Trump’s Geriatric Foreign Policy

Things are moving head-spinningly fast. Developments in the Middle East, in particular, have made more twists and turns than most of us can even keep up with. With all the air strikes and twitter-born threats, though, we may lose sight of just how antiquated much of our current foreign policy is.

There is something truly archaic about Donald Trump’s approach to international relations. Many of us tend to think “Make America Great Again” harkens back to some golden time in relatively recent memory, perhaps the go-go years of the Reagan 1980s. I’m not so sure. I’m struck by how much Trump’s worldview mostly seems to come from my grandfather’s time or even before. So many of his major policy initiatives have a 19^th century sensibility, or at best a mid-20^th century one. I would be surprised to learn that the President had done significant research into the history of American diplomacy, or that he had reflected deeply on how he wanted to tie his own policy into the longer-term currents of US politics. But I so often have the feeling that Donald Trump is channeling some inchoate version of an older American story dimly recalled from his 1950s elementary school American history class in Queens. His vision is that of an old man, largely inaccessible even to middle-aged Americans, much less young voters. Trump has been lucky, thus far, that the vision fortuitously resonates with his base, even if his supporters don’t necessarily get the references.

There’s an irony here. Donald Trump is in many respects the most revolutionary president the United States has had in the post-war period, and perhaps ever. He has challenged our alliances and longstanding partnerships, mostly abandoned a leadership role in a global system in large part created by his predecessors, rejected the free-trade philosophy that has guided American economic policy for 80 years or more. Further, he is the first American leader to have fully embraced social media, understood intuitively how to harness this revolutionary new way of communicating directly with his supporters without being filtered through traditional media. Overall, though, his revolution smacks more of radical reaction than innovative change.

One often has the impression that Trump sees himself as the president after Ulysses S. Grant instead of the one after Joe Biden. His take on foreign policy seems in many ways much more like his late 19^th century predecessors than his early 21^st century ones. The America of that time – a continental power in full territorial expansion, largely outside the power struggles of Europe or Asia, its industry growing by leaps and bounds behind exclusionary tariffs – may be the very America he means us to rediscover.

That would certainly explain his rather old-fashioned approach to foreign policy. In the first hundred years or so of its existence, the United States grew from thirteen original states hugging the Atlantic seaboard to a vast American empire. Sometimes, our expansion came through conquest, with the Mexican American War in the 1840s, for example, bringing in vast new lands from Texas to California. Sometimes, we made some very astute real estate deals, like the Louisiana Purchase in the early 19^th century or the acquisition of vast Alaska from the Russians in the 1860s. The idea was that huge, “empty” territories were there for the taking, that entrepreneurial, courageous Americans had the right to exploit the riches of unexplored wild lands. In that context, Trump’s periodic obsession with Greenland, for example, makes perfect sense. Indeed, the first serious thinking about the United States acquiring Greenland came in 1867 right after our purchase of Alaska, when the Andrew Johnson Administration commissioned a study on the possibility. There were a few more aborted attempts to get the territory subsequently. 

Similarly, Trump’s frequent focus on Latin America harks back to a much earlier time. With its “Donroe Doctrine” – what a ridiculous name – this administration makes a clear link with the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, which sought to ensure that great powers of the day left Latin America to US influence. Its modern version, as laid out in State Department planning documents, essentially seeks the same. “Under the new ‘Donroe Doctrine,’” the most recent Agency Strategic Plan says, “the United States has re-established absolute primacy in our hemisphere—both by bringing anti-American and rogue states to heel, and by forging powerful new security and economic partnerships with like-minded states.” Trump has repeated the long and often painful history of 19^th and 20^th century interferences in the region in places like Panama, Nicaragua, Honduras, Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Chili, and so on. Trump’s old-school intervention in Venezuela to overthrow President Maduro, his sometime blockade of Cuba, and his frequent comments on the desirability of a return the Panama Canal to American suzerainty all seem like they’re torn from some history of Yankee imperialism from past centuries.

His on-again, off-again trade wars feel equally dated.  In the 1800s, tariffs were a primary source of revenue for the federal government, and particularly in the later half of the century high tariffs were used to dope up America’s burgeoning industrial growth. Some of the highest import duties in the history of the United States were imposed not under Donald Trump but under President Benjamin Harrison in 1890. The so-called McKinley Tariffs reached as much as 50% on most imported goods. Trump seems bent of returning us to that era. You could almost imagine him dreaming of new railroads being built across the continent, the first skyscrapers going up in cities like New York and Chicago, the first Model-T Fords coming off the assembly line, all encouraged and protected by a wall of trade barriers.

His immigration policy, obviously, seeks to bring us back to an earlier time. Until the adoption of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) of 1965 under President Johnson, America’s immigration law was overtly and unabashedly racist. The Chinese Exclusion Act in the 1882 and the Immigration Act of 1924 sought to impose a policy that overwhelming favored immigration from northern and western Europe. The 1924 law also created the Border Patrol, so active under this administration. Trump’s immigration policy goes right back to those days, self-consciously. The architect of his war on immigrants, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, has been overtly critical of the INA’s end to geographic quotas. “If you bring those societies into our country and then give them free welfare, what do we think is going to happen,” he said on Fox News in December. “We need a moratorium on immigration from Third World countries until we can heal ourselves as a nation.”   

Even the current war with Iran, apparently now on hold for the moment, pulls us back into an earlier time. Of course, as Trump may or may not know, this is not the first time we’ve sought regime change in Iran. The CIA played a major role in the overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953, after the populist politician moved to nationalize British Petroleum. Of course, that CIA-sponsored coup gave us the Shah, the best friend both the United States and Israel had in the region for a quarter century.  The Shah, unfortunately, was also the leader whose regime provoked the Iranian revolution and inadvertently brought us the current hardline theocratic regime that has proven so problematic for American policy over the last forty years. With his threats to bomb Iran into the Stone Age, Trump seems to have drawn few lessons from the failure of overwhelming American airpower to create the political conditions for victory in places like Vietnam or Afghanistan. Trump instead seems to be channeling General Curtis Lemay, the head of Strategic Air Command when Trump was a boy. Lemay, a forceful advocate massive air power, once said, “if you kill enough of them, they stop fighting.”

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Retrouvez régulièrement les éditos de Jeff Hawkins, ancien diplomate américain, chercheur associé à l’IRIS, pour ses Carnets d’un vétéran du State Department.