Dwain Northey (Gen X)

In 1947, the United States unveiled what historians now consider one of the most strategically intelligent foreign policy decisions in modern history: the Marshall Plan. The idea was embarrassingly simple. Europe lay in ruins after World War II, and desperate, unstable societies tend to produce extremism, authoritarianism, and wars that inconveniently drag everyone else back in. So America did something radical—it helped. It invested money, food, infrastructure, and trust into rebuilding Europe, not out of charity, but because stability over there meant fewer problems over here.

Fast-forward roughly seventy-five years, and we arrive at the Trump era, where foreign policy appears to have been redesigned on a cocktail napkin with the words: “What if we just… didn’t?”

Donald Trump’s attitude toward world politics suggests a profound suspicion of history itself—particularly the parts that require patience, alliances, or the understanding that global leadership is not a protection racket. NATO, once the cornerstone of post-war stability, becomes in Trumpian rhetoric less a defensive alliance and more a delinquent HOA whose members haven’t paid their dues. The fact that NATO’s very existence prevented another European world war for nearly eight decades is treated as a coincidence, like the sun rising or gravity functioning.

The Marshall Plan, meanwhile, seems to exist in Trump’s worldview as an example of America being “ripped off,” rather than the foundational reason the U.S. emerged as the dominant global power of the second half of the 20th century. Why rebuild Europe when you could instead loudly complain that Luxembourg isn’t pulling its weight?

This revisionist approach to history replaces strategy with transactional thinking. Alliances are no longer long-term investments in stability; they’re gym memberships Trump insists everyone else is freeloading on. Never mind that American influence—economic, military, cultural—has depended precisely on these alliances. Influence, after all, requires showing up consistently, not storming out because someone didn’t say thank you loudly enough.

The logical endpoint of this worldview is a kind of geopolitical shrug. Europe? Fine, Putin can keep an eye on that. Asia? China’s problem—or prize—depending on the day. Democracy promotion? Exhausting. Multilateralism? Overrated. The Atlantic Ocean becomes a moat again, as if the last century of global interdependence was just a weird phase America went through before remembering it prefers isolation with cable news commentary.

Of course, history has already run this experiment. The United States tried disengagement after World War I, retreating behind oceans and optimism. Europe destabilized, authoritarianism flourished, and eventually America was dragged back into a much worse war at a much higher cost. The Marshall Plan and NATO were explicit attempts to ensure that never happened again. Trump’s foreign policy rhetoric, intentional or not, sounds like a rejection of that lesson—an assumption that chaos elsewhere will politely remain elsewhere.

What makes this posture especially ironic is that it doesn’t even align with Trump’s supposed obsession with “winning.” The post-war order was an American win—economically, militarily, ideologically. By questioning NATO, praising authoritarian strongmen, and treating allies as liabilities, Trump isn’t rejecting weakness; he’s discarding leverage. It’s the geopolitical equivalent of folding a royal flush because someone asked you to help pay for the table.

So we’re left with a strange, sarcastic historical question: Is this a bold new doctrine, or just strategic exhaustion dressed up as toughness? Is America consciously abandoning the Marshall Plan’s legacy, or has it simply forgotten why it existed in the first place?

Either way, the message heard across the Atlantic—and increasingly across the Pacific—sounds something like this: “Good luck out there. We’ll be over here. Don’t call unless it’s on our terms.”

History, unfortunately, has a way of calling back.