Anderson edited "Leveraging: A Political, Economic and Societal Framework" (Springer, 2014), has taught at five universities and ran for the Democratic nomination for a Maryland congressional seat in 2016.
Even as the world has grown smaller due to the Internet and the World Wide Web, and even as climate change and the Russia-Ukraine war bring international issues to our iPhones and televisions every day, it is still the case that Americans have deep isolationist and idealistic streaks that are central to our national identity.
Our isolationism and idealism are in many ways two sides of our national pendulum: one side of us stays out of global affairs, our President Washington side, and one side of us tries to make the world safe for democracy, our President Wilson side.
The isolationist and idealist streaks are due to basic issues about space and time. With two oceans that separate us from Europe and Asia, we historically have not experienced the kind of pressure on our borders that countries in Europe and Asia, the other two power centers of the world have felt. Indeed, both World Wars witnessed countries in Europe and Asia, including France, Russia, and China, that were invaded. We left the space of the Old World and came to the New World to escape religious persecution, religious wars, and poverty in Europe. We created ourselves essentially outside of time far away from the Old World as a new kind of nation -- one dedicated to freedom, equality, national sovereignty, the separation of powers, and limited government.
In addition, the basic issue of time is instrumental to our idealism because we are still a very young country, certainly compared to England, Russia, China, Italy, and Egypt. We are only in our third century and not even halfway through it. There is still a youthful idealism about America.
The United States is of course also known for its pragmatism. The philosopher Morton White argued in his classic book Social Thought in America that our pragmatism and revolt against all forms of formalism covered a great range of fields, including philosophy, economics, history and law. But pragmatism, according to John Dewey, was wedded to idealist goals because we should be driven to keep experimenting and keep testing our ideas, our social science and our social practices in order to arrive at better, more effective, more humane solutions to our problems.
This union of pragmatism and idealism was evident in the leadership of FDR. American pragmatism at its best is chin up, thumbs up, eyes and ears toward a better tomorrow. According to the late noted Harvard historian David Donald, Lincoln also led in this tradition.
Our current role in Ukraine adopts a middle position which is a good example of a pragmatist move. Because we are supplying massive amounts of military resources but no troops, the U.S. position is pragmatist and not idealist. The Wilsonian idealist would be sending troops and supplying massive amounts of military resources. The upshot is that our historic struggle with isolationism and idealism needs to be revisited. We need to reset it.
Pragmatism sits between isolationism, which is also aligned with the realist worldview which sees only a power struggle between self-interested state actors, and idealism. We also need to steer clear of the kind of polarization that has infected our domestic politics and ensure that our foreign policy and international relations overall is pragmatic in a strong and not a weak sense. Weak pragmatism says do what works or do what makes money or do what helps you achieve your ends regardless of the means. The strong pragmatist has clear moral ideals, but they cannot be defended in any absolutist way.
Wilsonian idealism, which follows core principles of the philosopher Immanuel Kant, tries to promote the same democratic values in all countries. The strong pragmatist realizes that there is no place for absolutism in global politics because there is no set of moral truths that apply to all peoples in all times or any absolutist standpoint from which to defend them. In real life and real politics there must be compromises, beliefs need to be revised when new evidence appears, and new policies must be devised to promote democratic values of freedom, equality, and stability.
The strong pragmatist approach is needed in our foreign policy as much as our domestic policy. It despises intolerance, respects uncertainty, and pursues bipartisanship. It avoids both isolationism and idealism and also closes the gap between academic theorizing and real life politics since there is no abstract moral point of view that rises above particular situations.
Pragmatism provides the way forward.
Demonstrators rally outside the U.S. Supreme Court as justices hear oral arguments on whether President Donald Trump can deny citizenship to children born to parents who are in the United States illegally or temporarily, on Capitol Hill, in Washington, Wednesday, April 1, 2026. (AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib)
Luz Angela Nuñez with her daughter Aisha Quershi Nuñez at their home in College Point, Queens. Photo: Mia Anzalone for Documented.
Kimberly Alvarez, 25, with her daughter Evangeline and her husband John Alvarez in Medellin, Colombia. Photo courtesy of Kimberly Alvarez.Alvarez arrived in New York City in February 2024 with her husband John Alvarez as asylum seekers from Venezuela. In April 2025, Alvarez found out she was pregnant with her first child, a baby girl. Her first reaction, she said, was fear.“How am I going to keep her alive?” she said. “That’s what I was thinking. ‘How am I going to be able to take care of her?’”At the beginning of Alvarez’s pregnancy, she said she was aware of the immigration enforcement occurring around the country, but vowed not to let it deter her from showing up to her doctor’s appointments.“When you went out, you were always on alert because you didn’t know if [ICE] might be around. I never saw anything suspicious,” Alvarez said. “But of course, you feel scared.”In October, when Alvarez was six months pregnant, her husband was detained by ICE agents at 26 Federal Plaza. When the immediate shock wore off, she obsessively checked the Online Detainee Locator System to find out where her husband went. A day later, she discovered that he was being kept at Delaney Hall detention center in New Jersey. Alvarez quickly set up an account to pay for phone calls, and every two days, she would pay about $10 for a one-hour call, updating her husband about the baby, her appointments and how she was doing.“Crying was the only way for me to release the tension,” said Alvarez, who worried that her lack of sleep and bad diet were impacting her baby. “Crying was the only way for me to release the tension.”—Kimberly AlvarezThat tension built up day by day, week by week following her husband’s arrest. Alvarez had stopped her work as a cleaner in the neighborhood’s synagogues two weeks before her husband’s detention because of her pregnancy. The plan, she said, was to rely solely on his income as a maintenance worker for “the food, the rent, everything.” Left with few choices, Kimberley had to rely on her mother’s income as a cleaner. The older woman had moved to New York from North Carolina to assist with Alvarez’s pregnancy. “I feel like I’m supposed to help my mom, not the other way around,” Alvarez said. “I felt powerless because I couldn’t do anything.”On Dec. 9, Alvarez gave birth to a daughter, Evangeline. While her baby was healthy, Alvarez’s anxieties did not go away. While she returned to cleaning synagogues a few months after Evangeline’s birth to help make ends meet, Alvarez and her daughter rarely left home. Alvarez said she felt paralyzed, getting frequent alerts from a neighborhood WhatsApp group when ICE was spotted nearby. One day, she said, ICE arrested her friend’s husband in Sunset Park, in an area where she would sometimes take Evangeline for walks.“I’m so afraid that I’ll go out and run into one of them and that they’ll take her away from me,” Alvarez said. “That’s my biggest fear, that someone will take her away from me and I won’t know where my daughter is.”In March, her husband decided to voluntarily remove himself from the United States and move back to Colombia, where he is originally from. It was a family decision, but it was not a happy one — hiring immigration lawyers was too expensive, Alvarez said, adding that staying in the U.S. felt too uncertain. 
