Walter Russell Mead
The twenty-first century has seen the return to prominence of U.S. foreign policy traditions once largely considered relics of an outmoded past. Jacksonian national populism, once dismissed as an immature sentiment that an enlightened nation had left behind, returned with a fury after 9/11. With the George W. Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, Jeffersonian isolationism—the belief that U.S. intervention abroad leads only to endless war, the enrichment of corporate elites, and the erosion of American democracy—also reemerged as a potent force on both the right and the left.
These two schools returned to prominence as the post–Cold War foreign policy consensus broke up. After 1990, a broadly liberal and globalist consensus defined the boundaries within which mostly Democratic liberal internationalists competed against mostly Republican neoconservatives. President Barack Obama’s retreat from humanitarian intervention following the disastrous campaign in Libya in 2011 illustrated the waning hold of liberal internationalism among Democrats. So did his restrained response to Russian aggression against Ukraine in 2014. Likewise, Donald Trump’s shock victory in the 2016 Republican presidential primary contest signaled the collapse of neoconservatism as a significant electoral force among the Republican base. In both parties, restraint eclipsed intervention as the dominant mode of foreign policy, and a commitment to free trade gave way to various forms of protectionism and industrial policy.
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