Was 2016 Trump’s foreign policy a return to realpolitik based on a balance-of-power view of the world and would 2024 Trump foreign policy continue this phrase or even a return of a more modest foreign policy. In 2016, Michael Barone noted, “Some will dismiss his appointments and tweets as expressing no more than the impulses of an ignorant and undisciplined temperament — no more premeditated than the lunges of a rattlesnake. Others may recall that similar things were said (by me, as well as many others) about his campaign strategy. But examination of the entrails of the election returns suggests that Trump was following a deliberate strategy based on shrewd insight when he risked antagonizing white college-educated voters in the process of appealing to non-college-educated whites.”
Historian and Hoover Institution fellow Niall Ferguson viewed Trump’s foreign policy as an extension of Henry Kissinger’s worldview. He observed, “A world run by regional great powers with strong men in command, all of whom understand that any lasting international order must be based on the balance of power.”
Trump took a congratulatory call for his election victory from Taiwan’s president. Tsai Ing-wen. The first visit to Trump Tower after the election was Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe; this sent a message that China would not be allowed to operate in the Western Pacific unchallenged and Trump would work with our allies. Trump also appointed Terry Branstad, the governor of Iowa, as the ambassador to China. Branstad first met Xi Jinping in 1985. Barone viewed the appointment as a “bad cop, good cop” move. He observed, “Trump wants some changes in trade relations with China and limits on its probes in the South China Sea and will build up U.S. military forces. But there’s room for acceptance of China as a great power. Trump wants some changes in trade relations with China and limits on its probes in the South China Sea and will build up U.S. military forces.” This was eight years ago but you can see that Trump was moving toward a new policy with emphasis on the Chinese threat.
As for dealing with Russia, Barone added, “There’s room for acceptance of Russia, too, as suggested by the secretary-of-state nomination of Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson, self-proclaimed friend of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s. He may be opposed by Republican senators who, like Mitt Romney in 2012, see Russia as “our No. 1 geopolitical foe.” But perhaps Trump favors Kissinger’s proposal for a neutral and decentralized (i.e., dominated and partitioned) Ukraine, with an end to sanctions on Russia. Tillerson would be a good choice if that were your goal. This would make the Baltic States and Poland understandably nervous, but they could take some comfort in Trump’s reaffirmation of our NATO pledge to defend them and in the fact that Pentagon nominee James Mattis has gone out of his way to honor Estonia for its sacrifices in Iraq and Afghanistan.” The irony that Barone was not entirely correct as Trump proved tougher on Putin than the Obama-Biden administration ever was, and people tend to forget that Putin chose to first invade Ukraine in 2014 during the Obama administration and Obama did nothing. The irony is that both Russia and United States were signature to the Budapest agreement in which both countries guarantee Ukraine sovereignty as long as Ukraine gave up their nuclear weapons. Obama viewed Ukraine not in our national interest, but Obama at least threaten sanctions and Putin decided to bide his time to go after the rest of Ukraine. He waited until Biden took office and the botched Afghanistan withdrawal and Biden hint that depending upon how far Putin moved in Ukraine. Ukraine was a war that should not never happened, and Putin viewed Biden as weak and Biden would follow Obama policy that Ukraine was not truly in United States interest but Biden and NATO armed Ukraine to defend itself and this is where we are.
Trump’s criticism of NATO included his view that NATO member states should contribute more toward their own defenses. As Michael Barone noted, “Finance ministers, stung by Trump’s campaign criticisms, are ponying up more money to meet their NATO defense-spending commitments; German chancellor Angela Merkel is backing down from her disastrous decision to welcome 1 million refugees.” No one debates this now, but they did in 2016.
Brexit was the first break in the European Union’s dominance of the continent. While Obama threatened Britain with being sent to the “back of the queue” if they voted to leave the EU, Trump supported Brexit and a possible future U.S-U.K. free trade agreement which has yet to occur. Brexit could be the first step toward the formation of the Anglosphere an alliance of English-speaking nations that would support Trump’s “America First” view of the world. But with the recent defeat of conservative and Labour Party accession to power may delay this and maybe the present British government may look back to the EU.
In the Middle East, Trump ditched Iranian deal and boosted the Sunni-Israeli alliance against increasing Iranian influence through various peace agreements between Sunni states and Israel. While Trump may pay less lip service to human rights, the reality is that Obama also paid lip service to human rights.
