We are Americans, and we could destroy any country that mistakingly tried to go to war with us. We’re proud about that, but we also value our privileged position: protected from most of the world by two oceans.
America’s political class has always been more internationalist than the populace — more open-borders, more ideologically free-trade, and more interventionist. The first Trump administration represented a populist shift toward nationalism and away from the post-Cold War penchant for adventurous foreign policy. President Donald Trump’s pick of JD Vance as his vice president was a startling mark of this shift.
However, if you’ve paid close attention to this shift, you see something more than a few anti-war politicians winning elections. You see the American public, joined by politicians of both parties, running full speed away from the bellicosity of the Clinton-Bush-Obama era, and embracing the humility of George Washington.
Compare, as snapshots, the inaugural addresses of 2005 and 2025. These events, 20 years apart, were both second inaugurations of Republican presidents.
Former President George W. Bush on Jan. 20, 2005, described the post-Cold War peace as a “sabbatical,” echoing the derisive phrase “holiday from history,” wielded by those who believe the United States is only fully itself when it is busy shaping the rest of the world at gunpoint. The task of the U.S. military, Bush said, was “the expansion of freedom in all the world.”
When his Iraq nation-building experiment teetered, he waved away practical considerations: “The difficulty of the task is no excuse for avoiding it. America’s influence is not unlimited, but fortunately for the oppressed, America’s influence is considerable, and we will use it confidently in freedom’s cause.”
This was quite a distance away from the “humble foreign policy” on which Bush campaigned.
Skip ahead 20 years, and move indoors to the Capitol Rotunda, and you get a speech that is far from humble (it is being delivered by Trump), but far less grandiose on America’s role in the world.
“We will measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end,” Trump said, “and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.”
“My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier,” he added.
Peacemaker? Avoiding wars? We haven’t heard such talk in these parts since before Pearl Harbor.
These sentiments, though, reflect not only the center of gravity of the American public, but also the direction of the American public.
Even where there is no doubt as to who is the good guy and who is the bad guy, Americans are increasingly averse to entanglement. Two thirds of Americans in a recent Pew Research Center poll expressed concern over the U.S. becoming more directly involved in the war between Israel and Hamas.
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In December 2024, for the first time, most Americans opposed “the U.S. helping Ukraine reclaim the territory it has lost in the war” with Russia. Back in 2022, a full 66% wanted the U.S. to help Ukraine gain back what Russia took.
America has the mightiest military of any nation in history, which gives it the luxury of not having to use it.