POV: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly in Trump’s Foreign Policy

Photo by Flickr contributor Gage Skidmore

During the entire campaign for this year’s Republican presidential nomination, Donald Trump has delivered a grand total of one speech devoted to foreign policy, on April 27 at the Center for the National Interest. To fill in the gaps of his foreign-policy program by sorting through his occasional remarks on the subject in numerous rallies and press conferences, one is hard put to find a consistent set of themes. So what can be gleaned from his single foreign-policy speech and his occasional off-the-cuff (I almost wrote “off-the-teleprompter) comments about how Trump might conduct the foreign relations of the United States if elected president?

I’ll give Trump the benefit of the doubt by acknowledging that some of his foreign policy pronouncements are fully compatible with the thinking of respectable schools of thought on the question of America’s role in the world. I will highlight three strands of his thinking about foreign policy as reflected in his recent public statements to demonstrate how they do not depart appreciably from the mainstream in the current American political scene: opposition to democracy promotion in the non-Western world, the need to exert pressure on US allies in Europe to increase spending for their own defense, and more generally, the adoption of an unapologetically realist approach to international relations.

Trump has denounced “the dangerous idea that we could make Western democracies out of countries that had no experience or interest in becoming a Western democracy.” He has forcefully and unequivocally denounced the military intervention in Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein for destabilizing Iraq and eventually, Syria. “We tore up what institutions they had and then were surprised at what we unleashed,” he declared. “The vacuum was created that ISIS would fill.” Those sentiments were directed against the neoconservative project of promoting regional stability by forcibly introducing democratic political institutions in Iraq as a putative model for the spread of those institutions throughout the Middle East. Such skepticism about exporting democratic political institutions and practices to regions with no history of representative government is shared by foreign policy experts and political leaders across the political spectrum. His announcement that “we’re getting out of the nation-building business” has resonated with those Americans who have learned the lessons of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya.

A second issue Trump has raised is also well within the mainstream of American political thinking about foreign policy. He has called attention to the long-standing unwillingness of America’s allies’ to bear their fair share of the burden to defend themselves while depending on Uncle Sam to pick up the tab and deploy its soldiers to do that job for them. While the United States “has been spending trillions” on defense, he notes, the Europeans, who are most directly threatened by external enemies from the east (Russia) and the south (Islamist terrorism), have been reneging on their commitment to provide for their own defense. Such criticism of America’s European allies for “piggybacking” on the United States for their protection is nothing new. During the Cold War, critics in the United States periodically raised the issue of “burden sharing” with its NATO allies, particularly after the European countries had recovered economically from the devastation of the Second World War. In response to this transatlantic pressure, the Europeans have tried for the last six decades to lay the groundwork for a European military force apart from, or parallel to, NATO. Each of these attempts failed. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, European defense budgets plummeted. As Trump accurately points out, only 4 of the 28 NATO member states other than the United States spend the minimum required 2 percent of GDP on defense.

Currently the European Union boasts both a larger combined gross domestic product and a much larger combined population than the United States. Trump’s question about why American taxpayers should continue to foot the bill for Europe’s defense reflects thinking at the highest level of the American government. In 2011 retiring Secretary of Defense Robert Gates let loose a parting blast about NATO’s “dim if not dismal future” if European alliance members do not increase their defense expenditures. This anger at America’s transatlantic partners has also emanated from the Oval Office. “Free riders aggravate me,” President Obama lamented to The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, taking up his former defense secretary’s complaint. Whether confronted with jihadist terrorism or Russian adventurism, “We don’t have to always be the ones who are up front,” he said in response to the negative fallout from an aide’s comment that the United States was “leading from behind” in the Libyan crisis of 2011.

Trump’s reference to NATO as “obsolete” and his insistence on the need to upgrade its “outdated mission and structure” reflect a widespread point of view in US foreign policy circles that “the indispensable nation” (in former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s unfortunate phrase) must pressure its European allies to cut the umbilical cord linking them to Washington a quarter century after the end of the Cold War that brought the Atlantic alliance into being.

