The Most Abrupt Change in U.S. Foreign Policy . . . Ever?

      I have been trying to come up with an example in the history of the United States of a new president changing U.S. foreign policy as dramatically and significantly as President Trump seems to be doing on the Ukraine War.

      I have not found such an example.

•       Thomas Jefferson was less worried about the French and was more conciliatory toward them than his predecessor as president, John Adams. However, after Great Britain and France began interfering with American shipping, Jefferson’s Embargo Act restricted trade with both countries. No huge switch there.

•       The election of an abolitionist as president of the United States in 1860 had larger consequences than any other election in American history. But Abraham Lincoln did not bring a change in foreign policy, beyond a concern with making sure other nations did not recognize the Confederacy.

•       Jumping ahead a century, Republican presidential nominee Richard Nixon promised that, if he was elected in 1968, he would end direct U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. That war had, of course, escalated dramatically under his predecessor Lyndon Johnson. Nixon promised “peace with honor” in Vietnam. However, there was in fact no significant switch in Vietnam policy from Johnson to Nixon. Indeed, Nixon expanded the war into Cambodia and Laos, and American combat troops continued fighting in Vietnam for five years after Nixon was first elected.

•       Nixon, that fervent anti-Communist, did go to Communist China and restored direct relations with a nation we had isolated for decades—but the policy he was switching was his own. He had already been president for three years before his China visit and had long before established himself as a staunch anti-Communist. Trump, on the other hand, seems about to overturn not only a policy—support for democracies and opposition to dictators and invaders—of his predecessor as president but a policy supported by most Americans.

•       During his campaign for president in 2008, Barack Obama called for a “phased withdrawal” of U.S. troops from Iraq. He also called for more emphasis on the conflict in Afghanistan than that in Iraq. His Republican opponent, John McCain, on the other hand, supported the Bush administration’s “surge” in the number of U.S. troops in Iraq. After his election Obama did begin withdrawing troops—but the withdrawal was gradual. The last U.S. troops did not leave Iraq until December of 2011. Trump’s break with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has been anything but gradual.

•       The best example of such a dramatic change in foreign policy from one set of leaders to another in the history of the modern world before Trump belongs to the Bolsheviks, right after the Russian Revolution. Lenin signed a peace treaty with the Central Powers in March 1918, ending Russia’s involvement in the First World War. I can find nothing like that in the history of the United States before 2025.

      President Donald Trump is not threatening suddenly to end U.S. military involvement in Ukraine—since the U.S. military has never been fighting in Ukraine. U.S. soldiers are not dying in Ukraine. Instead, Trump is threatening to suddenly end U.S. support for a democratic country that has been invaded by a dictator.

      Yes, what Trump is doing is outrageous. It is also—in the history of the United States—unprecedented.