It should not have taken the Iran war to finish the idea that he is an ‘isolationist’.
JANAN GANESH
Published MAR 13 2026
There is an annual real estate mega-conference with the unresonant name of MIPIM that took place this week. As ever, Cannes was the nominal location. “Nominal”, I stress, because those who have visited this bizarre bazaar — full of sovereign investors, Brits on the sauce and middle men of uncertain tax domicile — will know that it could be anywhere. You begin to see how a career at the top end of the property game might instil a certain worldliness in someone: a certain unshockability.
Let us come back to that. In the meantime, how do we think Donald Trump’s “isolationism” is holding up?
Long after he fired missiles at Syria (2017) and slew an Iranian general in a third country (2020), peers of mine were still using the i-word about him. His own people did too, although more as a compliment. JD Vance once cited “not starting any wars” as a reason to endorse him. This chattiest of vice-presidents seems tongue-tied of late. The Iran war has finished off the idea that his boss ever wanted America to be a hermit republic, but it should not have been needed.
The truth is that Trump cannot leave the world alone, and might fairly be called a globalist. It is not just the armed adventures: Nigeria, Yemen, Venezuela. It is also the almost unprecedented interest in the inner life of other democracies. His movement opines on the judicial decisions of Brazil and the alienness of Britain’s capital. This rolling commentary on distant societies might be tabloid level in its perceptions but it hardly suggests insularity or incuriosity.
We can all name empires that ran out of juice. Which empire ever retreated out of choice?
Trump’s America was never going to self-isolate. For one thing, his ego would not allow it. The attention of the outside world is too much to forgo. For another, even a saint, given immense military and economic power, could not resist using it. We can all name empires that ran out of juice, such as Britain’s, and empires that suffered defeat, such as Japan’s. Which empire ever retreated out of choice?
In other words, not only is this president not an isolationist, nor will any foreseeable one be. The issue is structural, not individual: the power of the office, not the holder of it. Youngsters won’t believe this but the original knock against George W Bush was that he would not take an interest in anything outside America. Oh, but he did.
Trump is not just knee-deep in “abroad” (Nose-deep, too, if this third Gulf war drags on). He is in some senses more typical of the world than other presidents have been. And so to that real estate background of his, with all its actual or perceived grubbiness.
What the west regards as corruption is, in some places, just another overhead. It is the oil in the engine of business. And of politics too, where the enrichment of relatives might be semi-open. Some liberals gently skirt this fact, which is considerate of them, but also in the end a kind of parochialism. The reality is that Trump’s paramount interest in money makes him a quite recognisable type to much of the world. In return, he is better placed than more obviously cultivated westerners to understand certain global themes, such as the materialism of societies that were very poor very recently.
The natural contrast is with Barack Obama. He was the “first Pacific president”. He gave a major speech in Cairo that made all kinds of internationalist noises. In the end, though, he came at the world from about as legalistic and traditionally western a standpoint as any of his predecessors. He was biographically, not mentally, different. I prefer Obama’s outlook by a wider margin than it is possible to state, but it is not clear that it is nearer the global intellectual median.
By the way, isn’t it telling that Trump’s residential addresses are not just coastal but in the parts of the US most penetrated by the world. For a populist, he makes startlingly little pretence of a heartland hearth. How the likes of Vance expected to get a stay-at-home America from this man, heaven knows, even if we might rather soon wish they had been right.
janan.ganesh@ft.com
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