Is the Mouse Ready to Roar?

Will Trump 2.0 mean a radical change in American foreign policy? I doubt it.

For the sake of my health, I did not watch any of the Republican National Convention. But I did attend a very pleasant reception on Tuesday night for my former colleague at the late, lamented opinion portal of The Week, Michael Brendan Dougherty, who has been named the William F. Buckley Jr. Senior Scholar at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, the organization that publishes Modern Age, where I am the film and stage critic. I’m delighted that the always collegial MBD and I will be colleagues after a fashion once again. The event, meanwhile, which was centered on a discussion of conservative foreign policy, was an opportunity to learn what some of Senator JD Vance’s most passionate supporters are hoping for from him, and from a second Trump term.

The answer is: quite a lot. In Walter Russell Mead’s terms, MBD reads to me like a Jeffersonian, an inward-looking idealist who opposes an expansive and interventionist foreign policy because of the damage such a policy does to America’s republican identity. The perspective has a powerful brief in its favor. Involvement in foreign quarrels implicates us in the issues that drive those quarrels and encourages foreign interests to corrupt our own government’s officials who should properly be responsive only to the interests and opinions of the sovereign people from whom their power derives. It puts us in a dominant or imperial position vis-a-vis foreign peoples, teaching our government to think of itself more generally in such imperial and ultimately sovereign terms rather than remembering that it is a government of the people, by the people and for the people. Finally, such a role requires the development of a large national security bureaucracy, operating at home and abroad, that can only do its job properly if insulated from the natural swings of electoral politics, and thereby corrupts the republican ideal at its heart.

All of these developments have demonstrably happened, which is why I say the perspective has a powerful brief in its favor. During the Cold War, America routinely interfered in the politics in other countries, including tacitly or actively supporting coups in countries like Chile and Iran, but also to counter potential pro-Soviet developments in treaty allies like Italy. These habits didn’t end with the demise of the Soviet Union any more than the national security state itself did, with the result that for many foreign governments today a core diplomatic and intelligence function is to try to influence the United States by a variety of means, most of them legal and above-board but still potentially corrupting, and sometimes crossing over into outright infiltration. I understand, therefore, why those who have been banging the alarm bells about this problem for decades (indeed, for more than a century; the same Jeffersonian concerns motivated opposition to the pressure America put on Japan over their imperial war in China, opposition to America’s entry into World War I, opposition to the Spanish-American War, even opposition to our acquisition of Hawaii), most of that time to no avail, are so eager for signs of a possible change in direction.

When Donald Trump first became president, this segment of his supporters thought that he would be that change. But in fact American foreign policy continued on the same trajectory more than it altered. We stepped up our arming of Ukraine and expanded NATO during the Trump years, for example, and while our approach to China changed considerably with the imposition of a variety of tariffs, an overture to North Korea, and early gestures toward a more formal commitment to Taiwan, inasmuch as the Obama Administration had already turned to containment of China as an overall framework these were changes of direction within that framework, and in no way a retreat from a forward-based foreign policy. It’s not surprising in that regard that the Biden Administration has pushed American foreign policy further down the trail blazed by Trump. So now, those who hope for something different are investing their hopes in Trump’s running mate, who has been playing some of their favorite songs, most prominently on Ukraine.

Before getting to my views on the plausibility of those hopes, I want to raise what I think are the most salient questions about the Jeffersonian perspective as a whole. First of all, how do you get from here to there? If the goal is to retreat to something more like a “normal” country as opposed to a global hegemon—to say nothing of retreating further into some kind of splendid isolation—how do you execute that retreat without inviting chaos and opportunism that ultimately results in a far more perilous international situation for America itself, to say nothing of the rest of the world? Second, if you have a plan for how to execute this transformation in foreign policy, how do you actually get the chance to execute it, given that the existing system has so many stakeholders not only in the government but outside it who will rally to shore it up at the first sign that it is being dismantled?

America is an extremely large commercial republic in a world that has grown far smaller than it has ever been thanks to technology. Hamiltonians—outward-looking realists motivated by the desire to advance America’s commercial interests and to safeguard and augment its power—will always be part of any American governing coalition, whether alongside restraint-oriented Jeffersonians, honor-driven Jacksonians, or crusading Wilsonians. It’s not plausible to imagine a world where they are simply out of power. They have to be won over into coalition with the Jeffersonians. To win them over, though, you’d have to convince them both that such a perspective is actually better for American power and its commercial interests than the current foreign policy regime, and that the transition can be managed without catastrophe.

I’ve never heard what I consider an adequate answer to these questions. But I got a better answer than I usually get on Tuesday night. In terms of an end-game, what I heard wasn’t a call for splendid isolation but for a more regionally-oriented security regime for America and its allies. After the fall of the Soviet Union, America should have actively sought to transform NATO into a European-centered defense entity which would itself be allied with America. This is what France has been advocating for generations, and still largely favors; America, by contrast, has always opposed NATO countries learning to cooperate militarily without American leadership. America’s goal should still be that transformation, and a negotiated end to the Ukraine war—which could not be seen as anything but a retreat from the maximalist objectives of both Ukraine’s government and its most vigorous American and European supporters—could be an ideal opportunity for America to announce its new direction. It would leave Russia with a defined sphere of influence in Ukraine and Belarus as well as in Central Asia and the Caucasus, and would force Europeans to either substantially step up their own contributions to mutual defense or to reconsider the scope of their commitments to, for example, the Baltic states.

