Trump’s foreign policy smashes our defining ideals

Setting aside the issue of whether the president is wittingly advancing the interests of a hostile power (a qualification that is only imaginable in the Trump era), what is happening to the direction of American foreign policy?

I’m on record saying that the collection of impulses, deceptions, assertions, retractions, revisions and compromises that constitute Trump’s foreign policy record are difficult to gather into a consistent doctrine. But we do know what doctrines Trump has set out to destroy.

GOP foreign policy over the last few decades is the outcome of two defining decisions. The first took place in 1952 when the Republican presidential frontrunner, Senator Robert Taft, expressed a lack of enthusiasm toward the NATO alliance. This alarmed NATO’s Supreme Commander, Dwight Eisenhower, enough to enter the race and beat Taft soundly.

Most rank-and-file Republicans in the early ’50s probably shared Taft’s isolationist belief that the world could and should take care of itself. But Eisenhower — who had seen how the unconfronted disorders of Europe could spill out into world wars that took tens of millions of lives — found Taft’s attitude dangerous. Eisenhower — and all Republican presidents until Trump — was committed to Atlanticism and collective security. All believed that giving minor concessions to a hostile power only delayed an eventual reckoning and made it bloodier.

The second decision came in 1980, when Ronald Reagan’s election marked the end of Henry Kissinger’s reign of realpolitik. Both men were internationalists who understood that America was safer when it engaged the world, acted with allies and shaped the security environment. But while Kissinger tended to see the goal of foreign policy as the stable management of unavoidable rivalry, Reagan saw the objective as the eventual victory of a superior system — a system of economic and political freedom that delivered better lives and fulfilled the deepest human longings.

By standing on the side of freedom fighters, dissidents and exiles, Reagan was clarifying a moral choice — not just between two political systems, but between good and evil. And this, in his view, tilted the tables of history in favor of free nations.

This is the context in which Reagan viewed our trans-Atlantic relationship. In one respect, he saw it as an essential security arrangement. “I can hardly think of another aspect of U.S. foreign policy on which there is broader consensus than our commitment to defend our allies against attack,” he argued in a 1983 interview. At the same time, this relationship had a deeper strength rooted in morality. “NATO is not just a military alliance,” Reagan said, “it’s a voluntary political community of free men and women based on shared principles and a common history.

“The source of our strength in the quest for human freedom is not material, but spiritual.”

Trump is smashing an alliance that has encouraged peaceful relations within Europe and jointly resisted terrorism and Russian aggression. By questioning NATO’s Article 5 and the principle of collective security, he is smashing a system that has turned a continent prone to war and genocide into a flawed but functioning community of free nations.