Opinion | The Ghost of Warren Harding

However one calculates the winners and losers in the Trump-imposed agreement to bring the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza to an end, it’s clear that one big loser was the United Nations. Trump did not invite the UN to the party, and it proved irrelevant to both the negotiations and their outcome.

The dismissal of any role for the UN was of a piece with Trump’s disdain for international and internationally focused institutions generally, from USAID to NATO. Many have lamented this ongoing pullback from global institutions as a departure from long-running American traditions of world leadership.

But it is a singular mistake, in my opinion, to view Trump’s approach to foreign policy and international relations, or to international economics for that matter, as a departure from established norms of U.S. policies and behavior.

Rather, I would argue that it is the internationalism of the 84 years following the American entry into World War II that should be considered an aberration—a praiseworthy aberration, but an aberration nonetheless.

The U.S. government’s priority prior to Pearl Harbor was one of what the French referred to as raisons d’état—reasons or concerns of state—as embodied in the Monroe Doctrine and its 1904 Roosevelt (Theodore, that is) corollary. International altruism played no part in, and was often deemed anathema to, American foreign policy until the 1941 Lend-Lease Act and, some years later, the Marshall Plan. As long as European emperors, tsars and kings did not threaten or otherwise negatively affect American interests, the United States would stay far, far away from any entanglements on the other side of the Atlantic.

At home, as abroad, what we are seeing on the political scene is not so much an unprecedented break with American tradition as a reversion to these old patterns. The lofty words of the Declaration of Independence notwithstanding, the United States has not historically been a harbinger of equality or human rights. Even the civil rights movement was a phenomenon that grew more naturally from the values of the tumultuous 1960s than from those of 1776, or even of Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation.

Let’s remember that the post-Civil War Reconstruction era ended up being a dismal failure. Anti-Black legislation became a hallmark of southern state jurisprudence, fully endorsed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson. Indeed, as Yale Law School Professor James Q. Whitman demonstrated persuasively in his 2017 book, Hitler’s American Model, Nazi Germany’s notorious 1935 Nuremberg Laws that turned German Jews into legal and social pariahs were largely cribbed from the American Jim Crow and anti-miscegenation statutes.

And then there’s the inconvenient truth that Hitler admired the United States for its racial policies and was heavily influenced by the virulently antisemitic Henry Ford, the only American mentioned by name in Mein Kampf.

Trump’s sweeping disdain for international institutions, including the UN, is reminiscent of the way President Warren G. Harding regarded the nascent League of Nations in the aftermath of World War I. “It is only fair to say to the world in general,” Harding declared in a 1921 address to a joint session of Congress, “and to our associates in war in particular, that the League covenant can have no sanction by us.” (Under isolationist pressure, the United States never joined the League of Nations.)

In the same speech, Harding said, “the urgency for an instant tariff enactment, emergency in character and understood by our people that it is for the emergency only, cannot be too much emphasized. I believe in the protection of American industry, and it is our purpose to prosper America first. The privileges of the American market to the foreign producer are offered too cheaply today, and the effect on much of our own productivity is the destruction of our self-reliance which is the foundation of the independence and good fortune of our people. Moreover, imports should pay their fair share of our cost of government.”

International altruism played no part in American foreign policy.

If Harding’s words sound uncomfortably familiar, it’s because Trump’s approach to tariffs, too, is firmly rooted in the long-standing American isolationist tradition epitomized by the Harding-Coolidge-Hoover administrations that preceded Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election in 1932.

I am not suggesting that the resurrection of a Hardingesque ideology is a good thing. Far from it. But understanding the contemporary scene does require facing up to the darker side of American history rather than sweeping it under the proverbial rug.

Menachem Z. Rosensaft is adjunct professor of law at Cornell Law School, lecturer-in-law at Columbia Law School, and general counsel emeritus of the World Jewish Congress. His most recent book is Burning Psalms: Confronting Adonai after Auschwitz.

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