Like few American politicians, President Trump grasps the precariousness of the nation’s present circumstances. Washington’s post-Cold War ambition to democratize the world yielded a series of futile regional wars that, in turn, eroded civil liberties and brought the country to the brink of a direct armed conflict with Russia. Contrary to expectations, the enthusiasm for a globalized, borderless world hollowed out the US middle class, while catapulting a backward China into manufacturing dominance and peer-military status.
A $35 billion deficit underscores the wide gap between America’s expansive international objectives and its limited capacity to attain them — a condition famously described by the New Deal journalist Walter Lippmann as foreign-policy “insolvency.” Continuing the hubristic course we have followed since the Nineties would be disastrous.
Trump gets all this. Which is why he is aiming to lower the temperature across various international theaters, counterbalance the power of rival states, and reset America’s global engagement. His own shorthand, Reagan-borrowed description of the strategy — peace through strength — is apt. His ability to deliver on this vision is still an open question, however. To a large degree, it depends on the people he taps to carry it out.
Richard Nixon faced a somewhat similar situation at the start of his presidency. America was overextended abroad in an unwinnable Vietnam War that bore little connection to the nation’s vital security interests. An increasingly confident Soviet Union was flexing its muscles in Czechoslovakia and Egypt and threatening to race past parity into superiority over the US nuclear arsenal. Economically, an overvalued dollar was crippling exports and rendering the United States highly vulnerable to a foreign-induced financial crisis. At home, the country was riven by violent clashes over Vietnam and racial injustice.
Nixon’s signature foreign-policy actions — making peace in Vietnam, pursuing détente and arms control with the Kremlin, opening diplomatic talks with China, stabilizing the Arab-Israeli conflict, and ending the gold standard — were aimed at aligning America’s goals and means abroad. At home, Nixon sought a breathing spell in which the United States could heal its internal wounds. By and large, it worked.
Although the particulars differ, Trump appears to be pursuing a similar vision of settling regional conflicts, stabilizing great-power relations, rebalancing American foreign trade, and buying time to mend internal rifts. He clearly recognizes that the so-called unipolar moment — the period when US power so greatly outmatched that of any other nation that the world had little choice but to bend to Washington’s will — has long been over.
As his secretary of state and interim national-security adviser, Marco Rubio, has concisely put it, “it’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power… It was a product of the end of the Cold War, but eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world. You have multiple countries now who have the capability to end life on Earth. And so we need to really work hard to avoid armed conflict as much as possible, but never at the expense of our national interest.”
Trump drove these points home last week in a seminal speech he delivered in Saudi Arabia. “We were the only power in the world,” he said, “and so we assumed this responsibility of sort of becoming the global government in many cases, trying to solve every problem. In recent years, far too many American presidents have been afflicted with the notion that it’s our job to look into the souls of foreign leaders and use US policy to dispense justice for their sins.”
The proponents of this model, he continued, “wrecked far more nations than they built and the [interventionists] were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves.” The contrast with President George W. Bush, Trump’s most recent GOP predecessor, couldn’t be more stark. In his Second Inaugural Address, remember, Bush called on Washington to “seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.”
Can Trump realize his more realistic vision?
The early signals from abroad give reason for hope. The interim tariff-reduction arrangement struck by US and Chinese negotiators last week is a sign that a compromise trade deal is realistic. Iran has cautiously indicated an openness to a pragmatic nuclear deal, while key Arab states are increasingly attracted to Trump’s vision of a modernized Middle East no longer riven by conflict and dependent on oil and gas exports.
“Success requires much more than winning over foreign leaders.”
Meanwhile, Moscow’s initial skepticism over Trump’s intentions has given way to growing optimism that he seeks not just an end to the war in Ukraine, but genuine rapprochement. Europe, too, is beginning to adjust to the reality that it can no longer simply outsource its security to the American hegemon, albeit with a great deal of wailing and gnashing of teeth. Team Trump’s success last week in defusing a looming nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan demonstrated impressive diplomatic skill.
Success requires much more than winning over foreign leaders, however. To implement deals, his administration must also engage effectively with the many moving parts at lower levels in foreign governments and manage those broader relationships. For this, Trump must bring Washington into line — and here, the early signs are more sobering.
Part of his challenge is institutional: the US government spent much of the past three decades building policy bureaucracies devoted to transforming foreign societies, and these groups have a clear self-interest in resisting Trump’s vision. The period of unipolarity also encouraged bad habits in the parts of the government supposedly designed to conduct and support diplomacy, because America’s coercive capabilities made the traditional arts of balancing the power and interests of foreign competitors seem unnecessary.
Part of the challenge is personal and political. There is a good deal of truth in the old Washington adage that personnel is policy. Finding staff that has the requisite combination of talent, experience, and loyalty is no simple matter, particularly when large parts of the GOP, and nearly all mainstream media, remain convinced that diplomatic engagement with adversaries constitutes appeasement and is therefore counterproductive.
Trump’s painful first-term experiences with opposition within his own administration have made him unusually sensitive to this problem. Still, there is no easy solution. Few of the officials who have been overseeing America’s long string of fruitless wars and failed democratization campaigns favor a new approach. And many of those calling for change lack the diplomatic polish and administrative dexterity born of experience. The large number of unfilled foreign-policy slots in the administration and the recent controversies over appointments at the Pentagon and on the National Security Council staff underscore just how difficult solving this issue is proving to be.
So while there is cause for optimism, the reality is that the much-needed change Trump is seeking in American foreign policy will be agonizingly difficult to achieve. It will certainly not come quickly. For Nixon, finalizing a peace accord in Vietnam took years. Full diplomatic relations with China were not established until well into the Carter administration. If Trump achieves even half of what he envisions during the next four years, he will have made remarkable progress. But his legacy will be that much more enduring and important if he manages to select and build a new cadre of able experts that share his foreign-policy ideas and carry his work forward.
