Introduction
States have goals (political, economic, social, etc.) which they try to pursue in the international system. Many of such goals transcend their territorial environments and so they will require the cooperation of other states in the system to achieve these national objectives. To this end, a state necessarily has to be in continuous communication with its external environment. It is the totality of this communication that is commonly referred to as foreign policy.
The American foreign policy before 1917, was characterized by isolationism due to the fact that the country went through a revolution and the moment was on building a nation, a strong one with of course a strong economy with a purpose to dominate one day the world.
America became great after building up its economy from scratch and the uncontrollable nature of the World War 1 would soon made it to come out of its isolationist policy. Suddenly, the U.S foreign policy will change from an isolationist approach to keeping Eurasia divided. During 1917-1991, American national security policy focused on maintaining the political division of industrial Eurasia. American policy makers feared that any state that controlled all of Eurasia could exploit its economic resources to build a war machine that could project power across the Atlantic and threaten the United States. Hence, the U.S. opposed every single expansion of the main candidates, those ones that represented a threat meaning the USSR and Germany. First of all, Germany during the first and second world war and later the USSR during the cold war for which they adopted a containment policy.
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dismantlement of the USSR marked officially the fading of geopolitical threats. From 1991, there is no plausible candidate for Eurasian hegemony. China comes closest, but not very close. Someday, China may rival the United States in military power but that day is decades away. And even then China will pose little geopolitical threat to the U.S.
This made the U.S. policy makers to shift the country’s foreign policy towards addressing the new threats that emerged after the storm of the cold war. Therefore, the containment policy has been abandoned to pursue a totally new one against some new threats: The spreading of Weapons of Mass Destruction, the rise of terrorists groups against liberalism and the threats to the global commons. As geopolitical threats have faded three dangerous new threats have emerged.
WMD Proliferation
Global security of nuclear weapons and materials has seen major crumbling in recent years.
- The Soviet collapse made Soviet nuclear weapons, materials, and scientists more available to terrorists
- The advance and spread of technology is lowering the cost of developing WMD. Even poor states like North Korea can now afford it.
- New nuclear proliferators have appeared on the scene. In the early 1990s we saw large counter proliferation successes: South Africa abandoned the bomb, Argentina and Brazil dropped their nuclear programs, and Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus dismantled their Soviet legacy nuclear arsenals. Momentum seemed to be with the non-proliferation regime. More recently things have ominously reversed. India and Pakistan tested nuclear weapons in 1998, North Korea has developed nuclear weapons, and Iran has moved further to develop them. Pakistan’s nuclear technology has been spread to others by the renegade leader of the Pakistani nuclear program, A.Q. Kahn.
WMD Terrorists
A new breed of terrorists who aspire to mass killing has appeared. The 1990s saw for the first time the emergence of terrorist groups the Japanese group Aum Shinrikyo (1994/95) and al-Qaeda (1990) that aspire to mass killing and would use nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction if they had them. Before the 1990s students of terror assumed that no terrorists aspired to commit mass murder. The watchword was that “terrorists want a lot of people watching not a lot of people dead.” Terrorists were assumed to be operating in the realm of pragmatic politics in pursuit of defined political aims. The appearance of Aum Shinrikyo and Al Qaeda proved this assumption wrong; some terror groups aspire to vast destruction. In 1998 Osama Bin Laden proclaimed that “to kill Americans . . . civilian and military is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible.” A former al-Qaeda press spokesman, Suleiman Abu Ghaith, even claimed that al-Qaeda had a right to kill four million Americans, including two million children. Together these developments face the United States with a serious threat of nuclear terrorism.
Redirect U.S. national security resources toward the new security threat:
Declaratory U.S. national security policy should identify the threat of WMD terror as the prime threat to U.S. national security. U.S. national security programs should also be redirected toward the WMD terror threat. This requires a reallocation of resources away from preparations for war against other great powers and toward the many functions most of them non-military that defeating terror and containing the spread of WMD requires. These functions include:
- Public diplomacy to shape global opinion on terror-related issues
- and toward the United States.
