Victor Davis Hanson

Many are now demanding that Trump act abroad in the way they think he had promised and campaigned–which can be mostly defined as how closely he should parallel their own version of MAGA.

But Trump’s past shows that he never claimed that he was either an ideological isolationist or an interventionist.

He was and is clearly a populist-nationalist: i.e., what in a cost-to-benefit analysis is in the best interests of the U.S. at home and its own particular agendas abroad?

Trump did not like neo-conservatism because he never felt it was in our interests to spend blood and treasure on those who either did not deserve such largess, or who would never evolve in ways we thought they should, or whose fates were not central to our national interests.

So-called, optional, bad-deal, and forever wars in the Middle East and their multitrillion-dollar costs would come ultimately at the expense of shorting Middle America back home.

However, Trump’s first-term bombing of ISIS, standing down “little rocket man”, warning Putin not to invade Ukraine between 2017-21, and killing off Qasem Soleimani, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and many of the attacking Russian Wagner Group in Syria were certainly not Charles Lindberg isolationism but a sort of Jacksonian—something summed up perhaps as the Gadsen “Don’t tread on me”/ or Lucius Sulla’s “No better friend, no worse enemy” .

Trump’s much critiqued references to Putin—most recently during the G7, and his negotiations with him over Ukraine—were never, as alleged, appeasement (he was harder in his first term on Putin than was either Obama or Biden), but art-of-the-deal/transactional (e.g., you don’t gratuitously insult or ostracize your formidable rival in possible deal-making, but seek simultaneously to praise—and beat—him.)

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https://x.com/VDHanson/status/1935398589125247371