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Janan Ganesh

Why the US will remain the world’s policeman

The lesson of the Iran intervention is that America’s retreat from the world is more talked about than realistic, whoever the president.

I take it we all agree now that he isn’t an “isolationist”. A word that should never have been applied to Donald Trump in the first place went up in smoke at the weekend, along with an unknown amount of Iran’s nuclear program.

The US bombings were consistent with his strike against Syria in 2017, against the leader of the militant group ISIS in 2019 and against Iran’s most senior general in 2020. Given all the abstract nouns that fit Trump well – jingoism, unilateralism, anti-Europeanism – it is a wonder that isolationism ever saw daylight. It is not even clear that he opposed the Iraq war as a private citizen in 2003.

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Janan Ganesh is the principal political columnist for the Financial Times.

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    Original URL: https://www.afr.com/world/north-america/why-the-us-will-remain-the-world-s-policeman-20250626-p5maji