Similarly, in Asia the United States should never have allowed China to grow by hollowing out our manufacturing base, but now that it has become an economic colossus we still should not assume this requires us to issue a frontal challenge. Instead, the United States should retreat from its recent edging towards a formal commitment to defend Taiwan, and should back off as well from the Biden Adminsitration’s restrictions on semiconductor exports to China. We should continue to insulate ourselves from supply-chain dependency on China, and build up our own defense production capacity. We should continue work with the Quad to deter China from pursuing a militarily-aggressive foreign policy to drive the United States out of the western Pacific and establish itself as the new regional hegemon. But we should also do everything we can to signal to China that we have no objection to their peaceful rise, and that it is the responsibility of Asian and Pacific states like Japan, India, Australia and South Korea to deter China from outright adventurism, with America functioning as an offshore balancer ready to provide defense in depth, as opposed to our being the front line of defense with our own troops and navy functioning as a tripwire for wider war. And then we should wait, and trust that China won’t actually rise indefinitely, but will slowly but surely start to fade thanks to the inherent inefficiencies of a command economy and the ferocious demographic head-winds they are facing.

It’s a coherent vision. I agree with a bunch of it. I’ve written about the dangers of a new Cold War and about the demographic implausibility of Chinese hegemony. I’ve advocated the Europeanization of NATO in the context of support for Ukraine. I’ve even argued that great-power rivalry might be better for tackling climate change than attempts to achieve global cooperation. But I see a few problems with it that have nothing to do with the resistance of a foreign policy establishment or the American people’s own receptivity to a more restrained and realist foreign policy.

First, this is a vision of a genuinely multilateral world, with a capable and independent Europe (or a collection of still-sovereign European states working in concert), a re-armed Japan, and a rising India along with Russia all jostling for position in a world where China and the United States are the most powerful countries but neither is hegemonic. In that world, what assurance can we have that these powerful European and Asian allies will pursue interests that are harmonious with ours, or that they will remain allies at all? Accepting multilateralism may be bowing to the inevitable—India, in particular, is not going to subsume its interests under an American umbrella, and we may yet get a more independent Europe if the far right continues to increase its influence in Brussels. But India showed the consequences of its independence in refusing to join the American sanction regime against Russia, and a more independent Europe is unlikely to join any American-led effort to contain China. A new Cold War is an extremely alarming prospect, but I understand why the custodians of American power see its advantages not only for themselves but for America, because it allows us to remain the leader of the soi-disant free world even if not of the world entire.

The scale of China’s manufacturing prowess makes this kind of multilateralism particularly threatening, meanwhile, because it makes it more rational for other powers to bandwagon with China for commercial reasons, and they have little reason to bandwagon with America for military ones if we are retreating from that role. This is how the United States rose to global prominence from the 1880s through the 1940s: by building up our economic might and watching Britain’s imperial role stretch it further and further until, with World War I, it had no choice but to mortgage itself to its former colonies to survive. We can debate whether China right now is more comparable to what America was then, or more comparable to Germany, Britain’s other great industrial rival, but regardless, America is in many ways in a situation comparable to Britain’s. And while it might have been wise for Britain to accept the rise not only of America but of Germany, Japan, Russia and other powers rather than try to sustain its supremacy and wind up playing third fiddle in an American-run world, it’s not obvious that America would have been Britain’s ally in that alternate reality, nor that a Germany that dominated the European continent would have remained at peace with a Britain that allowed it to achieve that dominance. That understanding is precisely why Britain hewed to the course it did.

Then there’s the problem of the world’s new smallness and the scope of destructive power that technology has unleashed. If America withdraws from the front lines, even if it continues to promise a defense in depth, front line states are going to want to more to ensure that they won’t need that defense in depth, that they have adequate deterrent capacity on their own. Indeed, that’s precisely what this strategy claims to want to happen. Realistically, that probably means that states like Japan, South Korea, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and potentially many more states will want a nuclear deterrent capability of their own. Are we comfortable with that, and what that means for the risk of a nuclear exchange somewhere in the world? Meanwhile, one very good reason not to want even a limited a war with China is that it would probably be fought in part in outer space, potentially both destroying the satellites that are so central both to our military and to our economy and leaving much of near-earth orbit too cluttered with debris for their ready replacement. But that very vulnerability points to the extreme difficulty of retreating to a defense-in-depth posture; we are effectively on the front lines, whether we want to admit it or not, and some of our vital interests are genuinely global, and can’t be carved up into regions.

I don’t raise these points as knock-down arguments against the position that MBD and his ilk take. I don’t think the Blob has any very good answers to the problem of America’s quasi-imperial overstretch, nor do I think that realist-oriented left-wing critics of the Blob like Robert Wright—whose views I also respect deeply—have very plausible ideas for how to achieve the global cooperation that they see as vitally necessary. I raise them because I think they’re strong objections and, moreover, are the kinds of objections that Hamiltonians will raise. They need to be answered with something other than handwaving or the reiteration of the restrainers’ original points against our current course if the case for change is to prevail over the long term.

The most likely course of a second Trump administration in foreign policy is unlikely to be a dramatic and decisive break from the past, regardless of what either Trump or Vance want. The ship of state turns slowly except in wartime, and advocates of change will face resistance even if the administration is fully in command of itself. I do think ideas matter, but that’s precisely why ideas that threaten interests (national, factional or personal) have to have exceptionally strong answers to objections from interest, whereas arguments that are not so threatening can get away without similar strength. The risk the restrainers face is not so much that they won’t achieve all they hope—that’s a certainty. The risk is that they will play a short game rather than a long one, lose quickly, and return to a comfortably familiar stance as critics. Inasmuch as they have vested their hopes in Vance, meanwhile, they reside not in the notion that he will be the brains (or the ideological enforcer) of a second Trump administration, but that he both plans to be president himself someday, and that he wants to be president for reasons beyond personal ambition.

They’re betting on Vance’s character in both dimensions. We’ll see soon enough whether the bet proves to be a good one.