I take it we all agree now that he isn’t an “isolationist”. A word that should never have been applied to Donald Trump in the first place went up in smoke last weekend, along with an unknown amount of Iran’s nuclear programme. The US bombings were consistent with his strike against Syria in 2017, against the leader of the militant group Isis in 2019 and against Iran’s most senior general in 2020. Given all the abstract nouns that fit Trump well — jingoism, unilateralism, anti-Europeanism — it is a wonder that isolationism ever saw daylight. It is not even clear that he opposed the Iraq war as a private citizen in 2003.
What is true of one man might turn out to be true of the US as a great power. The lesson of the Iran intervention is that America’s dreaded retreat from the world is more talked about than strictly realistic, whoever is the president.
For a start, keep the “split” over the Iran bombing in some perspective. The most prominent dissenters are Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson, not administration officials or even a large group of congressional Republicans. Some of this is the slavishness of a Maga movement whose ultimate bond is to Trump himself, not to non-intervention or any other principle. (On the same theme, lots of vaccine sceptics revere a president who oversaw and promoted the Covid-19 jab). But it isn’t as if the Democratic revolt has been very thundering, either. Or the wider public one. The market for isolationism in the US tends to be exaggerated from outside, as it fits old stereotypes of an insular people.