A Republican-led US would not shrink from the world

With Lord Halifax rather than Winston Churchill in charge, does Britain fight on in 1940? Had Richard Nixon not “opened” it, would China be a superpower? What if Pilate had spared Jesus? And so on. There is a repertoire of historical counterfactuals and it was getting stale until a year ago. Then a new question was added to the parlour game. What if Russia had attacked Ukraine while Donald Trump was US president? Imagine: the America Firster looks away, a weapons-starved Kyiv falls, autocrats the world over strike other targets as the west stands exposed as a paper tiger.

This low view of US Republicans is a good thing. It spurs countries to make provisions for their own security in case Trump, or someone in his image, runs America again. Germany and Japan are cases in point. The arsenal of democracy is set to grow.

It is just that, well, a useful misapprehension is still a misapprehension. In foreign affairs, the Republicans are ever more chauvinist. That is not the same thing as isolationist. It is very often the opposite. During his one term in office, Trump fired missiles at Syria as punishment for using chemical weapons, assassinated an Iranian general on the soil of a third country and began (or recognised) a struggle with China for mastery of the century. He also increased defence spending.

He doesn’t believe in the west, no. But because its enemies tend also to be America’s, and nothing is dearer to him than American amour propre, he often ends up acting as a Harry Truman-ish “hard” liberal might. In other words, jingoism has its uses. Yes, it clashes with the give-and-take of international life: Republicans increasingly dislike trade and multilateral bodies. But it is an asset when things turn raw. A conventional US president would support an allied nation under attack because it is the right thing to do. A populist one might support it because anything else looks weak. It is less about principle than face, but leads to the same forward posture.

Populism is as complex and self-contradicting as the next political creed. To an almost Freudian extent, it admires strongmen. Had Russia taken Kyiv at speed, a certain kind of rudderless young man in the west would still be “stanning” Vladimir Putin online as a grandmaster.

At the same time, no one is likelier or better-equipped to butt heads with rough nationalists than other rough nationalists. Trump would both flatter North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and threaten to “totally destroy” him, remember. He had fewer moral qualms with Bashar al-Assad than Barack Obama did, but only one of those US leaders enforced the red line on chemical weapons against the Syrian despot. The other merely drew it. In the populist id, strongman-worship vies with a hatred of being seen to give any quarter to anyone, ever. Even in theory, then, there isn’t an easy equation between populism and appeasement. Even in theory, then, there isn’t an easy equation between populism and appeasement.

True, polls suggest a decline of support among conservative Americans for Ukraine. Republicans in Congress have become ever more difficult about aid. Nations from Europe to east Asia are right to worry about a slackening of American commitment to allies in future. But that could happen under anyone. The US was “leading from behind” before Trump. There is a butter-over-guns caucus on the left. A Democrat (Obama) and an establishment Republican (George W Bush) let a Russian attack on a neighbour happen on their watch without adequate response. One of the most direct calls for a “settlement” with Russia over the past year came from the congressional left.

I used to think that US-watchers invoked no spectre more often, more baselessly, than “isolationism”. It dignifies a movement with little purchase on public life since Pearl Harbor. There will always be a Pat Buchanan or Gore Vidal (note the right-to-left spread) but nothing is achieved by talking them up as though the America might revert to Neutrality Acts and naval retrenchment. The stunning thing about US politics is how few votes for isolation there are in perhaps the only major country that could safely practise it.

Now, I think there is something to be said for talking up the risk of a withdrawn US. That fear is driving up the military ambitions of Europe. It is ending the “neutrality” of some democracies. And framing isolation as a Trumpist thing in particular rallies the global left behind a cause — defence spending — that it might otherwise oppose. Keep the trope going, then. Just don’t believe it.

janan.ganesh@ft.com