In the fast-moving American political scene, a new movement is bursting onto center stage: globo-skepticism.
It’s not isolationism, but it’s not globalism either. It is born of a healthy caution about total involvement in foreign wars. Spawned in the ranks of MAGA, it resists the endless commitment of American lives we saw in Vietnam and Iraq or of our money that is evident in Ukraine.
Very recent polling by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs shows a growing reluctance to make heavy commitments in foreign policy.
Ivo Daalder, the former U.S. ambassador to NATO under Barack Obama, says the council’s annual polls are discovering two important trends.
“One change,” he says, “is that Republicans have increasingly — since about 2016 — become more skeptical about the United States playing an active role in world affairs and more favorable for it staying out of world affairs. This is the question we’ve been asking for 50 years.”
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But, he stresses, “something bigger happened in the last survey from late last year, which is that for the first time since we asked that question, more Republicans wanted to stay out of world affairs than play an active role in world affairs. That’s never happened before.”
Daalder says that it is pro-Trump MAGA Republicans who are leading the change.
In his survey, he divided Republicans into those who have a very favorable opinion of Trump versus those who either have an unfavorable or only a somewhat favorable opinion of him. He found that globo-skepticism runs deep among MAGA Republicans.
Only 40 percent of pro-Trump Republicans want the U.S. to “play an active part in world affairs,” while 59 percent prefer that we “stay out of world affairs and focus instead on domestic issues.”
Is the U.S. too involved in global affairs?
Isolationism — the extreme form of globo-skepticism — is a potent force in our political history. It has never been defeated in a general election. It fell into disrepute after Pearl Harbor and during Stalin’s conquest of Eastern Europe.
The Republican Party split to its core in 1952 when internationalists, led by Eisenhower, defeated Ohio Sen. Robert Taft at the national Republican convention and led the U.S. into the UN and NATO.
But now, clothed in MAGA garb, the globo-skeptics are increasingly dominating the modern Republican Party. They are driven by doubts about the wisdom of emptying our national treasury and denuding our stockpiles of weapons to help Ukraine.
But the movement has deeper roots that tap into an anti-globalist America First worldview.
Apart from Ukraine, skepticism about climate change is driving the new political movement. Seventy-two percent of Trump Republicans say the U.S. is paying too much attention to climate change, while 16 percent feel we are paying too little heed to the issue and 12 percent think we have the balance about right.
Climate change seems to be the gateway that leads to globo-skepticism. MAGA Republicans rightly refuse to orient our entire economy and energy industry around that single issue.
On the other hand, the survey finds a strong willingness — indeed, an eagerness — among Trump Republicans to assume an active role in policing our border, competing with China, and stopping Iran’s nuclear program.
Ninety-one percent of Trump Republicans say we are not paying enough attention to problems on our southern border, while 61 percent feel we are not paying enough attention to Iran’s nuclear program and 64 percent feel we are not sufficiently focused on competition with China.
Since the globo-skeptic movement has gathered momentum among the outsiders who are propelling MAGA into the White House, it will be hard to thwart it, although the world’s globalists will doubtless try.
Europeans are scared to death of the new globo-skepticism. American distrust of European cafe society globalism runs deep and is exacerbated by the left’s dogmatic and rigid positions on environmental issues.
As Trump runs for president, he will add recruits to MAGA and will elaborate his views on global issues. Globo-skepticism is a fast-growing movement in the U.S., and Donald Trump is bringing it to the fore.
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