Niall Ferguson noted, “Yet it was Trump who in August (2016) pledged that his Administration would “speak out against the oppression of women, gays and people of different faith” in the name of Islam. While the Obama Administration has shunned proponents of Islamic reform, Trump pledged to “be a friend to all moderate Muslim reformers in the Middle East, and [to] amplify their voices. This includes speaking out against the horrible practice of honor killings,” as well as establishing as “one of my first acts as President . . . a Commission on Radical Islam which will include reformist voices in the Muslim community.”
Ferguson’s point is that Trump did not make human rights a central theme of his foreign policy but his policy against Iran in the Middle East and China did more to advance human rights than the Obama/Biden administration did or Biden/Harris administration. President Obama often talked about the importance of human rights, but the Obama administration often ignored helping the truly suffering. His Syria policy may be responsible for the death of a half million Syrians, not to mention the thousands of people who died in Iraq and other Middle East nations because of Obama’s reckless policies.
In 1982, Herman Kahn wrote The Coming Boom, in which he foresaw the economic prosperity of the Reagan years and a new world order that included the rise of regional powers and new challenges to the bipolar power struggle between the United States and the U.S.S.R. Kahn thought that a multipolar world would eventually stabilize but the era before stabilization could be chaotic. Kahn’s predictions proved to be accurate.
Kahn saw the rise of China, Japan, and Germany as powers. Today, Germany is the leading European economic power and Russia is working on expanding its sphere of influence within Central Europe while reestablishing Russian nationalism and a new Russian Empire. China is working on being a Pacific power and both Russia and China look to check American power. After the collapse of the Soviet Empire, the United States was the lone superpower, but Russia, China, Germany, and India are now looking for their own place in the world as global powers. The rise of these countries signifies that we live in a multipolar world. Russia is now working with China and BRICS nations are now challenging the Dollar primacy as the main world currency. Iran is moving toward being the leading Regional power in Middle East and hopes to use it power to eliminate Israel.
The Trump Administration’s goal was to challenge our loyalty to transnational organizations, beginning with the United Nations. If one is serious about foreign policy, you can’t be serious about the United Nations, but if you are serious about the United Nations, you can’t be serious about foreign policy. When Obama failed to veto a UN resolution condemning Israel after the 2016 election, this reminded many Americans and most Republicans of the anti-American and anti-Israeli attitude of much of the United Nations. Obama’s support of the Iran nuclear deal allowed Iran to increase their influence in the Middle East and Biden revising the deal once again allowed Iran to be a threat to our influence and to Israel. The one thing that Obama/Biden/Harris failed to ask why
Lawrence Sondhaus in his book World War One: The Global Revolution discussed the debate about the U.S. joining the League of Nations and how the Republicans in the Senate failed to ratify Woodrow Wilson’s vision of transnational collective security. Sondhaus observed that while Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge opposed the League of Nations, he favored an active foreign policy that defended American interests in a way like what President Theodore Roosevelt followed during his administration. Lodge supported a separate treaty that promised France that the United States and Great Britain would defend her, since Lodge perceived this treaty as being in our national interest. Wilson’s refusal to separate the debate over whether America should join the League of Nations from the issue of America signing the Versailles Treaty doomed United States support for the Versailles Treaty. A similar debate will soon begin about America’s involvement in transnational organizations such as the United Nations and whether it is in our national interest to stay in or at least be as active in these organizations as in the past. Trump ‘s “America first” foreign policy didn’t mean isolationism, but a foreign policy that defends America’s interest first.
Trump was a good ally of Israel and did what others have promised but didn’t do: move the US embassy to Jerusalem. While the professional diplomatic class stated that the move would prove disastrous, it not only didn’t prove disastrous, but it didn’t even stop Trump’s biggest diplomatic coup, the Abraham Accords which allied Sunni Arabs with Israel. Trump didn’t just ditch the Iran deal, but also designed the Abraham Accords as a strategic architecture to counter Iranian influence. The accords tied the interest of Sunni Arabs and Israel to counter, the Iranian threat. Prior to the Trump administration, Palestinians had veto power over American policy toward Israel. Trump’s solution was to expand our national interest in the Middle East beyond the Palestinians conflict with Israel. Jared Kushner, Mike Pompeo, and Trump made sure the Palestinians did not get into the way of America’s effort to counter the rise of Iran, a direct result of the Obama-Biden Iranian nuclear deal, one of many bad foreign policy decisions made by the Obama-Biden administration. Biden revised the Iranian deal, and it has proven to be a disaster like much of Biden foreign policy. Iran, short on cash when Biden took over, is now flush with cash to support terrorism in the Middle East. The Hamas attack on Israel on October 7th and the expansion of attacks on Northern Israel by Hezbollah, another Iranian proxy. While Biden said all the right things, there is no doubt that Biden/Harris are pushing for a cease fire that allows Hamas to stay in power and keep the war from expanding in the North. If Biden/Harris team get their way, Israel will have Iranian proxy on their border and Yemon is becoming another Iranian proxy on Saudi Arabia border and threatening shipping in the Red Sea. Biden/Harris foreign policy is proving even more a disaster as the Obama/Biden policy proved to be. Biden’s energy policy. Imposing new restrictions on American oil and gas production and distribution, plays into the hands of our enemies and OPEC, and reducing our options in the Middle East. The real problem of the Biden administration is that it is filled with former members of the Obama administration whose Middle East policies proved to be a disaster to our national interest, a Harris administration will be no difference.
