Against Foreign Policy Doomerism
Realistic optimism must prevail for us to have any hope of recovery after Trump
Over the past several months, a pall of creeping and inevitable doom has descended on discussions of politics and policy in Washington—particularly when it comes to foreign policy. And it’s not at all hard to understand why: President Trump has certainly given us a surfeit of reasons for the bleak, pitch-black amalgam of despair and fatalism popularly known as doomerism.
After all, the president has leveled clear threats against the sovereignty and independence of stalwart, long-standing American allies Canada and Denmark over and over again. He and members of his administration have also spoken about the use of military force in Mexico and against Panama. Trump has displayed remarkable servility toward Russian President Vladimir Putin, offering the Kremlin unilateral concession after unilateral concession while attempting to brow-beat Ukraine into submission, all while displaying extraordinary contempt for American allies around the world. At the same time, Trump has launched a wholly irrational trade war against the rest of the world that appears aimed to fashion a bizarre and extreme version of American autarky—all while offering enormous opportunities for graft and extortion.
Worse, Trump and company have taken a sledgehammer to the foundations of American power. In myriad ways, they’ve disemboweled America’s capacity for scientific research and technological development: cancelling National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health contracts, launching an all-out assault on research universities and other institutions of higher education, and starving vital science agencies like NASA and NOAA of funding. American foreign aid effectively no longer exists, with even politically popular and effective programs like PEPFAR—the anti-AIDS initiative created by President George W. Bush—illegally dismantled by the Trump administration alongside the Millennium Challenge Corporation and USAID. Some estimates conclude that shutting down global health programs alone has already cost more than 300,000 lives, two-thirds of them children, and may well leave 25 million dead over the next 15 years.
Then there’s the president’s general corruption and venality, most strikingly with his apparent shakedown of the Qatari government for a $400 million 747 jumbo jet. Moreover, Trump’s disgraceful and embarrassing Oval Office contretemps with foreign leaders like Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Jordanian King Abdullah, and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has put his penchant for buffoonish malice on public display for all to see.
Taken together, the Trump administration’s actions paint a grotesque picture—one that’s not even finished yet. But we can take a realistic and unvarnished look at our predicament without succumbing to a doomer mentality that tells us all is already irrevocably lost. This is the sort of “unreasoning, unjustified terror” that President Franklin D. Roosevelt exhorted against in his first inaugural address, a cast of mind that only paralyzes us as we attempt to think constructively about rebuilding American foreign policy—and much else—after Trump.
If there’s reason for a sliver of optimism at the present moment, it’s the fact that basic realities about international affairs and America’s own place in the world haven’t changed. Trump and his America First acolytes can deny these realities all they want, and their denialism will likely do deep and possibly catastrophic damage to the United States, its interests, and the world as a whole. But they cannot repeal the twentieth century and turn back the clock on a world fundamentally transformed by steady advances in science, technology, and industry going back a century and a half.
American interests haven’t changed, either: we still retain an essential national interest in the freedom, security, and stability of Europe and the Pacific, an interest that the United States has fought two global wars to defend and now dates back well over a century. Nor have the interests of America’s erstwhile European and Asian allies changed: they would very much prefer even troubled partnerships with a relatively distant and democratic United States to domination by large and powerful neighboring dictatorships like China and Russia. Just as they have for the past hundred years, these interests compel cooperation between the United States and its allies on security, economics, and a whole host of issues over the long term.
For his part, Trump appears to be embarking on a second great renunciation of American international responsibility akin to the 1920s—an solipsistic foreign policy rooted in what FDR called “the illusion that we can ever again isolate ourselves from the rest of humanity.” There’s no better example of the underlying impulses toward isolationism than Trump’s proposed Golden Dome missile defense program: an inordinately expensive and unworkable shield that tries to neutralize the consequences of industrial and technological advances of the twentieth century and absolve America of any need to care about the rest of the world. The fact that this sort of abdication remains possible does not invalidate or nullify the logic that drives American involvement in the world; strategic reality does not simply disappear when a political leader or government tries to turn a blind eye to or hide from it.
Just as the first great renunciation did a century ago, this sort of foreign policy delivers a sub-optimal world dominated by dictators, prone to armed conflict, and hostile to American interests. It will also make it more expensive and much more difficult for the United States and its allies to recover and repair the damage done by Trump, but just how expensive and how much more difficult this project will be remains to be seen. Trump and his foreign policy will at some point crash hard on the shoals of reality, and a doomer mentality does nothing to help us prepare for the extensive reconstruction effort that will follow.
The point here isn’t to cultivate complacency or offer reassurance that everything will be alright in the end; the former would be foolish and the latter isn’t true. It’s simply to remind us that America has involved itself in the world for a variety of reasons, and these reasons will not disappear simply because Trump and his America First hangers-on choose to pretend they don’t exist.
It's already hard to tally up all the damage Trump has already done to America’s reputation, security, and future in just over four months in office—believe me, I’ve tried—much less predict just how deep a hole he will dig for the country as we continue to slog deeper into his second term.
But doomerism isn’t the right attitude to take when confronted with our current and likely future circumstances. As FDR recognized when he took office as the Great Depression reached its nadir, such ways of thinking don’t spur action but induce paralysis at best and self-destructive behavior at worst. If all is lost, why prepare to recover or fight to rebuild? The mere existence of obstacles—many of them severe, such as broken faith with allies and the evisceration of our capacity for basic scientific research—calls for realism, creativity, and determination, not doomerism.
We should take a cue from the late Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins and instead focus on carrying the fire—not necessarily offering up a suite of specific policies but cultivating the attitude that we’ve been given the responsibility to keep the flame of freedom alive through his particularly dark period of our nation’s history. It’s a much more hopeful and useful way to think about our present predicament, one that can help us be ready—at least intellectually—for the enormous task of recovery that will inevitably come to pass.
When the alternative is a gloomy fatalism that’s tantamount to surrender, this hard-headed sort of optimism isn’t a choice—it’s a necessity.
I agree with everything you wrote, but I'd stress that right now, every person who cares about democracy needs to be thinking specifically about elections, both this fall and especially in 2026. Perhaps the single most important task before us is to retake control of the Senate, something that eluded us in Trump's first midterm election back in 2018.