Responsible Retreat

Isolationism and its Discontents

• Part I: A proposal for a new paradigm in American foreign policy

In early July of 2018, shortly before Donald Trump’s infamous meeting with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, I dashed off a series of irate tweets. To my surprise, they went viral, and to this day, people keep circulating them. More people have read that thread, I think, than anything else I’ve ever written.

Also to my surprise, the response was overwhelmingly positive. This was weird, because the whole point of Twitter is to tell other people they’re idiots, and it just made no sense—since when do people go into raptures when I lecture them about the fundamentals of American foreign policy?

Ask yourself, as you read the thread—reproduced below without the typos—what part of this caused that reaction:

• Modern Europe—liberal, democratic Europe—is the United States’ creation. This story was once known to every American, but as the generation responsible for this achievement dies, so too has the knowledge ceased to be passed down casually, within families.