Trump confronted Chinese Communist Party efforts for military dominance, advocated for pro-democracy activists and persecuted minorities. and. Most importantly leading a fight against Beijing’s efforts to export authoritarian models, including adopting technological censorship the coopting of other nations’ elites and institution including our own. Our foreign policy establishment has given special accommodations in trade, with the idea of exporting our values. But the Chinese are also exporting their values. Big Tech’s censorship of conservative thoughts copies the Chinese social media’s own censorship of its citizens Confucius Institutes impacts China’s history is taught in our Universities.
One of the defenders of the old view of China was Joe Biden, whose families also benefitted from deals in China while he served as vice-president. The question is whether Biden has learned anything. At the beginning of his administration, there was no real deviation from Trump’s foreign policies. How long this last is questionable, since the people Biden put in place to oversee in his foreign policy were. in the past was part of the old Chinese policy. During the election, Biden conceded that China was our biggest competitor, but that Russia was our bigger threat. Before he left office, Trump imposed visa restrictions on individuals involved in their connections to foreign influence as well as limiting the length of visas for Chinese Communist Party (CCP) members to one month.
As National Review observed, “These narrowly tailored visa restrictions alleviated concerns that an all-encompassing ban on the CCP’s more than 90 million members from entering the United States would sweep up ordinary people. Instead, this approach targets Party leaders, immediate family, and those who truly pose a threat. Contrary to Democrats’ claims that such visa restrictions are racist and xenophobic, they demonstrate solidarity with the people of China against those most responsible for the ruling regime’s human-rights atrocities.” [i]Note that many Democrats view any restriction on Chinese diplomats as racist, which demonstrates how much many within our leadership class have absorbed Chinese values. Acting as if challenging China hegemony is racist is nonsense, since the Chinese are this century’s National Socialist/Fascist regime. An important goal of American foreign policy is to strengthen our alliance against China. The Biden administration be challenged by a more aggressive China and any alliance against China will depend on how our allies view American strength.
In the 1990’s, a good friend told me about a few years after the collapse of the Soviet Empire that he was surprised how communism ended up as National Socialism. The Hitler of today is President Xi.
China has concentration camps that hold millions, they use social media to control the population and President Xi is the Big Brother of our time. There is no liberty in China, and while the CCP allows profits to be made, the state controls every “private” enterprise. It is state corporatism, and China controls business as tightly as Hitler did in Germany and Mussolini did in Italy. OK? China views itself as the new center of the universe, with all nations bow to Beijing. While I don’t view China’s, National socialism means conquering nations, there is one exception: to ensure that Chinese Communist ideology reigns supreme, freedom in Hong Kong and Taiwan must be crushed.
What will a world be like if China was the most powerful country? It would be a poorer and less free world. We will see what will happen when other nations or groups of nations copy China’s national socialism. We will see more of own elites discuss their admiration of China the way Michael Bloomberg, for example, stated in the 2020 Democratic primary that “Well, it’s a question of what is a dictator. They don’t have a democracy in the sense that they have general elections. That is true. They do have a system where a small group of people appoints the head. And they churn over periodically. If you go back and look at the last two or three decades, there have been a number of people that have had the same position that Xi Jinping has.” But if China becomes the number one power, this means the United States will decline in economic power, and the freedom we take for granted will slowly disappear.
Trump’s foreign policy team has put an alliance in place, the Quad partnership between Australia, India, Japan and United States. which was originally conceived in 2007 before being disbanded in 2008. This is becoming the nucleus of a multilateral response to Chinese moves into the Indian and Pacific Oceans. We are looking at moving from the demands of competition into a direct conflict with Beijing. AEI scholar H. W. Brands, noted, “Well into Barack Obama’s presidency, U.S. cyber posture featured, with some very important exceptions, an emphasis on cultivating norms of restraint in this emerging domain of competition. The problem was that these norms were shared mostly by friendly democracies, but not by hostile autocracies…Russia and China, along with North Korea and Iran, have used cyberspace as an arena for hacking, espionage, and political meddling. Since 2017, U.S. Cyber Command has shifted to a more aggressive strategy featuring “persistent engagement” and “forward defense” — getting inside rivals’ networks and using disruptive action, or at least the threat of it, to keep them off balance.”
