Hillary Clinton has charged that Donald Trump’s foreign policy is “dangerously incoherent,” but her own ideas about America’s role in the world are worryingly clear, writes Thaddeus Russell:
What Clinton and her bi-partisan allies find most objectionable in Trump’s foreign policy pronouncements is not so much their lack of coherence but their discordance with the idea that America should be the leader of the world. “It’s a choice between a fearful America that’s less secure and less engaged with the world,” Clinton declared, “and a strong, confident America that leads to keep our country safe and our economy growing.”
Trump has certainly had his inconsistencies, but “Make America Great Again” has never meant “Make America Lead Again.” Clinton singled out for opprobrium the proposals made by Trump that would dismantle a century-long project initiated by progressives to remake other countries in the image of the United States. That project, which historians of U.S. foreign relations typically refer to as Wilsonianism, after the first president to give it intellectual shape, has been carried out with varying degrees of militancy but always embraced uncritically by both Democratic and Republican presidents since Wilson declared the United States to be “the savior of the world.”
To Clinton and other inheritors of Wilson’s calling, Trump’s specific sins are what some have crudely called isolationism. Rather than seek U.S. military dominance as a means to extend American influence, Trump has insisted that other nations bolster their militaries and defend themselves, which Clinton dismissively reduced to a demand to “let more countries have nuclear weapons.”
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