Robert Kagan avoids the obvious in his description of the presidential campaign:
Internationalists such as Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio went nowhere this year; Bernie Sanders joined Mr Trump in attacking global involvement; and Hillary Clinton was hit from all sides for being too internationalist and too wedded to the idea of the US as the “indispensable nation”, the Bill Clinton phrase that encapsulated the thinking of every president from Harry Truman to George W Bush.
This misses the point of what many voters were responding to and reacting against this year. Voters weren’t rejecting “internationalism” as a whole. Many of them were sick of open-ended desultory wars that seem to serve no American interest. Because interventionists like Kagan have identified those failed policies with “internationalism,” they assume that rejecting endless war must imply the rejection of international engagement, but the U.S. doesn’t have to have one to have the other. If Clinton was “hit from all sides” on foreign policy, it was because of her reliable support for aggressive measures overseas and her shoddy record of backing every military intervention that she could. Even the false conceit that America is the “indispensable nation” would not be so bad if it didn’t mean that we had to keep taking sides in one foreign conflict after another, but that is what it has meant in practice for decades.
Kagan assumes that the U.S. is now “out of the world order business” and that America may start acting like a “normal nation” again, but so far I don’t see a lot of evidence of that. Normal nations don’t believe that they are engaged in global war against various and sundry enemies for decades at a time, but that is what Trump’s adviser Michael Flynn claims to think about the U.S. If that is “national solipsism,” it is hard to distinguish from the views of ideologues ranting about WWIV in the previous decade. It is possible that a Trump administration will define American interests more narrowly than Kagan does, but Kagan defines them so broadly that it would be easy to do that without having the U.S. become anything like a “normal nation.”
If the U.S. were becoming “normal,” we would expect it to stop fighting unnecessary wars on the other side of the world and we would also expect it to normalize relations with the few states with which it has no relations. We should be seeing preparations for reducing military deployments overseas, and an overall reduction in military spending to a much lower level consistent with providing for our own defense. We’re not seeing any signs that any of those things will be happening, and I don’t think any of them are going to happen. If Flynn’s ideas and Trump’s own words mean anything for the new administration, the unnecessary wars will continue and others might be added in the coming years, and there won’t be diplomatic engagement with members of the “alliance” he thinks is arrayed against us. Kagan assures us that “there will be no bombing of Iran under a Trump administration.” That is a remarkable thing to say about the one state that Trump has specifically threatened to attack if there is an incident involving our ships in the Gulf. Trump says that he wants to increase military spending, and I don’t know of anyone around him that thinks this is a bad idea. None of that is what a “normal nation” does, and all of it takes the U.S. in the wrong direction away from becoming normal again.