The “America first” foreign policy of U.S. President Donald Trump has unsettled the world America made. Allies are questioning the United States’ reliability as a strategic partner and are concerned that Washington is now more foe than friend of the liberal rules-based order. They have reason to worry. The Trump administration believes that international pacts, open trade, and foreign assistance are degrading, not amplifying, U.S. power and influence. Trump has made quite clear his hostility to multilateralism, stating that he opposes “international unions that tie us up and bring America down.”

“America first” foreign policy may be the focal point of public debate over the future of U.S. leadership, and it is certainly setting the world on edge. But it is also a symptom of a broader challenge confronting the United States: the hollowing out of the domestic consensus that anchored U.S. grand strategy from World War II into the twenty-first century. Partisan, regional, and ideological divides have produced a disconnect between the country’s domestic politics and its foreign policy.

At one end of the political spectrum are the embattled liberal internationalists, firmly committed to the defense of the liberal order through the projection of American power, trade liberalization, multilateral governance, and the promotion of democracy. At the other are newly empowered “America firsters,” who are attempting to dismantle the liberal order by loosening foreign commitments, putting up tariff walls, disengaging from multilateral institutions, and abandoning efforts to spread democratic values. Neither vision can muster sustained domestic support. As a result, U.S. foreign policy has become erratic and inconstant, buffeted by competing visions of the country’s purposes and disagreement over how best to pursue them.

Such domestic division would matter less for the United States if it faced a benign and quiescent geopolitical landscape. Yet the country finds itself confronting mounting international challenges just when it has lost the political capacity to meet those challenges. If a fractured America is to steady a fractured world, U.S. leaders must bring international ends back into equilibrium with domestic means by persuading Americans from different walks of life to again get behind U.S. statecraft. Doing so will require pursuing a brand of foreign policy that appeals to the interests and aspirations of a broad majority of Americans, from the country’s urban metropolises to its rural hamlets.

To get there, the United States must make three key adjustments. It needs to repair the partisan divide between urban and rural America and rebuild an internationalist consensus that includes working families left behind by globalization. Such an effort will require a rebalanced trade policy that avoids both unfettered markets and protectionist excesses, a program of targeted investment in the country’s lagging regions, and an overhaul of a broken immigration system. Second, Washington needs to find a happy medium between deep multilateralism and a unilateralist breakout. To counter populist nationalism, the United States should reform existing multilateral institutions to produce a more equitable sharing of authority and burdens while enhancing the delivery of public goods such as common defense, humanitarian assistance, and cybersecurity. It should also promote coalitions of the willing that would allow states to work together on shared interests despite geopolitical and ideological differences. Finally, Washington must adopt a more discriminating approach to international engagement that avoids both the temptation of unrestrained globalism and the siren call of self-defeating retreat, prioritizing the country’s vital interests. The United States should continue to play the role of great-power balancer, but not global policeman.

Shoring up domestic support for a new American internationalism will be difficult, given the many divides now cleaving the country. But in an unruly world, poised and proactive U.S. leadership remains a necessity. The United States must find a midpoint between internationalist excess and nationalist retreat, stepping back from global overreach without stepping away from global engagement.

This is not the first time in U.S. history that the country’s leaders have struggled to strike a balance between the competing pressures of international and domestic politics. Racked by deep partisan and regional divisions in the 1920s, the United States rebuffed international leadership. Congress rejected membership in the League of Nations, and the Republican administrations of Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover favored commercial rather than strategic engagement abroad.

The laissez-faire credo that dominated the political landscape came to define U.S. foreign policy. Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover recognized the need to stabilize the economies of a war-ravaged Europe but were fearful of excessive government involvement in world affairs and constrained by the demands of coalition building in an increasingly fractured GOP. They gambled that private initiative, rather than government activism, would be sufficient to steer the world away from economic fragmentation and toward interdependence and geopolitical stability. But relying on “dollar diplomacy” did the opposite; in the absence of U.S. leadership and strategic engagement, militarism and geopolitical rivalry spread. The Great Depression only deepened the United States’ retreat. Washington erected tariff barriers and sought to cordon itself off from the forces destabilizing Europe and East Asia. Only the worldwide war that broke out would end the United States’ isolationist delusions.

With the end of World War II and the onset of the Cold War, Washington finally assumed the mantle of global leadership that it had rejected after World War I. Abandoning isolationism while eschewing idealistic calls for world federalism, U.S. officials instead took a middle course and pursued liberal internationalism. The liberal international order that took shape in the late 1940s and early 1950s was made possible by a broad political alliance that spanned party, region, and class. Democrats and Republicans, Northerners and Southerners, bankers, factory workers, and farmers all found common cause in freer trade, forward defense, and foreign aid, which linked prosperity and security at home to economic and strategic engagement abroad.

This bipartisan internationalism provided the political grounding for the network of strategic and commercial partnerships that succeeded in containing the ambition and appeal of the Soviet bloc. Foreign policy and domestic politics were in broad alignment. Because international........

© Foreign Affairs