Trump’s policies, from energy policies and the Abraham Accords to the Quad alliances recalibrated foreign policy towards more traditional goals. Donald Trump s administration brought back realpolitik, in which our country’s foreign policy will be based on America’s national interest. Idealism will no longer be a reason to send young Americans into combat. but defending our national interest will.
The weakness of the European Union is not the lack of creativity on the part of their people but the political institutions in place retard growth. Even in older European countries such as France and Germany, entrepreneurs are frustrated by bureaucratic inertia. In the United States, the Obama administration placed countless obstacles in the path of economic growth and Biden’s economic plan is even worse when it came to planning new obstacles to entrepreneurship, following the failed EU policies. One solution for American foreign policy makers is the development of the Anglosphere. James C. Bennett and Michael J. Lotus in their book America 3.0 saw the end of the bureaucratic state, or what they call “the end of America 2.0,” and return to a smaller and more decentralized “America 3.0.” Bennett and Lotus begin with a brief history of how we got to where we are at present, as we moved from being an agricultural America 1.0 to an industrial America 2.0. What Bennett and Lotus present is not just a roadmap toward a new America over the next25 years, but a new foreign policy based on the alliance of the Anglosphere nations: United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. We are not yet close to America 3.0 that Bennett and Lotus envisioned, we do see an opportunity that Republican governors like Ron DeSantis move their states forward and as DeSantis showed in 2020, Republicans can move their own agenda in the face of obstacles imposed by a pandemic. This could be the beginning of an attack on the bureaucratic state and a second Trump administration could see an direct assault of the Administrative state
Bennett and Lotus trace our roots and our desire for liberty and individualism back before 1776 to the Anglo-Saxon invaders in the fifth century after the fall of the Roman Empire. Our culture has two thousand years of history, and our desire for liberty is inherited. One thing that scholars see as a sign of progress is the nuclear family with individuals, not parents, selecting their spouse. The beginning of freedom for women began when this happened, and children left their parents’ home and no longer belonged to extended families. From there, they made their own wealth and expanded the economic pie.
The question is whether we can move to an America 3.0 without a complete collapse. The authors say this can happen. They present a libertarian vision that includes the elimination of the federal income tax and dramatically reducing federal government power, but they still support a defensive posture that includes maintaining our present alliances, along with federal protections for civil rights. So, while the authors questioned much of our foreign policy for the past decade and their criticism mirrored Trump’s, they don’t call for the non-interventionist policy . On domestic policy, they see many of our social problems being created by the federal government and foreseeing many states forming regional compacts on policies like health care. While many conservatives and libertarians may not agree with their vision, Bennett and Lotus present both a domestic and foreign policy alternative that can be synergistic with Trump Populism and Reagan conservatism.
While European are building a bureaucratic, centralized European Union, the Anglosphere nations are for most part suspicious of top-down super state institutions and instead as Bennett and Lotus state, “promote more and stronger cooperative institutions, not to build some English-speaking super state on the European Union, or to annex Britain, Canada or Australia to the United States but rather to protect the English-speaking nations’ common values from external and internal fantasies.” Brexit gives us the first opening to build the Anglosphere and tie Great Britain to the United States and move away from the bureaucratic European Union, which may be beginning its own implosion.
Who is part of the Anglosphere? Author James Bennett and Michael J. Lotus answer, “Geographically, the densest nodes of the Anglosphere are found in the United States and Great Britain, while Anglosphere regions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and South Africa are powerful and populous outliers. The educated English-speaking populations of the Caribbean, Oceania, Africa and India constitute the Anglosphere’s frontiers.”[ii]
Former Margaret Thatcher’s advisor John O’Sullivan has called for an American policy that is pro-American while undermining the European Union super state. The present German government has is attempting to use the European Union as a tool for its own economic hegemony over Europe. Germany needs to tie Central Europe to modern Europe and many Central Europeans want an American presence in Europe to safeguard their security, not just from the European Union dominated by Germany but a resurgent Russia to their east.
