. It can downgrade allies to clients. In his long-standing vision of Nato as a US-run protection scheme, he sees Russia as the “muscle”, scaring Europeans into paying up.

Trumpian isolationism could destroy Ukraine. That would embolden aggressors everywhere, from Russia in eastern Europe to China in Taiwan. But the distant screams would just be fodder for new American culture wars.

Follow Simon @KuperSimon and email him at simon.kuper@ft.com

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