“Every single American president from FDR on has believed that America has to exercise global leadership. The only exception is Donald Trump.” – Max Boot, PBS, Jan. 1, 2024.
“Trump is squandering America’s moral capital — and inviting a global backlash against his avaricious overreach,” Max Boot, Washington Post, Jan. 12, 2026
Sometimes, we wish the never-Trumpers of the world could settle on the reason they think Donald Trump is an existential threat to the nation.
Up until a few weeks ago, the threat he posed, we were told, was that he was an isolationist.
As pathological Trump-hater Max Boot repeatedly said, the world needs U.S. leadership, and Trump’s isolationalism was threatening peace and stability around the globe.
Boot was hardly the only one.
The Center for American Progress – as recently as April – warned that Trump’s “self-imposed isolation only makes it harder to solve shared challenges and harms American competitiveness.”
Fortune magazine, in March, ran a piece about how Henry Luce, the fabled founder of Time magazine, would be “appalled by the president’s narrow-minded retreat from global commitments” and “would have parried Trump’s isolationist thrust — and not cowered in fear of retaliation.”
Before the election, the National Interest ran a piece warning that “It is likely that in a second term, an angry and empowered Trump would move more quickly, forcefully, and effectively to achieve his goals, among which is a more isolationist foreign policy.”
Retired U.S. Naval Admiral James Stavridis said in June that “The emerging Trump Doctrine can accurately be described by a very different version of the letters IED,” where the “I” stood for isolationism. “That was the dominant force in U.S. foreign policy in the 1930s, and we paid a high price for it in World War II.”
Now, Max Boot is telling everyone that not only is Trump an imperialist, but that “the world should have seen it coming.”
And, as usual, he’s not alone. The chorus is now shrieking that Trump is too interested in global affairs, or, more precisely, too interested in a way that they don’t like.
So, we’re seeing headlines sprouting up about:
- “Donald Trump’s New Brand of Imperialism”
- “Venezuela and Beyond: Trump’s ‘America First’ Rhetoric Masks a Neo-Imperialist Streak”
- “Trump’s Retro Imperialism”
To legions of pundits, experts, elites, media mavens, no matter what Trump does, it will result in a calamity of epic proportions.
Issues & Insights was founded by seasoned journalists of the IBD Editorials page. Our mission is to provide timely, fact-based reporting and deeply informed analysis on the news of the day – without fear or favor.
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