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.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.