America’s pullback from the world is not a clever strategy to conserve strength. It is a symptom of an internal systems failure: a country that cannot agree on what it is for will struggle to decide what it is for in the world.
The United States has done this kind of reset before. After World War I it turned inward, then rebuilt an outward posture by World War II. The difference today is that the internal argument is less about policy and more about identity. Partisan exhaustion, feed-driven tribalism, and eroding trust in basic institutions make it harder to rebuild any shared outward focus.
Ronald Reagan liked to describe America as a “shining city on a hill,” not as an ethnic lineage but as a place defined by a set of civic commitments. In his farewell address he argued that anyone could become American by joining those ideals. That story powered a lot of soft power and a lot of immigration. I’d argue it still powers much of the “heart” in America’s residents and why they’re here today. As the country has grown more diverse, the original impulse toward inclusion has sometimes bent into its mirror image: ideological gatekeeping that treats “American” as a narrow set of cultural shibboleths instead of a shared project.
A country that treats its core identity as a moving target will not project stable leadership abroad.
The wokeism debate: good intentions, tribal outcomes
Attempts to correct real injustices can turn into new forms of policing, especially when they run on social media logic rather than institutional process.
What people call “wokeism” started as a push to notice structural bias and give more space to voices that had been ignored. That part was overdue. The trouble came when moral seriousness got wired into platforms that reward outrage, speed, and public shaming. Then things got weird… fast.
Campus politics offers a clear case study. At Evergreen State College in Washington, a dispute over a “Day of Absence” policy escalated from disagreement into a complete breakdown of campus norms. A place that should have modeled argument and disagreement as normal parts of civic life became a stage for loyalty tests. Professors who questioned the plan were not argued with; they were shouted down or pushed out. The label “safe space” drifted from psychological safety for individuals to ideological safety for groups.
Once that pattern locks in, a few predictable things happen:
- Complex topics collapse into slogans and hashtags
- People learn to self-censor rather than test ideas in public
- Outsiders start reading the whole ecosystem as self-loathing instead of self-critical
In that environment, good faith argument feels risky, and performative indignation feels safe. The system routes energy into internal scorekeeping instead of shared problem solving. Outside observers, including many Americans, read this as a country that spends more time auditing itself than building anything together.
When your main instruments for dealing with disagreement are callouts and cancellations, it becomes harder to maintain a stable civic identity. The culture starts to feel like a bug tracker with no triage and no resolution, only ever-growing lists of offenses.
The world moves on: alternative models, real risks
Other countries have been tightening their internal stories while the United States has been loosening its own.
In India, you can feel a strong sense of historical continuity tied to a rising middle-class ambition. In China, official narratives link current growth to a long civilizational arc and a promise of restored centrality in the region. Russia leans on memories of victory in World War II and a revived nationalism. These stories often gloss over deep problems, and they can justify ugly treatment of minorities or dissenters. But they give many citizens a clear, if simplified, sense of what they are part of.
That cohesion has costs: stifled opposition, pressure to conform, and heavy state control of media and culture. Yet it also provides a kind of default answer to the question “who are we” that many Americans struggle to articulate. A country that once called itself a melting pot now often feels like a set of disconnected neighborhoods arguing over zoning rules.
While the United States argued over statues and pronouns, rivals and rising powers invested in their own core narratives and in new networks of trade, infrastructure, and influence. Again, not everything they built is stable or just. But they have a clear sense, internally, that they are moving toward something, not just away from something.
America does not need to copy top down uniformity or embrace hard edged nationalism. It does need a functional alternative: a pluralistic identity that can absorb change without dissolving into a culture war feedback loop. At the moment, the export is less a model and more a live stream of permanent argument.
Beyond left vs right: an outdated operating system
Reducing every question to left versus right is like trying to run modern infrastructure on a wiring diagram from the 1700s. It still powers some lights, but it is a bad fit for current load.
The left right split comes from a specific historical seating chart in revolutionary France. That shorthand still has some use. It gives people a quick map of rough tendencies. The problem is what happens when the map becomes the territory. A 21st century superpower faces problems that do not care where someone would have sat in an 18th century assembly.
The real issues read more like a systems engineering checklist:
- How to maintain peace in a more crowded, more armed world
- How to keep human dignity intact under economic and technological pressure
- How to share the gains from new tools without turning entire regions into sacrifice zones
- How to update institutions built for paper and telegraphs to handle networks and algorithms
Those are not purely “left” or “right” questions. They cut across sectors and identities. They blur the lines between market and state, local and global, public and private.
