America Is Cursed by a Foreign Policy of Nostalgia

Nancy Okail and Matthew Duss

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U.S. foreign policy is adrift between the old order and one that has yet to be defined. Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 U.S. presidential election awakened many in Washington to the reality that despite the political elite’s presumption of an unassailable foreign policy consensus, many Americans questioned the assumptions that had guided decades of the U.S. approach to the world—in particular, the idea that an international order backed by American military hegemony was self-evidently worth maintaining, no matter the cost. The 2024 election has confirmed that 2016 was not an anomaly. The old Washington consensus is dead.

But Trump’s “America first” approach is not a viable alternative. Despite often being mislabeled as isolationism, what Trump offers is in fact aggressive unilateralism, or what the political scientist Barry Posen has termed “illiberal hegemony”: a vision of the United States unbound by rules and unashamedly self-interested, no longer getting ripped off by a self-dealing and entrenched Washington political establishment and free-riding international allies and clients. In his speech to the Republican convention, Vice President–elect JD Vance built on this theme, weaving his own personal story of disillusionment with the Iraq war, in which he served, into a broader narrative of elite failure and impunity. Democrats neglected to respond adequately (even bafflingly touting the endorsement of one of the Iraq war’s key architects, former Vice President Dick Cheney), leaving a lane wide open for Trump to present himself, however cynically, as the antiwar candidate.

Americans need an alternative to the choice between “America first” unilateralism or “America is back” nostalgia. Putting a new coat of paint on the old liberal internationalism will not do—neither for Americans nor for most of the world’s countries and peoples, who understandably see U.S. leaders’ appeals to a “rules-based” order as a thin varnish for an order ruled, and often bent or broken, with impunity by the United States and its friends. Progressives and Democrats now have an opportunity—and obligation—to map a better way forward.