A fair argument can be made that Donald Trump is an isolationist. But he is not against war. Isolationism is one of the longest standing political philosophies in the U.S. and has attracted people from the far right to those who identify as progressive anti-capitalists.  

Often drawing its roots from George Washington’s Farewell address warning against entanglements in Europe, the 1920’s and 1930’s saw an expansion of the ideas.  The experiences of World War I led to the understanding that Americans had been pushed to war by bankers and industry who profited from dealing in death. The 1934 publication of Merchants of Death, followed by War is a Racket in 1935 gave isolationism a strong anti-capitalist sentiment.

But isolationism has never meant anti-militarism, except for small groups of committed pacifists. And isolationism for Donald Trump does not mean limiting the military. On the contrary, as outlined in Project 2025 Trump has every intention of reshaping the U.S. military system. 

Nowhere is this expansion of the military more dangerous than in his approach to nuclear weapons. There has been some attention drawn to his desire to use the military as a domestic police force, swearing loyalty to him and not the Constitution, attacking his enemies and rounding up immigrants. It is clear that Trump thinks the military should be used to attack “the enemy within.” But there has been little attention to his expansion of nuclear war capabilities. These ideas are equally horrifying.

Certainly the U.S. and the world are closer to nuclear war than at any time during the darkest days of the Cold War. Under Joe Biden the U.S. has accelerated the production and development of new nuclear weapons, spending billions of dollars. But the proposals contained in Trump’s Project 2025, vastly outstrip Biden’s wildest vision.

Analysts assessing the program conclude that if “this hawkish political coalition gets its way in November, the scope, pace, and cost of US nuclear weapons programs would increase all at once. Their plan, which seeks to significantly increase budgets and deployments of nuclear weapons and related programs and destroy the remaining arms control agreements, would dramatically increase the risks of nuclear confrontation as a result.”

As Michael Hirsch reports in Politico, the agenda “is far more ambitious than anything Ronald Reagan dreamed up.”

Project 2025 proposes that a second Trump administration should take very specific actions including:

• Prioritizing nuclear weapons programs over other security programs.

• Accelerating the development and production of all nuclear weapons programs.

• Rejecting any congressional efforts to find more cost-effective alternatives to current plans.

• Increasing funding for the development and production of new and modernized nuclear warheads.

• Developing a new nuclear-armed, sea-launched cruise missiles

• Increasing the number of nuclear weapons above current treaty limits

These would require the expansion of the production of the nuclear industry, including the capabilities of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s weapons production complex, vastly increasing budgets, shedding non-nuclear weapons programs at the national laboratories and accelerating production of the plutonium pits that are the cores of nuclear weapons.

Further, Trump intends to resume nuclear testing. He has made it clear he is prepared to violate the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty that prohibits such tests and has not tested a full-scale nuclear device since 1992.

He will reject current arms control treaties that he considers “contrary to the goal of bolstering nuclear deterrence” and “prepare to compete in order to secure US interests should arms control efforts continue to fail.”

He will dramatically expand the directed energy and space-based weapons, abandoning “the existing policy of not defending the homeland against Russian and Chinese ballistic missiles.”

Trump fully intends to use the military, to reshape it, and to accelerate the development and deployment of nuclear weapons. This is not isolationism in any form. It is against our common humanity.