In the nations that form the Anglosphere, Bennett and Lotus note, “The market economy is more than the absence of socialism. It is more than the absence of interventionist government; it is the economic expression of a strong civil society; just as substantive democracy is the political expression of a civil society and civic state.” [iii]While there is no rule that democracy and the market economy need to exist side by side, they often do. What matters is a civil society and understanding that government is but one player in society and part of a greater society. Religion, charities, and corporations of varied sizes as well as political parties are all players in society, and all interact with one another. A strong civil society sees individuals creating and working in a variety of enterprises, but the Left’s attack on this civil society is threatening the foundations of our country.
For the Anglosphere nations, strong civic societies had their roots in medieval Europe. James C. Bennett and Michael Lotus contend that in the Middle Ages, particularly in England, the modern-day society was built upon mix of “tribal, feudal, local, church family and state institutions” [iv] and the lack of a single overwhelming power capable of dominating. a nation. From the Magna Carta, English princes and barons made it clear to the crown that they had rights and this ideal became rooted in English custom and eventually made its way across the Atlantic. When civil society is strong, government can be limited to specific duties since welfare can be provided privately as well as publicly.
James C. Bennett and Michael Lotus do not yet consider India formally part of the Anglosphere but for the Anglosphere to dominate the 21st century, India must become part of the alliance. They write, “In such a commonwealth (Anglosphere), should the Indian choose to engage it, it may well be that Bangalore becomes a major center of the Anglosphere in thirty- or fifty-years’ time. Anglospherists do not fear this, knowing that just as London is still great today because it shares an Anglosphere with New York and Los Angeles, it and the American metropolises will be great tomorrow partly because they might share it with Bangalore.”[v]
Indian writer Gurcharan Das remembers attending Henry Kissinger’s lectures at Harvard in the early 1960’s and listening to Kissinger point out that Nehru was a dreamer and “it is dangerous to put dreamers in power.” Kissinger’s own views on Nehru may have been misplaced and he admitted it in his most recent book on diplomacy. Nehru was not an idealist and certainly not a pacifist like Gandhi. When force was needed, Nehru was prepared to use it. Four wars with Pakistan, including the liberation of Bangladesh from Pakistan in 1971, constant combat with China, and pushing the Portuguese out of Goa showed that India was not afraid of using military force. What Kissinger called a foreign policy of dreamers was a serious attempt to buy time for the new nation, residing as it does next to belligerent neighbors. Kissinger’s own opinion from his Harvard days changed when he stated, “India’s conduct during the Cold War was not so different from that of the United States in its formative decades.” The difference is that in the United States’ formative years, there was an ocean between America and Europe. India, on the other hand, is in a region populated by vipers and political rivals.
The United States, as the leader of NATO and the premier Western power, has inherited the traditional British interest in ensuring that no one single nation dominates the Eurasian landmass. India, also, has co-opted policy from its former English master. In 1934 Britain designed a plan to stabilize the Sino-Indian border and to dominate the Indian Ocean from Aden to Singapore. India’s present naval building effort reflects those same objectives. Like the United States, India does not want to see an Islamic fundamentalist revolution sweep through the Middle East. As China grows in strength and challenges the United States in the Far East, China also threatens India at her northern borders and through the sea-lanes including the Indian Ocean. India is crucial in both the development of alternatives to China’s authoritarian state but also the expansion of the Anglosphere vision of the world. Trump made progress toward moving India toward our circle and the question is whether Biden’s foreign policy team is smart enough to follow through this alliance or even understand its advantages
An America First policy should begin with the formation of the Anglosphere defense alliance, while adding additional allies against common foes. It also means to recognize what is in our national interest and what is not, to ensure that our resources are not wasted on nation-building but making sure we can project force when our national interest is at stake. America First is not isolationism, but a view that we do have our national interest. and we don’t surrender our national identity and policy to transnational organizations. The Paris climate accord is an example of an agreement to avoid, as we would have put our economic and energy plans at the mercy of transnational organizations that would have reduced our ability to prosper. Even the supporters of the Paris Accord couldn’t present evidence that it would reduce global warming. John Kerry views himself the master of the deal when it comes to climate change, but the Paris Accord is allowing China and India to delay their own efforts to reduce emissions while we are committed to doing it now.
If anything, the return of John Kerry to power as the climate czar before leaving to help with 2024 demonstrated the failure of the leadership class. Kerry’s career in the Senate was at best mediocre, He failed in his 2004 presidential bid, and his tenure as Secretary of State was part of the worst foreign policy team in the post-World II era. As the new climate czar, he will prove equally unequal to the task, as he has in the past.
A Republican foreign policy will put our foreign policy in our hands, instead of in the hands of transnational organizations, and will protect our national interest in a multipolar world.
The Donelson Files 