Deconstructing Trump’s foreign policy

THE conventional wisdom is that President-elect Donald Trump is by nature a foreign policy “isolationist”, but that pressures at home and abroad would prevent him from pursuing a radical global America-first agenda.

That conclusion is based very much on Trump’s first term in office. Recall the concerns that he would pull the US out of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato) and other multilateral security groupings, or that he would end up drawing the US into new wars around the world with, say, North Korea or in the Middle East.

Ultimately, these and similar scenarios did not materialise. He did pressure Nato members as well as other international allies to increase their defence budgets, which they did – 23 of Nato’s 32 members have now made the target of spending 2 per cent of GDP on defence.

Trump revoked the nuclear deal with Iran and threatened to nuke Pyongyang at one point, but ended up pursuing diplomatic detente with North Korea. He also helped to broker peace between Israel and Arab countries through the so-called Abraham Accords.

Yet, there was one element in the first Trump administration’s foreign policy that distinguished it from that of his predecessor’s and successor’s terms. It reflected realpolitik considerations and refrained from injecting idealist notions such as human rights considerations into the pursuit of America’s interests abroad.

Indeed, Trump’s foreign policy was based on the assumption that the international system is evolving in the direction of a great power competition; and that the US should approach its geo-strategic and geo-economic competitors, led by China and Iran, first and foremost on considerations of national interests and mostly through transactional relationships.

But then, the president is the one who decides what those national interests are, and – based on that – constructs foreign policy.

And Trump’s modus operandi during his first term – and probably in the second one too – was to leave both allies and rivals trying to predict his policies.

To put it in concrete terms, it’s true that Trump has vowed to end the war in Ukraine, bring about peace in the Middle East, press China to play by America’s terms, as well as continue pressuring allies to spend more on defence and impose tariffs on trade partners, including 20 per cent on all imports and 60 per cent on Chinese ones.

But the question is how he plans to do all of that. That is an element of unpredictability that would probably become the most distinctive characteristic of his foreign policy in the next four years, as it was during his first term.

In a way, the real question would always be: Who was the last person that Trump spoke with before making his foreign policy decision?

Two schools of thought

During his first four years in office, Trump was surrounded by foreign policy establishment figures, such as retired marine general James Mattis (secretary of defence) and business executive Rex Tillerson (secretary of state), who impeded their boss’ tendency to shoot from the hip and actually provided some sense of predictability to the making of national security and foreign policy.

Some of the names being mentioned now as possible foreign policy office holders are former US ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell, Florida Senator Marco Rubio, and Trump’s former national security adviser Robert O’Brien for the secretary of state position.

While it may be too early to predict who would lead the Pentagon and the State Department, it is possible to identify two main schools of thoughts that are expected to dominate the foreign policy debate in the next Trump administration.

First, there are the traditional Republican internationalists, such as Senator Bill Hagerty, a Republican from Tennessee, who served as ambassador to Japan during Trump’s first term and who would be more inclined to constrain the isolationist tendencies in the Trump administration as well as stress the US’ role as the guarantor of international peace and order.

Unlike Trump, they insist that Washington should continue to support Ukraine economically and militarily in its war with Russia, which they consider to be an aggressor that threatens core US national interests. And they continue to put focus on the need to secure and even expand multilateral security organisations such as Nato.

Then there are aides, such as Grenell and Elbridge Colby – who served in the Pentagon during Trump’s first term – who tend to reflect a more constrained internationalist perspective that is likely to ally more closely with Trump’s view. They can be called the China-first school of thought.

Elbridge and other aides do not reject the notion that Russia is an aggressor. But they insist that America’s core national interests lie in the Pacific in containing China, and that the US geo-strategic centre of gravity should shift from Europe and the Middle East to East Asia.

From their perspective, America’s allies across the Atlantic should be the ones to carry the burden of containing Russia and, in that context, help Ukraine and create the conditions for a ceasefire and, eventually, a peace agreement.

That would allow the US to shift more military resources to the Pacific to deal with the China challenge, together with regional allies such as Australia, Japan, India, and South Korea.

In the Middle East, these aides consider Iran and its allies as a threat to US interests. But they would like to see a military axis involving Israel and the Arab Sunni states, led by Saudi Arabia, using their power to contain the Islamic Republic and its proxies.

According to various sources, Trump would like to see the war in Gaza end and the hostages there released before he takes office in January.

The next step would be to expand the Abraham Accords by facilitating the normalisation of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, and press for the establishment of a regional security grouping to contain Iran. That again allows Washington to focus its attention on China and prepare for a possible military conflict with Taiwan.

In that context, these aides would attach less significance to multilateral security groupings and invest more time and resources in strengthening US military ties with regional “influentials”.

In addition to traditional allies such as Britain, France, Germany and Australia, these would include India, South Korea, Israel, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Poland.