Trump’s Grand Strategic Train Wreck
Believe it or not, the president has a grand strategy. But it's a nightmarish mess.
(Photo credit: DREW ANGERER/Getty Images)
The Trump doctrine
To address these perceived threats, Trump has put forward an “America First” grand strategy with four key pillars.
The first is what White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon proudly calls “economic nationalism.” Trump has signaled a willingness to embrace a protectionist and mercantilist foreign policy more familiar to the 19th and early 20th centuries than to the 21st. In his inaugural address, for example, Trump declared: “From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first, America first. Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs will be made to benefit American workers and American families. We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our product, stealing our companies and destroying our jobs. Protection will lead to great prosperity and strength.”
To enact this vision, Trump, in one of his first executive actions as president, withdrew the United States from the TPP. He has also pledged to renegotiate NAFTA, and to withdraw from that accord if Canada and Mexico do not meet his terms. He has threatened stepped-up trade enforcement actions and the imposition of tariffs as high as 45 percent against China and others engaged in unfair trade. And he says he will impose “consequences” on U.S. companies that move jobs overseas, perhaps by enacting heavy border duties on the importation of goods manufactured abroad. If you think that the foreign economic policies of the 1920s and 1930s worked well for the United States, then Trump’s economic statecraft is for you.
A second key pillar is what might be called “extreme” homeland security. This includes the infamous wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and other investments in stepped-up border security. It includes Trump’s threat of mass deportations of illegal immigrants, starting with those with a criminal record. And his approach calls for an indefinite ban on Syrian refugees, a temporary ban on all refugees, and a suspension of legal immigration from several Muslim countries until such time as “extreme vetting” procedures can be put in place to ensure that entrants to the United States “share our values and love our people.” Last week, Trump signed an executive order putting all of these measures in motion. Trump has also expressed openness to a registry of all Muslims living in the United States, and threatened punitive action against those who fail to report friends or family members suspected of holding extremist views to law enforcement.
What we call “amoral transactionalism” represents the third, and perhaps most central, feature of Trump’s grand strategy. In Trump’s view, the United States should be willing to cut deals with any actors that share American interests, regardless of how transactional that relationship is, and regardless of whether they share — or act in accordance with — American values. In the battle against radical Islam, for example, Trump has said: “All actions should be oriented around this goal, and any country which shares this goal will be our ally.” The biggest perceived opportunity, in this regard, is for a strategic realignment with Russia — a country Trump and some of his advisors see as a natural partner in the fight against Islamic extremists and perhaps in countering China too.
Trump’s grand strategy is transactional in another sense as well. It contends that those allies and partners that gain from U.S. assistance should “pay up” — and, if they don’t, that the United States ought to cut them loose. Since the 1980s, Trump has consistently characterized U.S. allies as wealthy freeloaders who disproportionately gain from American commitments and expenditures, to the detriment of U.S. security and the American economy. He has argued that NATO is obsolete and questioned the wisdom of the U.S. commitment to Japan and South Korea. For Trump, America’s treaty alliances in Europe and Asia are not sacred commitments; U.S. allies are no better (or worse) than any other states, and, accordingly, our relationships with them should be conditional rather than special. As Trump argued in April: “The countries we are defending must pay for the cost of this defense, and if not, the U.S. must be prepared to let these countries defend themselves. We have no choice.” Trump put it even more starkly in his inaugural address, arguing that the United States had “subsidized the armies of other countries while allowing for the very sad depletion of our military” — in essence, that America’s alliances have made the country weaker and less secure.
The final pillar of Trump’s grand strategy is a muscular but aloof militarism. For decades, Trump has advocated “extreme military strength.” On the campaign trail and during the transition, Trump called for larger U.S. naval, air, and ground forces, and significant new investments in cyber warfare capabilities and nuclear weapons. (On Jan. 27, Trump announced an executive order to follow through on this commitment, but the details remain unclear.) Yet Trump’s stated purpose is not to engage in military adventures, or to bolster U.S. alliances, but rather to deter potential adversaries and defeat those who attack the United States. Trump has pledged to intensify the military campaign against the Islamic State and other terrorist groups — but he has consistently criticized both regime change and nation building. In the campaign against the Islamic State, it is clear Trump hopes to depend heavily on local and regional “Muslim forces” to carry on the fight on the ground while the U.S. military’s role is primarily to “bomb the shit out of them” — and perhaps, if Trump is taken literally, to take Iraq’s oil once the Islamic State is defeated. Past U.S. presidents wanted an America that was strong enough to shape global affairs; Trump seems to want an America that is strong enough to eradicate terrorism and then simply be left alone.
Taken together, Trump’s “America First” grand strategy diverges significantly from — and intentionally subverts — the bipartisan consensus underpinning U.S. foreign policy since World War II. American presidents in the postwar era have generally seen a world of expanding democracy and free markets as safer and more prosperous. They have also believed that the modest investments the United States makes in protecting its allies and supporting international institutions are bargains, because they prevent adverse geopolitical developments that might ultimately require far higher costs — in both lives and money — to address.
Not so for Trump. He simply doesn’t subscribe to the long-held belief that “American exceptionalism” and U.S. leadership are intertwined — that the influence of the United States on the world stage is rooted in the idea of America and the values it represents, not just its material power. Moreover, as Thomas Wright notes, “Trump believes that America gets a raw deal from the liberal international order” it helped construct seven decades ago and sustain to this day. He is therefore hostile to that order, institutionalized through alliances with other democratic states and international agreements that promote an open, rule-based international economy, and refuses to invest blood and treasure to maintain it.