We're Not Pivoting to the Western Hemisphere. We're Just Retreating.
The impact of foregoing alliances and turning from the world is immeasurable.
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There’s a talking point making the rounds in MAGA circles that goes something like this: America is finally coming home. We’re done being the world’s policeman. We’re refocusing on our own backyard — the Western Hemisphere, the Monroe Doctrine, America First.
It sounds coherent. It isn’t.
What’s actually happening isn’t a strategic pivot. It’s a retreat dressed up in the language of strength.
The Monroe Doctrine Was Never a Golden Age
Let’s start with the myth MAGA is selling. The Monroe Doctrine era — big battleships, a bristling American porcupine — is held up as some lost golden age. You don’t bother us, we won’t bother you. Fortress America, sovereign and proud.
What that nostalgia leaves out: it didn’t work. America entered World War I embarrassingly unprepared — we struggled to raise an army, let alone field one. It took years to matter on the battlefield. And when we finally burst onto the world stage, something remarkable happened: we realized that isolation isn’t a foreign policy. It’s just hoping the world leaves you alone. The world rarely obliges.
World War II finished the lesson. When it was over, American leaders — many of them Republicans — made a deliberate choice. They would not repeat the mistake of retreat. They built NATO. They built alliances across the Pacific. They underwrote a rules-based international order. Not because Americans are naturally altruistic, but because they understood something iron-clad about geopolitics: a large military plus large alliances prevents war. One without the other is insufficient.
The Peace Dividend and Its Dangerous Hangover
When the Soviet Union collapsed, the United States stood alone. Unchecked power. No peer competitor. And to our credit — with exceptions that matter — we didn’t use that power the way empires historically do. We didn’t annex. We didn’t colonize. We maintained the alliances and let the liberal order generate prosperity for ourselves and much of the world.
That prosperity created a problem. Generations of Americans, and their political leaders, grew up in a world where major war between great powers was essentially unthinkable. They looked at the cost of bases in Germany and South Korea and asked: why are we paying for this? They forgot — or never learned — that those bases weren’t charity. They were the reason the question of great-power war never had to be answered.
Nuclear weapons deserve some of the credit too. Mutual assured destruction made the calculus of all-out war suicidal. But nukes don’t deter everything. They don’t deter proxy wars, economic coercion, or a slow erosion of the norms that make the international system function. What deters that is allies. Partners willing to fight beside you, sanction beside you, stand beside you. That’s a force multiplier. That makes enemies calculate twice.
MAGA looked at that stability and concluded the alliances were unnecessary overhead. It’s one of the most dangerous misreadings of cause and effect in modern American political history.
Our Own Backyard Wasn’t Fine Either
Here’s what makes this especially maddening: the critique of American overextension has a legitimate kernel. The post-9/11 era wasn’t just strategic overreach in the Middle East — it was strategic neglect of the Western Hemisphere.
While we poured blood and treasure into Iraq and Afghanistan, authoritarianism deepened in Venezuela. Criminal networks metastasized in Central America and Mexico. Poverty and governance failures drove millions of people toward our southern border. We absolutely should have been doing more in our own hemisphere — building democratic institutions, fighting corruption, targeting cartel financing, investing in the conditions that let ordinary people stay home.
But “we ignored our backyard” is not the same argument as “we should abandon the rest of the world.” America is capable of walking and chewing gum. We have the largest economy on earth, the most powerful military ever assembled, and a network of alliances that no other nation comes close to matching. The argument that we must choose between the Indo-Pacific and Latin America, between NATO and the Caribbean, is a false choice built to justify a predetermined conclusion.
What Retreat Actually Looks Like
We’ve now had a glimpse of what MAGA foreign policy produces in practice. The operation against Maduro felt, for a moment, like America projecting decisive power in our own hemisphere — the kind of muscular engagement the hawks said they wanted. But then came Iran. And there, the pattern was clarifying: allies were cut out, unilateral military power was foregrounded, and the United States ceded the information space entirely while the White House was consumed with domestic politics.
Allies noticed. They always do.
Because here’s what allies are watching, constantly: Is this partner reliable? Will they consult us? Will they be there when it matters? Once that question becomes genuinely uncertain, the alliance calculus changes. Countries hedge. They cut side deals. They build redundancies. The network frays — not dramatically, not all at once, but in ways that are very hard to reverse.
Economically, it’s devestating. Whether we like to admit it our not, our defense industry is a large driver of our economy. But those arms are not solely for our defense, they are sold to allies. This gives the US leverage in policy, and activity in economics. Now, Europe has decided to invest heavily in standing up it’s own industry, believing the US to be too fickel. And who could blame them? We have told the Germans they won’t get the cruise missiles they ordered, and we claim to be low on defense interceptors.
The Stakes
The next president will inherit a world where the international order America built is under more pressure than at any point since 1945. China is patient and methodical. Russia is violent and revanchist. Rogue states are watching to see what they can get away with. And America’s traditional partners are asking a question they haven’t had to ask in decades: Can we count on Washington?
The answer to that question will determine whether the next generation of Americans fights a major war.
History is clear on this: large militaries and strong alliances prevent wars. Retrenchment, nationalism, and the fraying of commitments make wars more likely. We’ve run this experiment before. We know how it ends.
America doesn’t have the luxury of nostalgia. The Monroe Doctrine was a product of a world that no longer exists. What kept the peace for eighty years wasn’t isolationism — it was engagement, alliances, and the credible commitment to show up.
We need to show up again.
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