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Changes in American society are likely to ensure the United States will ultimately return to greater engagement in international affairs, the Crawford Australian Leadership Forum has been told.
Professor James Steinberg, a former US deputy secretary of state and national security adviser, told the forum at the Australian National University on Tuesday that the Trump administration's foreign policy position – while containing "idiosyncrasies" – was part of a long-term tradition in which the US has resisted sustained engagement in the rest of the world, he said.
Many of the issues facing the world, like climate change, cannot be solved by individual countries.
"I think it's important to remember that the kind of role the US has played internationally – beginning with the US entry into World War II and especially in the post World War II order, security order, economic order – is relatively novel in America history," Professor Steinberg said.
He said "even in the Cold War – when the practice of foreign policy was much more engaged with the decision to create security arrangements, in Europe and east Asia – that was never fully accepted by the American people".
"The decision to create NATO was a contested one, as was the question of a role in this region," he said, and noted that "President Carter had wanted to withdraw troops from Korea".
Questioning the value of US engagement has come the fore in the US political debate since the Cold War.
"It was masked for a period of time because a generation of leaders who grew up during the Cold War were a trailing indicator of these deeper changes taking place so you had political leaders including President Clinton and President Bush who had some of the sense of this air of the great generation that you had to stay involved," he said.
Indispensable question
"Certainly President Obama believed in the importance of engaging in negotiations over climate change, the importance of multilateral institutions like the UN but began to question the reflexive sense that the United States was the indispensable nation.
"If you look at the Trump administration's policy, there are some deep idiosyncrasies, but at a more fundamental level the sense of America first, of America tending to its own, is not that far out of the mainstream of trends in American foreign policy," he said.
"So as we think about what the structural engagement is going forward, the question is what would happen if the United States, after a sustained period of international engagement, really pulled back."
His own sense was that the consequences of this would be troubling "simply because the nature of the challenges we face are pretty obvious", and it was very hard to see how the necessary collective action to deal with problems like climate change or terrorism could be organised. He said it would be "helpful" if Europe or China could take on that role but he was not sure whether that would work.
However, demographic change taking place in the US "actually favours more engagement".
The US must go through some deep social and economic adjustments arising from long-term globalisation but a much more diverse population means there will be a considerable constituency that feels a connection with international affairs, he said.