Yet American politics keeps replaying an ideological costume drama. Each camp tells itself that the other side is an existential threat and that any compromise is a step toward collapse. When the mental model is permanent emergency, the political system behaves like a traffic grid stuck on flashing red lights. Everything becomes a standoff; very little moves.
While that pattern holds, other countries keep extending their infrastructure, their trade routes, and their diplomatic reach. America has spent a lot of time in recent years arguing about decade-old tweets while others quietly signed contracts, built ports, and tested new regional institutions.
Cultural identity is worth preserving
If America has a unique advantage, it is not just economic scale or military capacity. It is the idea that people from very different backgrounds can sign onto a shared civic framework and still keep much of their own culture. That has never worked perfectly, but it has worked better in America (and I guess Canada) than anywhere - generation after generation of newcomers are the proof.
The record is, of course, mixed. The same country that wrote powerful language about liberty also wrote laws that denied it to large parts of its population. Yet over time, that civic framework helped power major advances in civil rights, science, and global governance. People inside and outside the country watched a system that was willing, however slowly, to revise itself using its own tools. That leadership drove much of the narrative of what “freedom” means around the world.
Other democracies grapple with similar tensions. In Germany, debates over Leitkultur try to define a set of guiding norms that can hold diverse communities together without erasing their differences. France and Quebec guard their languages in ways that can look fussy from the outside, but they see those policies as the scaffolding that keeps a living culture from collapsing into souvenir-shop aesthetics.
These efforts are uneven and often controversial. They are still attempts to design systems that balance openness with continuity. The United States once modeled this balance more convincingly than most. It made it possible for outsiders to feel they could belong without pretending they had no history before arrival.
Walking away from that hard-earned skill in favor of short term point scoring in cultural trench fights weakens the broader story. It trades a complex, adaptive ecosystem for a collection of brittle identity lanes.
Why it matters for America’s role
Foreign policy runs on more than aircraft carriers and trade agreements. It runs on whether other countries see your system as something they might want to plug into.
If Americans sound unsure about what, if anything, binds them together, it is difficult for others to treat the United States as a long term partner in any shared project. Why would you sign on to a model that its own citizens describe mostly in terms of failure modes?
Diplomacy is partly about interests and partly about narratives. A state that cannot maintain a credible, constructive story about itself loses influence even when it still has capacity. Partners begin to hedge, building alternative arrangements. Rivals, meanwhile, are happy to define the American story for their own audiences.
There are still realistic levers available:
- Make inspiration cheaper than intimidation. Alliances built on consent and shared standards tend to be more durable than those built purely on fear or dependence.
- Build cultural depth instead of slogans. Real inclusion looks like honest disagreement, negotiation, and memory, not instant verdicts on who is pure and who is not.
- Adapt without deleting yourself. Institutions need renovation to handle new technologies and global shocks, but major rewiring works better when there is a stable sense of what the building is for.
A country can change its policies every few years and still feel coherent if the underlying story and basic norms are legible. When those disappear, policy swings start to look random rather than adaptive.
Define yourself or be defined by others
In practical terms, a state that will not decide what it stands for leaves that work to its critics and competitors.
America still has a plausible path to renewed leadership rooted in freedom, pluralism, and innovation. The raw materials have not vanished. The question is whether enough people are willing to treat national identity as something to maintain and update together instead of as a trophy to fight over.
History suggests that course corrections are possible. The country has faced internal fracture and external doubt several times:
- After the Civil War the system, damaged and unequal, eventually rebuilt a stronger federal structure and a clearer (if still contested) idea of citizenship.
- During the Great Depression and World War II faith in institutions cracked, then was partially rebuilt around a more active state and a new international architecture.
- In the civil rights era mass protest and legal change widened the circle of rights and gave the American story more credibility abroad, even as the work remained incomplete.
Each of these moments involved a hard look at what “American” should mean, and each time the answer was updated rather than scrapped. The country expanded who was genuinely included in the story and what promises were supposed to apply in practice.
Something similar is possible now, but not automatic. Rediscovering an inclusive, confident civic identity will not look like a return to a simpler past. It will look more like city planning in a crowded, diverse metropolis: long meetings, unglamorous repairs, occasional breakthroughs, and constant argument over how to share space without blowing up the whole grid.
The alternative is not stasis; it is drift. If the United States treats its identity crisis as background noise instead of a design problem, others will keep writing the script. They already are.