Unlike Ronald Reagan's famous Pont-du-Hoc speech, no one is going to quote President Biden's remarks from “a lonely, windswept headland on the north coast of France” 40 years later, but Biden had a more short-term political goal: to implicitly attack Donald Trump and suggest that Trump was abandoning Reagan's message that “isolationism has never been and never will be an acceptable response to tyrannical governments with expansionist intent.”
Setting aside how disingenuous it is for Biden, who opposed most of Reagan's successful Cold War policies, to embrace the zipper and attack Trump, is Biden's criticism accurate? Is Trump an isolationist?
There is no denying that there is an increasingly vocal isolationist faction on the right, and these factions, as exemplified by Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), believe that Trump is their ideological ally. But a closer look at Trump's record shows that he is not the isolationist they hoped he would be.
Consider this: When Iran crossed Trump's red line for killing Americans, Trump didn't launch reckless attacks against Iranian proxies like Biden did. He ordered the U.S. military to target Iranian terrorist mastermind Qassem Soleimani, then A warning to Tehran If Iran retaliates, he said, it will target “52 sites in Iran that represent the 52 American hostages that Iran held many years ago,” and “those targets, and Iran itself, will be hit very quickly and very hard.” Iran backed down. That's not isolationism.
Follow this author Marc A. Thiessen's opinion
Or take the Islamic State (IS): While the Obama-Biden administration led a disastrous withdrawal of US troops from Iraq in 2011, which created the IS caliphate, Trump drove IS out of the caliphate and then ordered the killing of its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
President Trump launched two military strikes against the regime of Bashar al-Assad for its use of chemical weapons against Syrian civilians, launched a cyberattack (an act of war) against Russia, targeting the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency, which spearheaded Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, and authorized U.S. forces to remove hundreds of Wagner Group mercenaries from eastern Syria.
After the Obama-Biden administration refused to arm Ukraine after Russia's invasion of Crimea in 2014, Trump became the first president to provide lethal aid to Ukraine, transferring Javelin anti-tank missiles that helped Ukraine defend itself when Russia invaded again under Biden. And while isolationists like Vance and Greene argue the U.S. should not give Ukraine “one penny,” Trump has said he could significantly increase aid to Ukraine. “I would say to Putin, if you don't make a deal, we're not going to give Ukraine one penny,” he said. [Ukraine] “They have a lot of benefits,” he told Fox News' Maria Bartiromo, “and if necessary, we're going to give them more than they've ever received.”
Trump has also led what he calls a “major rebuilding of the American military,” dramatically increasing defense spending and creating the Space Force as the first new military branch since 1947. By contrast, Biden is on track to put defense spending as a percentage of GDP at its lowest since President Bill Clinton tried to claim a false “peace dividend” after the Cold War.
Trump has negotiated the release of more Americans from foreign captivity in four years than Barack Obama did in eight years, and he did it without paying ransoms or sending planeloads of cash to terrorist regimes. He built an international coalition to isolate Venezuela's Maduro regime. He brokered three Arab-Israeli peace agreements, the first in more than 25 years and a diplomatic achievement worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize. He also negotiated a historic new free trade agreement with Mexico and Canada, the USMCA (which even Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) acknowledged was “much better than NAFTA”), and new trade agreements with Japan and South Korea. By contrast, Biden is on track to be the first president since Jimmy Carter not to negotiate or sign a trade agreement during his term.
Or take NATO. Biden claims that Trump is trying to gut NATO. Not according to Trump. He said in March that he would stay in NATO “100%” as long as allies held themselves accountable for military spending. As president, Trump got allies to spend hundreds of billions of dollars more on common defense. When Trump left office, allies were spending $130 billion more on defense than they had in 2016. That figure was expected to grow to $400 billion by the end of 2024, and twice as many allies were meeting their commitment to spend 2% of their gross domestic product on defense. Despite hurt feelings, Trump left NATO stronger than it has been since the end of the Cold War.
Critics may respond: “What about all the international agreements he withdrew from, like the Paris Climate Accord, the Iran Nuclear Deal, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty?” Withdrawing from international agreements that are not in the United States' interest is not isolationism, it is conservatism. George W. Bush withdrew from the ABM Treaty, which banned the United States from deploying ballistic missile defense systems, and removed the United States' signature from the Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court.
Trump's record is by no means perfect, from his thwarted plan to invite the Taliban to Camp David to giving Turkey the go-ahead to invade Syria and attack its Kurdish allies, but objectively his foreign policy record is one of the best of any modern US president.
An often overlooked reason for this success is that Trump surrounded himself with a “team of rivals” during his first term, including Reaganites. It is unclear whether he will continue this approach in his second term, or whether his White House will be staffed with people who will advise him against the bold moves on the world stage that made his first term so successful. I expect Trump to stick with the strategy that served America so well during his first term.
This much is clear: Biden’s second term will be a disaster. Biden likes to say that “America is back” during his term. You know what else it’s back to? War. Trump is the only president of the 21st century whose term did not involve Russia invading a neighboring country, and he is the first president since Reagan whose term did not involve the United States, directly or by proxy, in a new war. He achieved this not by hiding behind “Fortress America” but by projecting strength on the world stage.
If that’s isolationism, save us from Biden’s engagement policy.
