As the issue of isolationism and interventionism in American foreign policy emerges in the presidential election, a former spokeswoman for the State Department, Morgan Ortagus, says in an interview with the Sun that the 45th president and lead Republican candidate is no isolationist. 

Political observers have been quick to count President Trump as part of the growing isolationist sect within the GOP. Some primary opponents thrill to his rubric of “America First.” Yet Ms. Ortagus, pointing to the Trump administration’s hardline stance on Communist China, support for military aid to Ukraine, and push for peace in the Middle East, suggests that his “America first” doctrine did not mean “America alone.” 

 “President Trump is not an isolationist,” Ms. Ortagus says in conversation with the publisher of the Sun, Dovid Efune. Ms. Ortagus notes that “people within our party like to grab that mantle for him.” Yet she explains that Mr. Trump’s “foreign policy was a return to Reagan’s foreign policy,” which focused American strength and diplomacy on halting the spread of communism by promoting democracy abroad. “Every decision had to be about what was best for America.”

Isolationism is not new in American foreign policy. “America first,” Mr. Trump’s motto, was coined by President Wilson in his push for American neutrality in World War I. “There certainly is that tendency on the right and the left of people who want to cocoon themselves here in the United States,” Ms. Ortagus allows. Even, she says, “our founders didn’t want us to get involved in foreign entanglements.”

Isolationist tendencies today, the spokeswoman contends, are fueled by the catastrophe of Mr. Biden’s exit from Afghanistan. “Twenty years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan has taken a toll on our armed forces,” Ms. Ortagus says, “especially for people who saw us withdraw the way we did.” Ms. Ortagus is a Naval Reserve officer and the founder of the nonprofit group Polaris National Security.  

President Biden’s administration is guided by the question of, “how do we make a policy decision to not escalate?” Ms. Ortagus says. So they “come to the table in a weak position,” she says. This was the attitude, she says, underlying Mr. Biden’s failed deterrent strategy in the lead-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. 

“We are the ones who gave the Ukrainians lethal aid before it was cool,” Ms. Ortagus says, aid which she says Mr. Biden made conditional on a Russian attack. His cancellation of sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline also gave a green-light to Russia, she says. “When Putin finally did invade, I was one of the people arguing, give them everything they need to win, and instead we keep giving them just enough to make sure that they don’t lose.”

Mr. Trump, during his tenure, also bolstered the American military to compete with that of Communist China’s amid a potential invasion of Taiwan or other territory in the Indo-Pacific. “The world was asleep as it relates to the threat of the Chinese Communist party in 2015,” Ms. Ortagus says, “before we started talking about it.”

The Trump administration called in 2020 for a ban on TikTok, or what Ms. Ortagus deems “digital fentanyl.” She asserts that “we can’t let the Chinese Communist Party have algorithms that they would never allow for their own young people to have in their own country because they know how dangerous it is.”

In the Middle East, the Trump administration came after foes and looked for friends. Ms. Ortagus points to the U.S. forces’ assassination of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in 2019 and Iranian military commander Qasem Soleimani in 2020, an operation in which she was involved. She also promoted the Abraham Accords, the  brokered treaties between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Sudan. 

Asked by the Sun what it would take for Saudi Arabia to join that circle of peace in the wake of Hamas’s October 7th attack, Ms. Ortagus notes that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud wanted a defense pact ratified by the American Senate. “He understood that for the United States, the prize was recognition between Saudi and Israel,” she says. “So he was willing to make a big ask in return for that.”

The next president will have to contend with myriad foreign dramas in different theaters. For now, it’s up to the Biden administration to make it clear to Qatar and other countries funding terrorism that “there can be no more Hamas — no more political wing, no more military wing,” Ms. Ortagus urges. “Whatever heads were turned the other way before October 7th are not going to be turned anymore and Hamas cannot exist after this.”