Back to 1940: Trump’s return to ‘Fortress America’

The year 1940 seems like a long time ago, but there are striking similarities between the international security challenges the U.S. faced that year and those it is grappling with in 2024. 

In 1940, Hitler conquered Western Europe after forging an alliance of convenience with the Soviet Union to crush the European democracies. Isolationist America stood on the sidelines, even as Great Britain stood alone to face the Nazi onslaught. 

Following the fall of France in June 1940, a political movement was launched — the America First Committee — that aimed not only to keep the U.S. out of the war but to stymie President Franklin Roosevelt’s efforts to provide military and material aid to the British. Fortunately, FDR prevailed, securing passage of the Lend-Lease Act, which delivered assistance critical to Britain’s survival and the eventual Allied victory in World War II. 

But isolationist sentiment remained potent until Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. That sounded the death knell for the America First movement and its shameful defeatism and doctrine of appeasement.

In 2024, large-scale war has returned to Europe with Russia’s ongoing campaign to conquer Ukraine and upend NATO. Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine almost immediately after forging an alliance with China — a “partnership without limits” openly dedicated to overthrowing the U.S.-led international security order in Europe and Asia. 

The Russo-Chinese entente is in spirit a modern-day Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact — an axis of despots aimed at the Western democracies. A final echo of 1940 is that President Biden’s effort to assist Ukraine and shore up deterrence in Europe and Asia is resolutely opposed by Republicans in thrall to Donald Trump, whose America First ideology is old wine in an old bottle — rank isolationism with a heavy dose of appeasement.

The one enormously consequential difference between the two eras is that in 1940, Europe’s balance of power was already shattered. The U.S. faced an awful choice between going to war to challenge the status quo or else acquiescing in totalitarian control of Europe and potentially Asia as well. 

Today, we are beneficiaries of far-sighted American statesmen who, following World War II, renounced isolationism and built a structure of global deterrence based on forward-deployed U.S. forces and alliance partnerships. NATO is their greatest legacy, having kept the Soviet Union and Russia at bay and helped avert a third world war for 75 years — a virtual “forever peace.”

Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) and others are thus entirely wrong to frame U.S. support to Ukraine as fueling a so-called “forever war” of marginal relevance. On the contrary, the assistance package proposed by President Biden aims to strengthen the global edifice of deterrence against war that is now being challenged by Russia, China, Iran and North Korea. 

Ukrainians are fighting on the ramparts of the West, manning a critical link in a defensive line that runs through Eastern Europe, across the Korean Peninsula and down the Straits of Taiwan.  Their ability to continue holding that line while degrading Russia’s war machine massively contributes to U.S. national security and is worth the investment many times over. It also buys critical time for the U.S. and its allies to rebuild their defense industries and replenish their arsenals. 

If Donald Trump returns to power, Ukraine will become a moot issue in view of his plan to dismantle the West’s defenses by withdrawing from NATO and unwinding U.S. security commitments in Asia. He will turn the clock back to 1940, surrendering ground purchased with the blood of American soldiers whose sacrifice he has scorned. 

Trump loyalists in Congress who staunchly support NATO will not acknowledge the truth in words, but their deeds speak for themselves. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) recently sponsored legislation whose only conceivable purpose is to prevent Trump in a second term from unilaterally withdrawing the U.S. from NATO. 

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) falls into the same category; his inexplicable fealty to Trump possibly derives from the constancy of his support for Israel and expectations for a revival of the Trump-Netanyahu partnership. But this, too, could prove illusory. Trump in his first term demonstrated he was unwilling to risk war on Israel’s behalf and reportedly denounced Benjamin Netanyahu as someone “willing to fight Iran to the last U.S. soldier.” Nor can he be counted on to defend — or even threaten to defend — Taiwan, which he also recently denounced for having “take[n] all of our chip business.”

The bottom line is that Trump abhors American security commitments and is extremely unlikely to defend any U.S. partner under threat or attack. While his empathy for enemies and contempt for allies of the U.S. remains unexplained, what is indisputable is that he is cut from the same isolationist cloth as his notorious America First forebears in 1940. He tacitly embraces the restructuring of the global security order heralded by Russia and China — a multipolar system with the world divided into spheres dominated by the great powers. Under Trump, the U.S. would ultimately retreat to the presumed safety of its own hemisphere — in the parlance of 1940, to Fortress America. 

But the notion that the U.S. can be secure in a world of shrunken democracies under the heel of authoritarian rivals is no less delusional and considerably more dangerous in 2024 than it was nearly a century ago. The renunciation of U.S. security commitments would in fact completely unhinge the international security system. 

Without the U.S. nuclear umbrella, some former allies would race to acquire nuclear weapons.  It would be stupidly naive to think that leadership in Germany, Japan and South Korea has not already begun to contemplate, if not plan for, such an eventuality. Those decision-makers are not unaware of what multiple opinion polls indicate about an electoral outcome in the U.S. less than nine months away.

James Foley served as U.S. ambassador to Haiti (2003-2005) and to Croatia (2009-2012).