Trump Doctrine: American Power Without Principle

No political analyst has put a better spin on contemporary US foreign policy than Tod Lindberg. As a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, Lindberg has long been an astute observer of global politics and a principled advocate for American power in an unruly world. And in an essay for the March issue of Commentary, he and co-author Corban Teague, senior policy director and deputy to the executive director at the Vandenberg Coalition, argue that Trump’s impulsive and capricious foreign policy is—like Wagner’s music—better than it sounds.

The results of Trump’s use of American power, Lindberg and Teague contend, have been more mixed than is commonly appreciated by the intellectual elite. It has marked, they write, “the start of a sobering return to reality.” They also argue that the majority of Trump’s voters are far more “hawkish and supportive of a strong U.S. presence on the global stage than the isolationist faction [of the Republican coalition] has sought to delude us into believing.” To justify these dubious claims, they point to President Trump’s belligerent rhetoric against America’s traditional adversaries and to his activist record in foreign policy.

The authors observe that many of Trump’s most devoted supporters wanted an end to robust American activism abroad. “A small but vocal Trump faction,” they write, still “seeks an Age of Trump that eliminates all vestiges of the postwar liberal order and looks instead to the isolationist, or at least anti-interventionist, spirit that existed prior to World War II.” But these hopes have gone largely unrealised, the authors maintain. Foreign-policy radicalism has not been the order of the day from President Trump—nor has it been demanded by his political base. After all, if Trump or his constituency genuinely sought to pare back America’s global commitments and retreat into Fortress America, why would he so frequently traffic in slogans like “Make America Great Again” and “peace through strength”? [Emphasis in the original.]

But this effort to interpret “the Age of Trump”—a locution that avoids directly implicating the president and his senior officials—as a simple demand for American power to be used in the national interest is unpersuasive. The Age of Trump has not been a mere corrective to the “unrealistic wishcasting” of a post-Cold War era that envisioned a world of perpetual peace and comity. It has also made Washington weaker and more isolated than at any time since the dawn of the Pax Americana, hastening the collapse of the alliance system that has been the bulwark of America’s power and influence.

National greatness has not returned to prominence in the Trump era. Whenever Trump has been asked to elaborate on what made America great in the first place, he has repeatedly invoked its wealth and power, but never the purposes to which that wealth and power were put. Ask Trump what constitutes America’s national strength, and he is liable to respond by citing its refusal to be a sucker on the world stage. Were he classically educated, Trump would no doubt endorse the principle once relayed by Thucydides: “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”