American security, and indeed the entire pax Americana has been predicated upon your country's network of global military bases and your carrier battle groups. This is what enables the USA to decisively influence any conflict anywhere on the globe.
Those bases would need to disappear in order for your comment to be true, and despite two thirds of your electorate who didn't vote against the future dementia ward patient currently in office, I don't think Americans are ready to accept a world where American foreign policy cannot be promulgated more or less at will, which is what isolationism would entail.
No, America's influence over its globe-spanning empire is predicated on that. That's not the same thing as it's national security. It would do just fine if it weren't the head of a global hegemony, although it might have to start living within its means.
Security-wise, two oceans, vassal neighbours and two thousand nuclear missiles have it covered.
> Security-wise, two oceans, vassal neighbours and two thousand nuclear missiles have it covered.
You need to take a moment and think about your "vassal states" argument. May I remind you that at the peak of the cold war the US had a hostile country plant their nukes right at the doorstop of the US in one of those neighbors who not so long before was a vassal state?
If America had not been escalating with embargo pressure, the Bay of Pigs invasion, covert regime-change operations, and forward nuclear deployments near the USSR that made Moscow eager to answer in kind, the Cuban Missile Crisis never would have happened. A more protectionist America would not have pushed Cuba so hard into Soviet dependence, and the Soviet Union would have had little reason or opportunity put nuclear missiles there in the first place.
The U.S. would do just fine but the rest of the world would descend into chaos and we know this for a fact because it happened twice in just the first 50 years of the 20th century.
perhaps the US would be mostly safe from violence, but not consequences. We're heavily dependent on international trade and any major war in another part of the world will impact us if it involves any important trading partners or their ability to trade with us.
Even in the 19th century the US was sucked into Europe's wars - the war of 1812 was essentially the American theater of the Napoleanic war - US merchants were attacked trying to trade with France/Europe, the US Navy tried to protect them saying "we're neutral let us trade" and Britain said "there's no such thing as neutral" and sent armies. Over time foreign powers got more wary of fighting the US but we still got dragged into European and Pacific wars (WWI, WWII), in large part because we kept trading with our European and Asian partners.
> Could the nation slowly step back and generation-by-generation shed their national reputation such that they have no enemies? Maybe
This is basically what the UK did after WWII. We’d have to be honest that a fall in relative living standards would probably accompany such a move. (Counterpoint: the Nordic countries.)
Can you elaborate on what you believe to have been this "peace process" you speak of?
Even today, when the Kremlin is begging for the Ukraine war to go away, they are bombing civilians and Kiev and threatening Armenia with a war of invasion.
The same peace they enjoyed for decades before the UN decided to court Ukraine for membership. They had balance of trade agreements, resource use agreements, and generalized peace.
Can you elaborate as to why you seem to think this was impossible?
Also, NATO accession talks for Ukraine were dead for years when Russia invaded Crimea. The notion that Russia was forced to invade Ukraine holds up about as much as the claim that America was forced to bomb Iran.