Foreign policy, like every other aspect of public policy today, serves as a political battlefield for our two politicized mindsets to make us choose one or the other of them. Even beyond the dynamics of “woke left” and “Trumpist right,” America has been moving toward this bipolar division for decades.
Today, policy by partisan interest now precludes any long running ethos. “Liberal International Order” and “America First” are cast as irreconcilable partisan icons, contested in cultural denigrations, by each side of the other. Many blame Donald Trump’s mercurial rhetoric, particularly shocked U.S. allies. But the politicization of policy has been building for decades. Politicized formulas and partisan loyalty have grown ever more determinative in policy making, so that policy processes deliberate less and less over choices, serving more and more to implement current administrations’ reflexes (See Michael Mazarr’s Leap of Faith).
In Trump’s wake, partisan bipolarity will continue, with divisive rhetoric, generating wide policy shifts in “both” directions. U.S. conduct will veer and swing, in ever wider disconnection, with electoral fortunes. With no durable theme under US foreign policy, our international conduct will swing back and forth, to reflect electoral outcomes and the chief executive’s aspirations. America will not be able to stand credibly for anything. The U.S. could well become “unreliable” in an extended sense, beyond one administration’s unexpected disruptions.
How long can this inconsistency of conduct, and unclarity in national ends, go on? Perhaps the better question to ask, given the depth of uncertainties in this age, is: in the event that America loses some vital means to security or well being, if some loss of influence or credibility poses a danger to us – if the cocoon that shelters us in our political dysfunction gets ruptured – what do we most need to secure? Can we find comity on some fundamental American ends, and relegate the competing politicized policies to means?
There have been two long running, overarching foreign policy themes in U.S. history, which weathered political shifts to set long terms norms for US foreign policy. Most recent was the Containment doctrine of the Cold War, adopted to defeat the threat of Soviet Communism. This doctrine extended the campaign against the Fascist axis, setting America as systemic opponent to totalitarians. It lasted, in total, 50 to 60 years, ending with the fall of the USSR and beginning in the fitful mobilization against the Nazis and their allies of the 1930s. In the course of this campaign, we conceived and led a “Liberal global order,” which regulated geopolitics and supported prosperity as well as American influence.
The older theme was isolationism. It set America’s foreign policy default stance from George Washington’s farewell address until the anti-totalitarian theme took shape in the 1930s, running roughly 140-160 years. The stance was conceived to shield America, in its republican public ethos, from the effects of competition and war with the (mostly monarchic) “great powers,” to let Americans focus on America’s own development. By 1941 we had developed into the world’s most powerful nation. The Axis’ horrors triggered our emergence into global pre-eminence.
Can we find a new underlying foreign policy ethos, held by the public in general and at least acquiesced to by the political operators? We see it has been done. It need not be a unified consensus of specific policies; comity in a bedrock ethos allows for different politics. Both isolationism and containment took diverse forms, under different administrations. But we must share a core sense of what America stands for. If our standing in the world needs to be built from the ground up, on what would we ground it?
The Realist school of thought says we simply need to be powerful. In one White House aide’s words, “we live in a world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power … in iron laws [dating from] the beginning of time.” This was true at the beginning of time, and thus clans and tribes and sovereignties sheltered the weak and enabled rulers. Identities of blood, soil, lord and church consolidated these entities, and gave the world a certain order. But America conceived itself on a principle that reaches beyond animal self-interest. We do need our tangible, national institutional, edifice, and it will need to apply power to meet our Real needs. But it must do so in a manner consistent with our founding ethos.
There is also a view that America’s commitment to rights commits us to every identity group’s tangible claims, to satisfy every declared group in any stake to which it asserts entitlement. But the founding was for persons’ rights as persons. America cannot treat individuals according to some received trait, of race or gender or other category. Our creed is for each one of us, as “myself” named by my chosen lights, in rights that it charges government to secure.
In our rights, American individuals wrestle to reconcile “my” rights and self-interest with the rights of all. As a nation we also wrestle, to meet the challenges of the world’s Hobbesian legacies – in fidelity to our founding on rights. The paradoxes of a creedal nationhood, the limits of historical life, and the things we can’t know today, have and will put us through trying choices, with imperfect outcomes. But, even if implicitly and too often affirming it in the breach, we have carried founding creed as bedrock ethos for 250 years.
In 2026 all normal expectations are losing their sway – and it doesn’t matter just how any norms or propriety or sense have been debased. America faces a question – how to set our conduct going forward, and how to validate the idea on which we conceived ourselves a nation. That basis, a creed of personal rights and government by consent of the governed, remains abstract, aspirational and unusual. Whether a nation conceived in this manner can survive is a perpetual question, a constant experiment. It has thus far.
Common Conviction 