On being asked recently if it was possible to identify a “Trump Doctrine,” the best response I could come up with was “America First.” It is likely that Donald Trump is unaware of the historical context of that phrase: the America First Committee spearheaded the isolationist opposition to US assistance to Great Britain during World War II. Apparently that term reflects Trump’s conviction that American foreign policy must be based on one criterion only, namely, the vital national interests of the United States. Thus his opposition to international trade agreements, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which in his view adversely affect American businesses and workers. His penchant for protectionism is shared by many others, witness the opposition of both Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Senator Bernie Sanders to those trade deals, as well as of Democrats from Rust Belt states, such as Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio.

When he announces that he is “skeptical of international unions that tie us up and bring America down,” when he declares that his administration will pursue “a foreign policy based on American interests,” Trump (doubtless without realizing it) fits in perfectly with the realist tradition of international relations theory. The realists insist that states are the central actors in international politics, rather than international organizations like the United Nations or multilateral undertakings like trade pacts and arms control agreements. They believe that no international authority is capable of enforcing rules of behavior with sovereign states in an anarchic and potentially dangerous international order. They assert that all states always act to maximize their self-interest and to pursue power to ensure their own self-preservation.

It seems likely that by repeating phrases like “making America great again” and “America First,” Trump is saying that the United States should look after its own interests first and foremost and avoid getting entangled in disputes and controversies that do not directly affect its vital interests. Although most public officials would be reluctant to admit it, this attitude has widespread support in a country whose government has refused to join the International Criminal Court and to ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention, and other agreements that would restrict its ability to act as it wishes in the world. This go-it-alone attitude may strike some as a bad way to relate to other countries in the world. But Trump is in good company among many other public figures and security experts in this country who believe, whether they admit it or not, that when push comes to shove, the president must, and will, make decisions based solely on what he or she judges to be in the country’s national interest.

So much for the “good” and the “bad” in Trump’s foreign policy pronouncements. It is the “ugly” nature of his other statements about how the United States should conduct itself in the world that in my view renders him the most unacceptable candidate for the presidency in recent memory. His proposal to block all Muslim immigration to the United States would serve as an effective recruitment tool for Islamist terrorist groups such as the Islamic State, which would gleefully remind both American Muslims and Muslims interested in partaking of the American Dream that they are unwanted. It would antagonize predominantly Muslim countries allied with the United States against jihadist extremism. His outrageous, thoroughly debunked claim to have seen “thousands of Muslims cheering” in New Jersey during the attacks on the World Trade Center on 9/11 further damaged his credibility and insulted Muslim-American citizens. His offhand remark that “Islam hates us” mistakenly conflates the 1.6 billion Muslims, who constitute 22 percent of the world’s population, with the terrorist activities of a jihadist fringe. His characterization of immigrants from Mexico as rapists and drug smugglers, later expanded to include “all of Latin America,” would poison the relations between a Trump administration and America’s neighbors in the Western Hemisphere.

All of these statements, and dozens of others that could be cited, represent the attempt by a demagogue to stir up people’s fears of being inundated by immigrants from Muslim countries who will commit terrorist acts on American soil and by immigrants from south of the Rio Grande who will commit acts of sexual violence, run drugs, and take jobs from American workers. In the last analysis, all of this candidate’s plausible suggestions for the pursuit of a more effective foreign policy adumbrated above are trumped by his xenophobic appeal to the basest instincts of the American electorate.

William Keylor, a College of Arts & Sciences and Pardee School of Global Studies professor of history and of international relations and director of the International History Institute, can be reached wrkeylor@bu.edu.

“POV” is an opinion page that provides timely commentaries from students, faculty, and staff on a variety of issues: on-campus, local, state, national, or international. Anyone interested in submitting a piece, which should be about 700 words long, should contact Rich Barlow at barlowr@bu.edu. BU Today reserves the right to reject or edit submissions. The views expressed are solely those of the author and are not intended to represent the views of Boston University.