- Efforts to lock down loose nuclear weapons and materials in Russia and elsewhere. Preventing or ending civil and interstate warfare around the world.
- This task is important because terrorist organizations feed on warfare. For example, al-Qaeda exploits the Israel-Palestinian conflict, the India-Pakistan conflict in Kashmir, the conflict in Iraq, the conflict in Chechnya, and past conflicts in Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor and Somalia in its propaganda, and it uses some of these conflicts as a training ground for its terrorists. Hence the U.S. should be a peacemaker everywhere. To do this it must develop its peacemaking capacity.
- Preventing failed states and ameliorating state failure. Terrorists breed in failed states, hence the U.S. must build its capacity to prevent them and ameliorate them.
- Strengthening all elements of homeland security. This should include reform of the FBI, integrating local police, fire departments, and public health labs into homeland security, imposing better control on U.S. borders, securing U.S. nuclear reactors, chemical plants, railroads and ports from terrorist attack, and rewriting U.S. insurance laws governing terrorist incidents to give businesses an incentive to harden their infrastructure against an attack.
Elevate the protection of the global environment and global public health to higher priority in U.S. foreign policy.
Declaratory U.S. national security policy should identify the threat of WMD terror as the prime threat to U.S. national security. U.S. national security programs should also be redirected toward the WMD terror threat. This requires a reallocation of resources away from preparations for war against other great powers and toward the many functions most of them non-military that defeating terror and containing the spread of WMD requires. These functions include:
• Public diplomacy to shape global opinion on terror-related issues
and toward the United States.
• Efforts to lock down loose nuclear weapons and materials in Russia and elsewhere.
• Preventing or ending civil and interstate warfare around the world.
This task is important because terrorist organizations feed on warfare. For example, al-Qaeda exploits the Israel-Palestinian conflict, the India-Pakistan conflict in Kashmir, the conflict in Iraq, the conflict in Chechnya, and past conflicts in Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor and Somalia in its propaganda, and it uses some of these conflicts as a training ground for its terrorists. Hence the U.S. should be a peacemaker everywhere. To do this it must develop its peacemaking capacity.
• Preventing failed states and ameliorating state failure. Terrorists breed in failed states, hence the U.S. must build its capacity to prevent them and ameliorate them.
• Strengthening all elements of homeland security. This should include reform of the FBI, integrating local police, fire departments, and public health labs into homeland security, imposing better control on U.S. borders, securing U.S. nuclear reactors, chemical plants, railroads and ports from terrorist attack, and rewriting U.S. insurance laws governing terrorist incidents to give businesses an incentive to harden their infrastructure against an attack.
Elevate the protection of the global environment and global public health to higher priority in U.S. foreign policy.
These goals are viewed as minor concerns in U.S. foreign policymaking. They deserve far higher priority, commensurate with their importance to the national welfare.
Barack Obama finishes his second term with a mixed but positive foreign policy legacy. America’s global standing is much improved from the waning days of the George W. Bush administration eight years ago. Obama’s most notable achievements were the international agreement slowing Iran’s progress toward nuclear weapons capability and diplomatic normalisation with Cuba. On the other side of the ledger was his failure to extricate America from military overextension in the greater Mideast and from the global policing mindset that produced that overextension. Also marring his record was his incoherent response to Syria’s deadly civil war and Libya’s collapse into anarchy following the 2011 international intervention.
When Donald Trump delivered his first and only major foreign policy address of the 2016 campaign on April 27 at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, he indicated that it was time for a fundamental change in America’s approach to both its allies and adversaries. Has Trump profoundly altered the course of American foreign policy? Or has he been a study in inconsistency? At the outset of his 2016 speech, he declared that it was time to “shake the rust off America’s foreign policy.” He proposed to remove it by pursuing a policy of America First that would usher in a shiny new nationalism. To be sure, Trump pointed to the Cold War as an era of American greatness. But he argued that the very triumphalism that had emerged after the fall of the Berlin Wall set the stage for the disasters that ensued in the Middle East, when the George W. Bush administration set out on a quixotic quest to transform the region overnight into a bastion of Western-style democracies. The problems were only compounded by President Barack Obama’s intervention in Libya. According to Trump, “each of these actions have helped to throw the region into chaos and gave ISIS the space it needs to grow and prosper. Very bad.” He also noted that these actions had created a vacuum that allowed Iran to expand its reach and influence.
