Konstantin Kisin

At the domestic level, the culmination of this worldview is their demand for social justice, a forced redistribution of wealth, influence, and opportunity from the oppressors to the oppressed.

You don't need to be a Robin DiAngelo acolyte to see how this Marxist dynamic extends to global affairs.

Social justice at home becomes global justice abroad.

If the world is unequal, which it is, then that must be corrected.

The extraordinary ignorance of the world beyond the borders of the safe, peaceful, and civilized countries they live in is extremely helpful in this regard because it prevents them from seeing that peace, stability, and prosperity are the products of culture, science, and innovation.

Instead, they argue that the West's recent dominance is a product of colonialism, racism, and imperialism.

They hate the West for being successful and want a multipolar world as both a punishment and a corrective.

The isolationists, on the other hand, are primarily an American phenomenon, albeit one which has spread to other parts of the West, along with every other aspect of American culture.

I have some sympathy for their instincts, even though they are, in my view, as misguided as the woke left about the way the world actually works.

Having traveled extensively around America, I well understand the feeling of a man living a comfortable life in rural Ohio being asked to care about events happening halfway around the world.

When I sit on the porch of my Airbnb somewhere in the middle of America, I find it much harder to care about those events too.

For this reason, among others, isolationism has always existed in American history and was particularly powerful in the 1930s.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the president who orchestrated America's support for Britain during World War II and his country's eventual full involvement in that conflict, had to tread extremely carefully around this faction until Pearl Harbor.

The outcome of that war, an overwhelming moral and military victory over indisputable evil, kept isolationists quiet for some time.

But the horrors of Vietnam, compounded by the trillion-dollar disasters of Afghanistan and Iraq, have understandably produced a powerful backlash against interventionism.

America can't be the world's policeman when they cry.

Unfortunately, simple slogans are rarely true and inevitably leave out much-needed context.

America accounts for 5% of the world's population, but 25% of its GDP.

Much of this is due to geography, natural resource wealth, and the ingenuity and drive of her people.

But much of it also stems from the fact that America is the world's most powerful country, an advantage she uses with great skill to get the best deals, secure access to resources, and shape global affairs in a way that benefits her and her allies.