The Logic of Neo-Isolationism: A New Approach to U.S. Grand Strategy
The U.S. defense budget in 2019 totaled a whopping $738 billion, and neither President Trump nor President-elect Joe Biden have promised a reduction. In fact, policymakers from both sides of the aisle call for increased defense expenditures and expansion of overseas commitments, even as the United States experiences a declining share of the world's economic product, faces a worsening fiscal imbalance exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, and suffers from deep-rooted social divisions. These dynamics warrant a fundamental revision of U.S. grand strategy.
America's engagement with the international community should not be centered on military activism. For decades, the United States has used force to prevent nuclear proliferation, regional and ethnic conflicts, humanitarian crises, and other problems in world politics. While this expansive set of defensive commitments may seem productive on the surface, closer inspection reveals them to be unnecessary and harmful. Routine deployment of armed forces has compromised liberal values like democracy and self-determination, damaged the United States’ international reputation, cost tens of thousands of American lives, and siphoned vast sums of funding from productive economic and political projects, diminishing the country’s commercial competitiveness. Despite trillions of taxpayer dollars wasted on repeated foreign policy disasters, America’s grand strategy still operates on the assumption that selective applications of violence are necessary to secure international trade and prosperity.
America’s Strategic Immunity
The most appropriate grand strategy for the United States today is neo-isolationism, a minimally activist approach to national security designed to avoid foreign entanglements. The fundamental maxim of neo-isolationism contends that strategic engagement beyond a core security perimeter around North America is unnecessary and counterproductive. The United States need not intervene in the political and military affairs of other nations because, surrounded by two large oceans and friendly countries, it occupies a position of strategic immunity. The country also enjoys economic security as the world’s largest economy and one of the most innovative techno-industrial bases, and all of its trading partners are disproportionately dependent on the United States for their economic well-being.
Viewed through this lens, the most pressing source of insecurity for the United States is military activism abroad. Engaging in politico-military competition undermines U.S. national security interests by giving foreign actors incentives to attack the United States and disrupt commercial activity involving American firms. In this way, neo-isolationism challenges the basic logic of strategic engagement that the United States must maintain the world’s most powerful fighting force; threaten war with China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, or any other states America’s foreign policy establishment deems threatening; risk war; and even engage in armed conflict for the ostensible purpose of avoiding war. Ultimately, the United States is not uniquely capable of resolving international conflicts or obligated to spend blood and treasure fighting wars that pose no threat to its security.
Less Warfare, More Welfare
In addition to maximizing U.S. national security, neo-isolationism offers two key advantages to mainstream grand strategy. First, the United States’ aggressive force posture fuels a gross misallocation of limited resources. The defense and foreign policy establishments often speak about military spending, which compromises 3-4% of GDP, as a small portion of America’s economic output, but the costs of a forward-deployed military posture are astronomical. During peacetime, the U.S. armed services maintain over 200 military bases, which cost more than $25 billion annually, and support around 200,000 soldiers in 150 foreign countries. The total defense budget may reach $800 billion in coming years—far beyond what is needed to serve the country’s core strategic interests. Moreover, these expenditures do not account for the cost of overseas contingency operations, which can vastly surpass the military’s base budget. For example, during America’s recent military campaigns in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Pakistan, the cost of actually deploying troops and weapons systems has exceeded $6 trillion since 2001.
The United States must balance three competing priorities as a great power: commercial competitiveness, social welfare, and security. Excessive defense commitments place an enormous burden on the shoulders of American taxpayers while enriching arms manufacturers and wealthy investors. Since 1960, the United States’ portion of global GDP has declined by over 50%. Now that the country faces greater resource constraints—rising deficits, ballooning national debt, and a smaller share of world economic output—the government should halt its procurement of fighter jets, warships, and missiles and rely more on strategic immunity. Eliminating the country’s overseas military footprint would channel more resources to critical domestic priorities, such as improving the quality of public schools, repairing infrastructure, and addressing pervasive social injustices like police brutality.
Leadership by Example, Not Force
A neo-isolationist grand strategy would also support America’s democratic project. Advocates of strategic internationalism maintain that forcefully manipulating the domestic politics of other countries is necessary to advance U.S. leadership, and some may associate isolationism with protectionist measures, such as the Smoot-Hawley tariffs of 1930, or nativist policies like the Trump administration’s immigration bans. But strategic nonengagement does not mean complete withdrawal from the outside world. Indeed, the United States can maintain a minimal self-defense force while deepening engagement with the international community. In Isolationism Reconfigured, Professor Eric Nordlinger details a new variant of neo-isolationism that supports free trade practices and principles through the moderately activist, albeit peaceful, promotion of liberal values abroad.
The United States does not need to spend more on defense than 144 countries combined to promote democracy and human rights. In fact, humanitarian interventions commonly aid armed factions that perpetrate human rights abuses. In 1995, for instance, U.S. military consultants trained Croatian and Bosnian Muslim forces that later displaced over 100,000 Serbs in the Krajina region and killed hundreds of defenseless civilians. Conventional approaches to grand strategy are right to stress the United States’ increasing economic interdependence with the rest of the world. However, military force is hardly the most sustainable or efficient policy instrument to combat today’s global issues. Demilitarizing U.S. foreign policy would not only divert attention to critical domestic priorities, but also free up resources to advance America’s liberal project in nonviolent ways and help solve pressing global problems, such as climate change, extreme poverty, and easily preventable diseases that cause millions of deaths every year.