Trump’s verdict was stark. He stated that overall, “our foreign policy is a complete and total disaster.” He pointed to a number of problems. First, he said that Obama had crippled America with massive debt, low growth, and open borders. Instead of rebuilding other countries, America should end the “theft of American jobs.” Second, he stated that America’s allies were not meeting their financial obligations to a common defense: “a Trump administration will lead a free world that is properly armed and funded, and funded beautifully.” Third, Trump argued that America’s allies were increasingly convinced that Washington was a fickle friend. “We’ve had a president who dislikes our friends and bows to our enemies,” he said, “something that we’ve never seen before in the history of our country.” Trump condemned Obama’s “disastrous deal with Iran,” castigated him for supporting the ouster of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, and decried his approach to Israel. Fourth, Trump contended that under Obama, America was no longer respected abroad. North Korea, he complained, had carte blanche to increase its “aggression” and “nuclear reach,” while China was continuing its “economic assault.” Finally, he said it was critical for America to abandon the “nation-building business” and focus on “creating stability in the world.”
To reorient American foreign policy, Trump said he would no longer rely on the experts who had populated previous administrations. According to Trump, “I also look and have to look for talented experts with approaches and practical ideas, rather than surrounding myself with those who have perfect resumes but very little to brag about except responsibility for a long history of failed policies and continued losses at war. We have to look for new people.”
There can be no doubting that Trump has sought to fulfil a number of the promises that he made during the campaign. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that Trump has no convictions, he clearly has deep-seated beliefs, or at least impulses, when it comes to foreign policy. These centre, more often than not, on an older conception of American foreign policy. In his stances on trade, immigration, international organizations, and NATO, he has exhumed Republican traditions that date back to Henry Cabot Lodge, Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Robert Taft. He represents a challenge not only to Wilsonian liberals, but also to the neoconservatives who joined the gop during the presidency of Ronald Reagan.
How effectively Trump has pursued his aims in another matter. In the Middle East, Trump built on Obama’s policies and largely fulfilled his aim of crushing isis. He has also upended the debate over Israel by essentially sanctioning its occupation of not only the Golan Heights, but also supporting a peace plan that would eventually allow it to annex a substantial area of the Jordan Valley. In backing this plan, however, Trump may be condemning the region to further turmoil as the Palestinians abandons the slender hope that negotiations would allow them to form a viable state. Ultimately, Israel could be headed toward something resembling a binational state.
When it comes to Iran, Trump has essentially fulfilled his campaign vows. To the consternation of America’s European allies, he exited the nuclear deal in May 2018, calling it a “horrible one-sided deal that should never, ever have been made.” Since then, tensions with Iran have been on the upswing and Tehran has demonstrated no willingness to engage in negotiations with the Trump administration. Despite Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s assertions that the policy of maximum pressure is succeeding, the dangers of a war, particularly in the wake of Trump’s liquidation in January of Qassim Suleimani, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, cannot be discounted.
Trump’s moves in the Middle East have further strained relations with America’s European allies. His insistence on an increase in financial contributions to NATO has been helpful. But his erratic suggestions such as expanding NATO’s remit into the Middle East to create a “NATOME,” as Trump put it, have not met with a favorable reception in Europe. It is also the case that Trump’s predilection for creating crises at NATO summits is now being imitated by other members. On the eve of the recent summit in London, French president Emmanuel Macron announced that NATO is “brain dead.” If Trump imposes auto tariffs on Europe in coming months, the alliance will inevitably come under even further strain as France, Germany, and Great Britain protest.
