A nation wary of war

We are Americans, and we could destroy any country that mistakingly tried to go to war with us. We’re proud about that, but we also value our privileged position: protected from most of the world by two oceans.

America’s political class has always been more internationalist than the populace — more open-borders, more ideologically free-trade, and more interventionist. The first Trump administration represented a populist shift toward nationalism and away from the post-Cold War penchant for adventurous foreign policy. President Donald Trump’s pick of JD Vance as his vice president was a startling mark of this shift.