The Phantom of 'Neo-Isolationism'

Katulis and Cook rail against neo-isolationism, but the thing they are railing against doesn’t really exist.

This diatribe against “neo-isolationism” from Brian Katulis and Steven Cook is divorced from reality right from the start:

Historians will likely look back at the United States in early 2024 and scratch their heads at the curious disconnect between any objective observation of the country’s power and the profound reluctance of its leaders to use it.

The idea that the U.S. is unwilling to “lead” in the world has become a popular claim among some hawks and interventionists. Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the ex-prime minister of Denmark, and former Secretary-General of NATO, recently said, “Recent global events in the Taiwan Strait, in the Middle East, in Ukraine are all results of American hesitance to actually lead.” It is ridiculous to look at how the Biden administration has acted over the last three years and see hesitance or reluctance to “lead,” but this is the story that a lot of hawks want to tell right now. Interventionists can’t imagine that U.S. “leadership” as it is usually exercised might be a big part of the problem, so they explain everything in terms of a lack of “leadership” and a reluctance to use power. As they see it, the only cure for what ails the world is more U.S. leadership and more U.S. power, so they have to pretend that the U.S. isn’t already extremely meddlesome and overreaching.

The reality is very different from the hawkish story. The U.S. is currently supporting two foreign wars and waging a few small ones of its own, and it is still imposing broad sanctions on at least five other countries. This is not the description of a country whose government is reluctant to use its power in the world.