America is retreating from world affairs and circling the wagons…

For all its rhetoric, the US under Donald Trump is on a clear path of disengagement in international matters

America's ambivalence about engagement with the world beyond its shores is nothing new. Isolationist instincts are deeply rooted in the national psyche. Large constituencies opposed US involvement in both world wars. Donald Trump's "America First" campaign was the most recent manifestation of a longstanding desire to avoid the "foreign entanglements" that the first US president, George Washington, warned against in his 1796 farewell address.

Yet, as US power expanded, this yearning for separateness grew increasingly at odds with another national urge - to demonstrate America's pre-eminence, and propagate its values and interests, through global leadership. This process climaxed in the early 1990s when America's main rival, the Soviet Union, imploded and the US claimed the mantle of sole superpower.