On a more fundamental level, the notion that the United States needs a powerful military to project influence is deeply flawed. The United States’ global appeal stems not from drone strikes in the Middle East nor naval exercises in the Indo-Pacific, but from American soft power—liberal values like freedom of speech; Hollywood and American popular culture; the world’s strongest financial system and most vibrant, innovative economy. This distinction is exemplified in the 2020 Global Soft Power Index. The report, which surveyed over 50,000 consumers in 87 countries, ranked the United States as most influential for entertainment, media, sports, and science, but 44th for foreign relations. Avoiding entanglement in the affairs of other countries would leave the United States with more friends, not fewer.
Responding to the Critics
Perhaps the most common criticism of neo-isolationism is the expectation that international trade would suffer under the rise of authoritarian regimes. Proponents of strategic engagement argue that America’s preponderance of military power underpins global stability and prosperity. Without a forward-deployed military posture, authoritarian states would surely seize control of crucial sea lines of communication (SLOCs) and disrupt commercial activity, hurting transnational firms and consumers.
This argument is misguided for two reasons. First, the underlying purpose of America’s expansive network of military bases and troop deployments is not to protect SLOCs, but to prevent the emergence of a peer competitor—that is, to preserve the United States’ unipolar position through deterrence and selective applications of violence. As a Pentagon memo explained in 1992, shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, America’s overseas military presence “convince[s] potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests.” China’s military modernization, Iran’s and North Korea’s advancing nuclear weapons programs, and Russia's annexation of Crimea all serve to demonstrate that this strategy has failed, or at least that American economic and military power is no longer sufficient to deter revisionist states.
But more importantly, global commerce does not need the protection of U.S. armed forces. With trade comprising 26% of GDP, the United States is one of the least trade-dependent countries in the world. Other states like China—which has relied on rising export demand for manufactured goods since the late 1970s to lift 800 million people out of poverty—have ample incentives of their own to ensure freedom of navigation. Therefore, withdrawing troops from overseas would not jeopardize maritime security. Even as nontraditional security threats, such as piracy and illegal fishing, remain prevalent in Africa and Southeast Asia, the United States does not have a unique obligation to foot the bill, nor do these problems necessarily require a military response.
Defense analysts also assert that the United States needs military power to contain Chinese expansionism. But this argument, too, is misguided. For one, China is expanding its influence primarily through economic means, such as the Belt and Road Initiative, Asian Development Bank, and Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. China’s current military strategy is based on limited aspirations, such as protecting territorial and sovereignty claims along its periphery. Significantly, East Asian countries spend less on defense now than they did 25 years ago, long before China rose to a position of prominence.
U.S. Marine Corps expeditionary forces launch an anti-armor missile during Exercise Iron Fist, a bilateral mechanized training exercise aimed at increasing interoperability with Japan’s Ground Self Defense Force. The exercise takes place amid concerns about China’s military modernization effort. Photo by Sgt. Christopher O’Quin.
Military intervention in East Asia would be inconsistent with U.S. interests even if China decided to leverage its military power. The most plausible scenario of Sino-U.S. armed conflict is Taiwan. Chinese leaders, who view the island as PRC territory, plan to unify Taiwan with the mainland. If China resorted to force to resolve the issue, the costs of defending Taiwan would vastly outweigh the benefits. Considering the potential effects of a military contingency with China, a 2016 RAND study estimates that losses in bilateral trade, consumption, and returns from overseas investment could decrease U.S. GDP by 5-10% after just one year of major war. Civilian cyberwar could cost an additional $70 billion to $900 billion. “By 2025,” the authors note, “U.S. [military] losses could range from significant to heavy,” jeopardizing the lives of 85,000 American soldiers currently stationed in the Pacific.
A minor skirmish along the Taiwan Strait might also escalate into a nuclear exchange. The risk that miscommunication or misunderstanding between Washington and Beijing will result in nuclear war is increasing due to growing antagonism between the two countries, expansion of China’s nuclear arsenal, strategic distrust, and different risk perceptions. Though the United States has demonstrated political commitment to Taiwan since enacting the Taiwan Relations Act in 1979, the preservation of Taiwanese sovereignty is not worth such profound military and economic costs. By sending warships to the South China Sea, deploying troops along China’s periphery, and selling billions of dollars of weapons to Taiwan, Washington is unnecessarily inviting the possibility that China will take aggressive action against the United States.
The Case for Neo-Isolationism in 2020
The United States has suffered from strategic overstretch since the Cold War, upholding an expansive set of defense commitments made a half-century ago with a smaller share of global economic output, manufacturing production, and military spending. Rising budgetary constraints and bureaucratic infighting further confuse attempts to achieve a healthy balance between security and economic growth. Despite internal challenges, America’s current foreign policy trajectory is one of direct confrontation and potential conflict with China, Russia, and numerous other states, which causes insecurity, threatens economic exchange, and impedes cooperation on key global issues.
Instead of resisting the international system’s transition to multipolarity, U.S. policymakers should recognize that military force cannot routinely produce desirable political outcomes and instead view this moment as an opportunity to adopt a grand strategy more consistent with the state’s national interest. Lower defense budgets would allow for more flexible macroeconomic policies and provide greater political capital for domestic social and economic projects. Non-intervention would preserve America’s liberal ideals and support international leadership by example rather than compulsion. Finally, a self-defense force posture coupled with peaceful promotion of prosperity and civil liberties overseas would fulfill the goal of an assertive America with less confrontation, cost, and risk.
Trey Sprouse is a junior in Columbia College studying Political Science and East Asian Languages and Cultures. You can reach him at lrs2202@columbia.edu with questions or comments.
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