Editorial: Waltz's foreign policy dance card -- Avoid dangerous isolationism

The week after he won the White House, Donald Trump announced his national security advisor. It was 2016 and the pick was Mike Flynn, a man with an oddly pro-Russian worldview who only would last three weeks in the role, having lied to the vice president about talking to the Russians. Flynn was also under investigation for being an unregistered foreign agent. Later convicted of crimes, Flynn was ultimately pardoned by Trump.

This time, a week after he won the White House, Donald Trump announced his national security advisor. It’s another Mike, Mike Waltz, a Florida congressman. Unlike Flynn, Waltz is no pal of the Kremlin, or the Chinese or the Iranians, all our rivals on the global stage. A serious man, Waltz also has a more sound understanding of America’s place in the world and why we must stay engaged and not withdraw.

Waltz knows the value of standing up to bullies and standing in solidarity with friends, even if Trump sometimes doesn’t. We mean Russia and Ukraine.

Trump talks about America First, but his adopting the name of a dangerous and discredited isolationist organization of the 1930s and 1940s shows his lack of understanding of the history.

During a March 2016 interview, New York Times reporter David Sanger in asking candidate Trump about his foreign policy, compared it to the America First ideas espoused by Charles Lindbergh that held that both the British and the Germans should be viewed with suspicion in 1940 and 1941, as England fought alone against the Nazis.

From the interview transcript it doesn’t seem that Trump knew anything of the historical movement, but liked the catchy name and adopted the phrase.

The isolationism and avoiding foreign commitment of Lindbergh and America First was also the editorial policy of the Daily News in the 1930s and 1940s, having been traumatized by the mass death of the First World War.

These editorial columns argued to stay out of other people’s fights; we opposed FDR’s Lend-Lease plan to aid Britain. It was not our business, went the thinking. It was a terrible mistake. The “pro-peace” position allowed tyrants in Germany and Italy and Japan to swallow up their neighbors in Europe and Asia as long as we stayed out of the fray. But the tyrants always want more. It wasn’t until Pearl Harbor that The News changed course.

That fatal mistake after WWI, when America withdrew from the world, was not repeated after WWII, when NATO was created. Collective security works.

France and Germany fought three major wars in the 75 years between 1870 and 1945, each more destructive than its predecessor (Franco-Prussian, WWI and WWII). In the 75 years since NATO was founded in 1949, under Washington’s sponsorship, France and Germany have been strong allies and no NATO member has been attacked.

Trump and Waltz both want our NATO partners to increase their military funding, as do we. The U.S. cannot carry the entire burden. Ukraine is not in NATO, but it borders on NATO territory and Putin’s aggression cannot be rewarded.

Maybe Trump is correct that he can end the war “in 24 hours,” but the only just “deal” is a full Russian withdrawal to the lines before the invasion, not a negotiation on how much of Ukraine Russia gets to keep.

That’s the right way to be a peacemaker.

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