Then there is the matter of Trump’s relations with China. Trump has blown hot and cold on China, denouncing it for its predatory trade practices on the one hand and hailing his beautiful relationship with its President Xi Jinping on the other. But Trump’s fulminations about China are counterproductive. The summary of the Trump administration’s 2018 National Defense Strategy stated that both China and Russia are revisionist powers intent on creating a world “consistent with their authoritarian model—gaining veto authority over other nations’ economic, diplomatic, and security decisions.” This may well overstate the extent of Beijing’s ambitions. If anything, the regime’s difficulties in dealing with unexpected crises like the coronavirus suggest that it is more fragile internally and vulnerable to fissiparous tendencies than is often assumed abroad.
Many in Washington, Democrats and Republican alike, have become convinced that a collision between China and America is inevitable. In this issue, however, former World Bank president Robert B. Zoellick forcefully reminds us of the perils of exaggerating the threat posed by China. It is an adversary but not a new Soviet Union. For all the huffing and puffing about the China threat, it has been a fairly responsible great power, albeit an increasingly aggressive one. It halted nuclear testing in the 1990s and signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. It has worked to impede Iran’s nuclear program. Without China’s assistance, no real deal on nuclear weapons is possible with North Korea.
For now, Trump may have backed off a heightened trade war with China, but the wanton tariffs that he has already imposed are not being paid by Beijing, as he continually insists, but by American consumers. At the same time, they have injured the very farmers who form a vital part of his political base. For the past fifteen years, China was the fastest-growing destination for American exports until the Trump administration enacted its purblind protectionist policies. This does not mean that there are not serious strategic conflicts between the two countries. But they can be managed through diplomacy. Zoellick has it right:
“A slide into Sino-American conflict whether intentionally or by accident would lead to incalculable costs and dangers. The twentieth century painted a shocking picture of industrial age destruction; do not assume that the cyber era of the twenty-first century is immune to crack-ups or catastrophes of equal or even greater scale. The United States needs to enhance its influence through long-term partnerships with allies and partners. … And the United States needs to cooperate with China to mutual benefit while managing differences.”
Conclusion
The Trump Doctrine is for the sake of the U.S. national interest. Unlike several of the world’s other leading powers China, for example, but also Germany, which treats the EU as a front organization and the euro as a super-mark; Trump does not seek to practice “globalism for thee but not for me.” On the contrary, his foreign policy can be characterized as nationalism for all. Standing up for one’s own, Trump insists, is the surest way to secure it. For Trump it is not in U.S. interests to homogenize the world. Doing so weakens states whose strength is needed to defend our common interests. As the quote from Hazony makes it clear, we have all been indoctrinated in the alleged dangers of nationalism. But few people today dare ask about the dangers of a lack of nationalism. Yet those dangers are manifold: Nationalism saved France in 1914, and the lack of it doomed the country in 1940. It’s unclear, moreover, how standing and fighting for one’s own in a just cause is anything but noble.
Beyond all this, globalism makes the world less rich, less interesting, and more boring. In the lecture he wrote after receiving the 1970 Nobel Prize in literature, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn argued: ‘’In recent times, it has been fashionable to talk of the leveling of countries, of the disappearance of different races in the melting pot of contemporary civilization. I do not agree with this opinion. … Nations are the wealth of mankind, its collective personalities; the very least of them wears its own special colors and bears within itself a special facet of divine intention.’’
These words, written almost 50 years ago, are more relevant today than ever. Solzhenitsyn was talking about another empire, which had subsumed many nations and was trying to brainwash them out of existence. These captive nations are now free, thanks in part to him, and many of them stand on the front lines, ready and eager to defend not just themselves but all nations and the very principle of the nation itself.
As the Solzhenitsyn quote makes clear, Trump’s foreign policy is fundamentally a return to normalcy. What we had before couldn’t go on. It is too generous to say it was going to end in disaster: It had already produced disaster. Getting back to some semblance of normal is necessary, good, and inevitable. Anything that can’t go on forever won’t. The only question is how it ends: with a hard crash or soft landing? For the establishment, Brexit and Trump and all the rest may feel like the former, but they’re really the latter—a normal response by beleaguered peoples who have been pushed too far. Trump is simply putting U.S. foreign policy back on a path that accords with nature.
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