The latest in a family of documents detailing the Donald Trump administration’s foreign-policy vision dropped late last month. And it is a doozy. The 2026 National Defense Strategy echoes the macro themes from its parent directive, the 2025 National Security Strategy. Where the National Security Strategy spells out basic principles guiding foreign policy and strategy, the National Defense Strategy explains in more concrete terms how the U.S. military apparatus intends to help put the administration’s vision into practice.

Doubtless some readers will find the strategy’s blunt tone jarring. It reflects the style favored by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and by the commander-in-chief himself. It even gave me, a practitioner of softly, softly diplomacy, pause. But the substance is solid, if arguable, the document is refreshingly short, and the writing gallops along. Read the whole thing. It repays the effort.

Four things about the National Defense Strategy are worth spotlighting in particular. First, the strategy follows the National Security Strategy’s lead in elevating the Western Hemisphere to top priority among U.S. strategic priorities. It downgrades the Indo-Pacific to a close second place, Europe to a not-so-close third place, and other regions to also-ran status. The Monroe Doctrine, the Theodore Roosevelt Corollary, and the “Trump Corollary” to the Doctrine put in appearances.

In his cover memo, Secretary Hegseth disclaims the notion that reshuffling regional priorities means the administration and the republic have turned isolationist. And he’s right to do so. A directive that proclaims that the United States will reassert supremacy across half the globe, deter its prime extraregional antagonist, China, and help allies help themselves to manage tough neighborhoods, is not an isolationist directive by any meaningful standard.

Washington espies a brave new world. But it’s not one marked by American isolationism. Retrenchment, maybe.

Was the United States ever isolationist? Well, no. In the late 1990s, University of Pennsylvania historian Walter McDougall published my favorite diplomatic history of the United States, a sprightly work titled Promised Land, Crusader State. Long story short, Professor McDougall dates the break between the early, promised land and later, crusader state phases of U.S. diplomatic history to 1898, when the United States evicted the Spanish Empire from its island holdings in the Caribbean Sea and Western Hemisphere and wrested them away for itself. It burst out of North America for the first time in a major way. Few could say it was isolationist after the splendid little war with Spain. Increasingly it asserted itself.

Yet McDougall contests the commonplace notion that the United States was an isolationist republic even before 1898. True, giants of the American Founding such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson did warn against the perils of entangling alliances. Still, McDougall insists—and I concur—that it’s a mistake to label pre-1898 US foreign policy isolationist. Genuinely isolationist powers seclude themselves from the outside world almost entirely; think imperial Japan for the quarter-millennium preceding the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Now that was isolationism.

By contrast, the United States sought commerce across the globe from its inception. It never secluded itself as the Japanese did. In fact, the sail merchantman Empress of China left New York Harbor for the........

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