The Washington Post: Trump’s Doctrine is making America Smaller Again!

According to Journalist Fareed Zakaria who wrote on the Washington Post, saying that the Trump administration’s foreign policy doctrine reduces the role of the United States from a global power to a regional one, in a trend that can be summed up in the slogan “Let’s Make America Smaller Again”.

In his column in the Washington Post, Zakaria who’s specialized in US foreign policy explained that the new national security strategy criticizes decades of American global engagement and calls for narrowing the definition of American interests and limiting them mainly to the Western Hemisphere, invoking the Monroe Doctrine in a modern form.

Zakaria argues that this logic seems reasonable on the surface, but it ignores the fact that the United States today is the most powerful country in history, and that its economic, technological, and military influence makes it impossible to retreat to its “backyard” except at a high cost to it and the international system.

This is because the conditions under which the Monroe Doctrine originated in the nineteenth century belonged to a small country with limited resources, not a global giant with interests intertwined with interests with far more interconnected interests with Europe and Asia than Latin America.

The focus on the Western Hemisphere places US policy in an economically marginal region compared to major centers of global power, arguing that the traditional successful strategy of the United States has been to maintain close ties with the world’s most important centers of economic power.

Zakaria criticized the NSP document itself, calling it disjointed, contradictory, and fraught with overly worded slogans, and warned that this trend is reviving the isolationism that prevailed in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, which was then coupled with anti-immigration and fears of “non-integration”.

The exaggeration of immigration as an existential threat reflects a dangerous regressive mentality, and that the world today, as it was a century ago, needs an active US role to maintain international stability.

Zakaria concluded that the withdrawal of the United States will create power vacuums filled by less responsible parties, which could lead to global chaos and instability, and warned against repeating the mistakes of the past, stressing that a closed America will leave a world without a clear leadership.