Who cares about the Uyghurs? Or Hong Kong. Or Taiwan, Crimea, the Baltics, Venezuela and Poland

 

"There are variations on the story about how to get a mule's attention, but we should thank Golden State Warriors minority owner Chamath Palihapitiya for hitting all of us over the head with a 2-by-4. As he put it in a now-famous podcast: "Nobody cares about what's happening to the Uyghurs, OK? You bring it up because you really care, and I think it's nice that you really care. The rest of us don't care."

A mountain of high dudgeon has fallen on Mr. Palihapitiya, who looks sufficiently case-hardened not to lose sleep over it. But don't get distracted. Push deeper into the interview, and this fellow from the NBA's courtside seats says something that is at the center of the debate over America's role in the world right now.

Mr. Palihapitiya elaborated: "If you're asking me, Do I care about a segment of a class of people in another country? Not until we can take care of ourselves will I prioritize them over us." He added that we should "take care of our own backyard."

That is the voice of isolationism. More precisely, it is the voice of progressive, left-wing isolationism, a newer, less-noticed strain of America-first ideology. The idea of global human rights that Democrat Jimmy Carter elevated is now being off-loaded from party concerns.

Mostly through the past century, the idea of demoting the world's problems while attending to "our own backyard" has been associated with Republicans and the right, notably of late with President Donald Trump.

Set aside for now whether Mr. Trump was a classic Republican isolationist. What can't be denied is that substantial numbers of Americans always have struggled between going it alone or going over there when we're needed.

Like much else, such as the origin of the global virus pandemic, the argument over isolationism has been overtaken by events. The world as it is in front of our faces makes clear that isolationism from the left or right is an absurdity. Like it or not, we're in it up to our frazzled neurons.

North Korea, which possesses nuclear bombs, has spent the past weeks launching four ballistic missiles from its mainland. North Korea's Hwasong-15 missile, test-fired in November 2017, has a theoretical range that would reach somewhere in the U.S. mainland.

Both China and Russia the past year tested maneuverable hypersonic missiles, somehow catching the U.S. intelligence community by surprise. China's push into the Pacific is no surprise but continues.

Cyberattacks on the U.S. mainland by foreign entities (primarily Russia, China and North Korea) shut down the Colonial Pipeline in the eastern U.S. and JBS Foods.

Ransomware attacks on small U.S. companies, local governments, schools and hospitals are commonplace and unpublicized and often end with the authorities telling the targets to pay.

It borders on amusing that an issue this week is whether U.S. Winter Olympic athletes in Beijing will be in such danger from Communist Party surveillance that they should substitute "burner" phones (more commonly used by drug dealers) for their personal cellphones. The idea that this would be avoidable if we withdrew from the Olympics is beyond irrelevant.

Vladimir Putin seems almost old-school in his decision to mass 100,000 Russian troops on Ukraine's border. This brinkmanship will be just another day at the office for Mr. Putin if it ends with approval this year of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and Western Europe permanently dependent on Russian energy supplies.

These multiple, often novel, threats exist because our adversaries are on offense 24/7 against the U.S.'s interests. There is no longer any such thing as the relative calm of an interwar period.

Still, there is that pertinent question: Who cares about the Uyghurs? Or Hong Kong. Or Taiwan, Crimea, the Baltics, Venezuela and Poland.

When Ronald Reagan promoted human-rights protection for resisters in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, it was seen in great part as a moral obligation. The backlash this week against Mr. Palihapitiya's "no one cares" was largely moral, but that won't last. Without apologizing, Mr. Palihapitiya took to Twitter to clarify his remarks: "I recognize that I come across as lacking empathy."

Progressive isolationism, as with the Warriors owner, is antiseptic. It wants no entanglements or acknowledgment of threats that would let the conservative opposition argue for increases in spending on national security or defense. It wants that spending reprogrammed into uncapped domestic spending like Build Back Better.

Mr. Palihapitiya's crude progressive realpolitik goes far toward explaining the Biden presidency's ad hoc stabs at foreign policy, starting with the pullout from Afghanistan. With the world rattled by the possibility of a Putin invasion, the Biden White House will resist doing much more than sticking U.S. thumbs in any of the globe's leaking dikes before the midterm elections.

For Mr. Biden and the Democrats, it's protecting domestic spending uber alles.

Fortress America? That's history. This is a moment of the sort Reagan identified in the early 1980s. Today we need a coherent, proactive foreign policy to build a credible multifront deterrent. The world's  actors are engaging us everywhere -- from capturing the network behind the screen you're looking at to filling the skies with weapons we can't stop yet" [1]

1.  Progressive to Uyghurs: Drop Dead
Henninger, Daniel. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 20 Jan 2022: A.15.