More than a month into Trump’s second presidential term, the world remains flabbergasted by the blonde tycoon’s ability to captivate, shock, and command the attention of millions. He does so by savvily mixing spectacularly outrageous declarations with a raft of policy initiatives so numerous and fungible that it is not even possible to properly keep track of them.

Trump’s grand strategy on the international scene (assuming there is one) has so far proved wonderfully elusive to all would-be interpreters. Is he a Kissingerian realist aiming to pull Russia away from China’s embrace, a neo-imperialist realpolitiker seeking a deal with China, or a Reaganite cold warrior determined to win America’s confrontation with it? And does he intend to be the liquidator of America’s ‘Empire by invitation’ (not least in Europe) or its rejuvenator on new, more sustainable terms, which would entail more financial responsibility, but possibly also higher political autonomy for allies? Amidst the uncertainties as to what Trump is, it seems increasingly clear that he is not something he has often been suspected and accused of being, to this day: an American ‘isolationist’. At least not in the way Europeans tend to understand the term.

What is known as ‘isolationism’ is arguably one of the currents in modern American public opinion most easily misunderstood by Europeans. We tend to think of it as a desire for America to indiscriminately cut off all foreign ties and entanglements, seen as an unnecessary disturbance and a destabilising influence for a subcontinental state protected by the planet’s two biggest oceans. Some even mistake it for an American version of the pacifism widespread in several European countries, whose upholders reject military engagements abroad for the sake of concentrating resources on the tranquil pursuit of domestic prosperity and equity for all. Nothing could be further from the truth.               

The so-called American ‘isolationists’ have typically been, first and foremost, staunch American nationalists. As such, they have often favoured a massive strengthening of the country’s armed forces. And they have believed in American ‘exceptionalism’ as firmly as their ‘interventionist’ adversaries. They have also usually possessed a populistic vein: for example, unsuccessfully promoting, in 1937, the Ludlow constitutional amendment, which would have required any American declaration of war to be approved by popular referendum.

More importantly, the foreign policy preferences of most of them displayed what the conservative Hungarian American historian John Lukacs defined as America’s split-mindedness, meaning the coexistence of essentially contradictory beliefs.  On the one hand, the United States has to narrowly maintain its own national interests and must not squander American wealth and blood by involving itself in Europe’s conflicts. The old continent is the cesspit of decadent tyrannies, corruptions, and heresies from which the Pilgrim Fathers originally moved away. One still detects echoes of this deep-seated perception in JD Vance’s much commented and lamented speech at the recent Munich Security Conference.   

On the other hand, American ‘nationalists’ and ‘isolationists’ did not stand against American involvement in Asia in the same way in which they condemned American involvement in Europe. While the ‘East’, where Europe lay, was to them a source of spiritual pollution and material threats, the ‘West’ of America’s great expanses and of the pacific oceanic depths, reaching into Asia, was the ordained scene of America’s ‘manifest destiny’. No American nationalist would have ever considered independence for the Philippines or for Cuba while they were US possessions, or opposed the frequent American naval and military operations in the Caribbeans. Neither would they have failed to be keenly aware of and duly indignant at Japan’s expansionist moves in the interwar Indo-Pacific.  

Is it too much of a stretch to feel that at least some of these myths and reflexes, deeply ingrained all along in the American psyche, are now reasserting themselves with a vengeance, after over half a century of dormancy? Trumpists are nationalists, American ‘exceptionalists’, populists, and ‘split-minded’ isolationists: allured by the prospect of territorial expansion in the Western Hemisphere (Canada, Panama, Greenland), supremely contemptuous of Europe, but acutely concerned by China’s expansionism in their ‘West’. And, let us not forget it, they are Republicans.

Accustomed to the internationalism of the post-Eisenhower Republicans, which after the Cold War degenerated into the hubristic globalism of George W. Bush, we all struggle to realise that most Republicans were historically anti-internationalist. They were, by and large and with only few exceptions, the American nationalist party from their very beginning, when they presided over the defence and consolidation of America’s federal state power during and after the Civil War. Although his Republican credentials have often been questioned, Trump’s nationalism in a sense represents a return to the GOP’s historical baseline.

While our ancestors were accustomed to American nationalism when the country was a rising but not yet dominant power in the world order, its impact on the current global system, so heavily dependent on America’s hegemony, is likely to be sweeping. Ill-suited to a system of political and legal internationalism, the new American nationalism heralds a rougher arrangement based on imperial competition and spheres of influence, towards which we all seem to be inexorably sliding. Having slumbered too long in dreams of herbivore power on Venus, Europe’s tardy awakening to the iron conflicts of planet Earth will surely be rough.