Put aside how disingenuous it is for Biden — who opposed most of Reagan’s successful Cold War policies — to embrace the Gipper to attack Trump. Is Biden’s critique accurate? Is Trump an isolationist?
It is undeniable that there is an increasingly vocal isolationist faction on the right, and that this faction — epitomized by Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) — believes Trump is their ideological ally. But a close look at Trump’s record suggests he is not the isolationist they hope him to be.
Consider: When Iran crossed his red line against killing Americans, Trump did not launch feckless strikes against Iranian proxies the way Biden did. He ordered the U.S. military to target Iran’s terrorist mastermind, Qasem Soleimani — and then warned Tehran that if it retaliated, he had selected “52 Iranian sites … representing the 52 American hostages taken by Iran many years ago” and that “those targets, and Iran itself, WILL BE HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD.” Iran backed down. That’s hardly isolationist.
Or take the Islamic State. While the Obama-Biden administration presided over the disastrous U.S. withdrawal from Iraq in 2011, which gave rise to the ISIS caliphate, Trump drove the Islamic State from its caliphate — and then ordered the killing of its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Trump twice launched military strikes against the regime of Bashar al-Assad for using chemical weapons against Syrian civilians. Trump also launched a cyberattack on Russia — an act of war — targeting St. Petersburg’s Internet Research Agency, the troll farm that spearheaded Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. He also gave the green light for the U.S. military to take out hundreds of Wagner Group mercenaries in eastern Syria.
After the Obama-Biden administration refused to give Ukraine weapons following Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea, Trump became the first president to provide Ukraine with lethal aid, transferring Javelin antitank missiles that helped Ukraine defend itself when Russia invaded again on Biden’s watch. And while isolationists like Vance and Greene insist the United States should provide “not one more penny” to Ukraine, Trump has said he might dramatically increase Ukraine aid. “I would tell Putin, if you don’t make a deal, we’re going to give [Ukraine] a lot,” he told Maria Bartiromo of Fox News. “We’re going to give them more than they ever got, if we have to.”
Trump also presided over what he called “a colossal rebuilding of the American Armed Forces,” delivering large increases in defense spending and creating the Space Force as the first new military branch since 1947. Biden, by contrast, has put the United States on track to spend the lowest percent of GDP on defense since President Bill Clinton tried to claim a misguided post-Cold War “peace dividend.”
Trump negotiated the release of more Americans from foreign captivity in four years than Barack Obama did in eight — and he did it without paying ransoms or sending planeloads of cash to terrorist regimes. He built an international coalition to isolate the Maduro regime in Venezuela. He brokered three Arab-Israeli peace accords — the first in more than a quarter-century, and a diplomatic achievement worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize. He also negotiated a historic new free trade agreement with Mexico and Canada, the USMCA, that even Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) admitted “is much better than NAFTA” — as well as new trade pacts with Japan and South Korea. Biden, by contrast, is on track to be the first president since Jimmy Carter to neither negotiate nor sign a trade deal during his term in office.
Or take NATO. Biden claims “Trump wants to eviscerate NATO.” Well, not according to Trump, who said in March he will “100 percent” remain in NATO so long as allies carry their weight when it comes to military spending. As president, Trump got allies to spend hundreds of billions more on our common defense. When Trump left office, allies were spending $130 billion more on defense than they did in 2016 — a figure that was on track to rise to $400 billion by the end of 2024 — and twice as many were meeting their commitments to spend 2 percent of gross domestic product on defense. Bruised feelings notwithstanding, Trump left NATO stronger than it had been since the end of the Cold War.
Critics will respond: What about all the international agreements he withdrew from, such as the Paris climate agreement, the Iran nuclear deal and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty? Withdrawing from international agreements that are not in U.S. interests is not isolationist — it’s conservative. George W. Bush withdrew from the ABM Treaty, which barred the United States from deploying ballistic missile defenses, and removed the United States’ signature from the Rome Statute creating the International Criminal Court.
Trump’s record certainly isn’t perfect, from his aborted plan to invite the Taliban to Camp David to giving Turkey a green light to invade Syria and attack our Kurdish allies. But looked at objectively, his overall foreign policy record was one of the best of any modern U.S. president.
One often-overlooked reason for that success is that Trump surrounded himself with a “team of rivals” in his first term that included many Reaganite conservatives. It is unclear whether he would continue this approach in a second term, or whether a Trump White House would be staffed by those who would advise him against all the bold actions on the world stage that made his first term so successful. I hope he’ll stick with the strategy that delivered so much for the United States in his first term.
This much is clear: A second Biden term would be a disaster. Biden likes to say that on his watch, “America is back.” You know what else is back? War. Trump is the only president in the 21st century on whose watch Russia has not invaded one of its neighbors, and was the first president since Reagan on whose watch America had not been dragged into a new war either directly or by proxy. He achieved this not by retreating behind a “fortress America,” but by projecting strength on the world stage.
If that’s isolationism, save us from Biden’s policies of engagement.
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