Trump’s America first foreign policy plan
Donald Trump is articulating a foreign policy of aggressive isolationism. The U.S. president no longer questions the utility of alliances such as NATO. But he has served notice that while America “is once again ready to lead” it is no longer prepared to exercise the leadership role that those allies have come to expect.
“My job is not to represent the world,” he told a joint session of the American Congress Tuesday night. “My job is to represent the United States of America.”
Trump is not suggesting the U.S. under his presidency will back away from aggressive international military action. Indeed, he is calling on Congress to vastly expand America’s military budget.
“Our foreign policy calls for a direct, robust and meaningful engagement with the world,” he said.
But he also seems to be saying he’ll be much pickier about his interventions, making war only when American interests are directly threatened.
What this means in practice is unclear. Are U.S. interests directly threatened by the Taliban in Afghanistan? Or is Afghanistan one of those cases where, as Trump put it Tuesday, America can be “friends today with former enemies.”
Is it in America’s interest to support Saudi Arabia’s proxy war against Iran in Yemen? Or might it make more sense, again using the language of his speech, “to find new friends, to forge new partnerships where shared interests align.”
The biggest question mark remains Russia. Trump has long argued for better relations with that country and its authoritarian President Vladimir Putin. But his attempts have been complicated by U.S. intelligence agency claims that Russia interfered in last year’s American presidential election and by persistent suggestions that Trump’s campaign team was somehow involved.
Still, Trump may have had the West’s conflict with Russia over its annexation of Crimea in mind Tuesday when he said “we will respect historic institutions but we will respect the foreign rights of all nations.”
Russia claims, among other things, that it has a historic right to Crimea and that the peninsula was attached to Ukraine during Soviet times for bureaucratic reasons only.
Missing from Trump’s speech was the pro-democracy language used by George W. Bush to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq and by Barack Obama to justify the 2011 attack on Libya.
Whatever he is, Trump is not an interventionist in the mould of Woodrow Wilson. He did not argue, as former presidents have, that non-Americans would be best advised to adopt the values of U.S. liberal democracy.
Rather, he said, it is up to them to determine their fates: “America respects the right of all nations to chart their own path.”
Trump is not the first U.S. president to recognize that America no longer has the money or energy to act as the world’s policeman. Obama was famously cautious about committing the U.S. to war in Syria. He re-entered the Iraq conflict only reluctantly.
Even Obama’s participation in the unhappy Libyan adventure was best characterized as leading from behind.
Ultimately, Trump — like so many American presidents before him — may be seduced by the prospect of striding militarily across the world stage.
So far, however, his rhetoric at least is more businesslike. He won’t abandon America’s allies. But he wants them to pay more of their own defence costs. He’s willing to go to the mat militarily — but only if the U.S. is directly threatened.
Like Henry Kissinger, the éminence grise who advised Richard Nixon, Trump is willing to work with regimes that prove useful, including dictatorships. This in itself is not unusual. What is refreshing about Trump is that, in this at least, he doesn’t dissemble.
In his speech Tuesday, he did not echo John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush by referring to America as a biblical “city on a hill” that inspires the world.
More prosaically, but perhaps more aptly, he talked instead of America as the country where the Remington typewriter was invented.
We shall see where all of this ends. Trump is a work in progress. At times he and the cabinet ministers who work for him speak at cross purposes.
Still, for someone routinely castigated as a bombastic egomaniac, his foreign agenda is remarkably modest.
He wants to protect American interests where necessary. He’s willing to put up with allies as long as they pay.
He doesn’t dislike the rest of the world (he had kind words, for Canada, Australia and Israel on Tuesday). But he doesn’t care that much about it either.