The Ghost that Never Vanishes: The War in Ukraine and the Renewal of the American Debate on 'Isolationism'

Syllabus

Seminar 1: Conceptual and Theoretical Brush-Clearing 

Seminar 2: “Theorizing” Donald J. Trump 

Seminar 3: NATO Enlargement and the Return of the “Russian Problem” 

Seminar 4: The Ukraine Conundrum

Seminar 5: The View from Ottawa and Prague: China and the Transatlantic Allies

Annotation

The course will focus on U.S. foreign policy in the context of the current state and future prospects of transatlantic security relations, in light of the war in Ukraine and the 2024 US presidential elections. It will be taught by Prof. David Haglund, a guest lecturer from the Department of Political Studies at Queen's University in Kingston, Canada.

This week-long course explores the current debate about America’s “grand strategy,” taking as our analytical point d’appui the current war in Ukraine. In particular, we will be looking at the policy orientation that more than a few Americans in this electoral season have been extolling as the nearest thing to strategic nirvana. This is the holy grail of reclaiming the country’s “strategic autonomy,” a goal that has usually, in American foreign policy lore, borne the label of “isolationism.” From the origins of the Republic in 1788 until the Second World War, isolationism could, with reason, have been considered to be the “default setting” of America’s grand strategy. In the aftermath of its intervention in the Second World War, however, it had generally come to be assumed by the foreign policy pundits that the probability of isolationism ever getting resurrected was basically zero. Recently, however, scholars and other observers of the American political scene have been reconsidering whether isolationism truly was something that could be deemed dead and buried. Like Lazarus, it shows signs of returning to life.

This growing interest in isolationism, on the part of both those who welcome it and those who abhor it, has of course been stimulated by the electoral prospects of Donald J. Trump, who aspires this coming November to do what no other president in American history, with the single exception of Grover Cleveland in the 19th century, had ever done: to return to the White House after having been unsuccessful in a bid for re-election. Cleveland, first elected in 1884, managed to do this after being rebuffed by the voters in 1888, only to have those same voters restore him to power in 1892. Because he served two discontinuous terms as president, Cleveland is registered as having been his country’s 22nd and its 24th president. Donald Trump, should he win this autumn, would thus become America’s 47th president, after having been its 45th one.

As interesting as this recording anomaly may be, what is really consequential about a second Trump administration is its potential foreign policy orientation, particularly in light of America’s current level of commitment to Ukraine in its war against Russia. During this electoral season, debates between Republicans aspiring to attain their party’s nomination have occasionally shone the spotlight on that country, with some of the presidential aspirants – especially Vivek Ramaswamy and, to a lesser degree, Ron DeSantis – indicating that they feel supporting Ukraine to be something that is not in America’s national interest. Trump himself has also expressed less than rhetorical solidarity with Kyiv, and he is never hesitant to proclaim his goal as that of putting “America first,” as he phrased it after his victory in the Iowa caucuses on 15 January of this year. As a slogan, “America first” is usually associated with the powerful isolationist forces that figured so largely in the debates of the period just prior to America’s entry into the Second World War. At the minimum, “America first” is assumed to mean that the United States would, under a second Trump administration, be taking a much more critical assessment of the value of its alliances than has been the case for all administrations since NATO was formed in 1949.