Who's Surprised By Trump's Hawkish Appointments?

Not me -- but that doesn't mean Trump is actually a hawk, or any other kind of bird

So, Donald Trump’s first foreign policy appointments have been revealed (whether officially or not), and they are: Representative Elise Stefanik as Ambassador to the U.N., Representative Michael Waltz as National Security Advisor, and Senator Marco Rubio as Secretary of State. Stefanik is a key Trump supporter with little foreign policy experience but who has lashed the UNRWA for being entangled with an infiltrated by Hamas. Waltz is a long-time advisor on foreign policy going back to Trump’s first term, and is known as a fierce China hawk and Iran hawk and opponent of the Afghanistan pullout. He’s also a critic of America’s strategy in Ukraine, but on terms that indicate a hawkish view of Russia. Rubio, finally, going back to his first campaign for Senate, is a full-spectrum American primacist and was the darling candidate of the neoconservatives in his 2016 presidential campaign.

Should anyone be surprised by these choices? My answer, as attentive readers might expect, is no.

I have serious criticisms of the “realism and restraint” faction within the Republican intelligentsia, but I also take it seriously and find some of their arguments quite compelling. I laid out both my respect and my criticisms in a post this past summer. But I have never understood that faction’s belief that Trump shares their convictions, or that he even has any core convictions in this area. It is clear that Trump has no interest in the moralism that has proved so increasingly pervasive in American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War, and inasmuch as many of the members of this faction view that tendency as the central reason for America’s foreign policy failures I understand why they would want to hitch their wagon to Trump’s morally unencumbered star. But their confidence that his star would pull them where they think the country ought to go has always struck me as wildly misplaced.

That doesn’t mean that I think Trump 2.0 is going to be predictably hawkish either. As I wrote at the end of October, I think it’s very hard to predict what Trump will or won’t do beyond some very general assessments of his character—and that assessment shouldn’t inspire confidence in anything.

In his first term, Trump made ostentatious overtures to Russian President Vladimir Putin, got into public fights with America’s major NATO allies, and put pressure on the government in Kyiv to do him political favors. But his administration also provided Ukraine with arms in a large scale way (largely accomplished through Congress’s efforts and against Trump’s preference), something the Obama administration never did. Did that combination convince Putin that Trump had no interest in threatening Russia, but that America would respond forcefully if Putin took further steps into Ukraine, thereby achieving effective deterrence? Or did it convince Putin that he’d likely get what he wanted (effective control of Ukraine) without a fight so long as Trump was in power? Or was it just dumb luck that war didn’t break out on Trump’s watch? There’s no way to know for sure. In the same way, there’s no way to know whether Trump’s next move is to vindictively cut Ukraine off, take whatever deal he can get and call it victory, or whether he aims to ramp up the war in order to create the conditions for a better settlement—which is precisely what the Biden administration had been trying for back in 2023, with poor results. It’s also entirely possible that the new administration’s approach will simply be muddled and self-contradictory. The one thing I feel confident in is that Trump can’t be relied on to stay a difficult course, because that has never been his modus operandi. That predisposition may dovetail with the “realism and restraint” crowd’s preference for a settlement, but they shouldn’t fool themselves that it’s based on conviction.

The best evidence for that is Trump’s approach to Iran, which has been consistently hawkish. He campaigned in 2016 on withdrawing from the nuclear deal, and withdraw from it he did, slapping additional sanctions on Iran to boot. He then ramped up American support for the Saudi war against Iran’s Yemeni proxies, the Houthis, and assassinated Iranian General Qasem Soleimani. Trump’s antagonism to Iran has been so clear that even restrainers like Trump advisor Elbridge Colby who previously advocated an American retreat from the Middle East in favor of a greater focus on China had to argue in favor of strong American support for Israel in its confrontation with Iran. I don’t think anybody should be surprised if the next Trump administration takes further provocative actions, or green-lights Israeli escalation of their war with Iran. That having been said, I also don’t think anybody should be surprised if Trump deals with Iran analogously to how he dealt with North Korea in his first term, blustering and threatening to rain fire down on them, and then offering to go to Tehran and settle everything man-to-man. There are certainly people in the current Iranian government who are hopeful of precisely that, though it is doubtful if they have the ear of the individual who matters most, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But even if Trump does offer to go to Tehran, that doesn’t mean anything will actually be settled; Trump met with Kim Jong Un, after all, and achieved nothing by it.

With respect to China (and Taiwan), it’s similarly unclear what Trump will do, or why. There is a faction (centered on Colby) that sees China as such a potent threat that all our other foreign policy objectives need to be subordinated to it; we need to not only build up our military capacity in general but simultaneously reduce our commitment to NATO and to the Middle East so as to focus exclusively on China. But there are other China hawks who think cutting a bad deal over Ukraine or appeasing Iran would only worsen our position in the Indo-Pacific theater as well. And there are also those who think that China isn’t really much of an external threat, and that we need to focus on our internal strength and not continue providing front-line security in Asia any more than we should in Europe or the Middle East—not to mention commercial interests who don’t want to lose money on their investments in the Chinese market or access to Chinese manufacturing prowess. Every one of these groups was well-represented in the Trump campaign, and got echoed by Trump himself. How, given that fact, can we possibly know what Trump intends to do? The base-case assumption should be that he won’t have a strategy at all, that he’ll lurch from confrontation to engagement, protectionism to trade-deal-making, in search of positive headlines and as a way of dispensing favors in exchange for personal I.O.U.s. And the base-case assumption should be that the Chinese know this, and will play the game accordingly.

None of the above means that we won’t see a big military buildup, which could itself affect the behavior of allies and antagonists alike. Then again, we might not; fiscal constraints will bite harder now than they did back when money was free. Nor does it mean that we won’t see America make additional diplomatic commitments—NATO expanded in the first Trump administration, after all, and America deepened its military commitment to Saudi Arabia in those years as well, as well as tilting even further in Israel’s direction. We truly don’t know, because Trump is fundamentally shallow and capricious. We can’t even be sure that personnel is policy, and therefore that these hawkish appointments clearly signal the direction that Trump is going, whether he wants to go there or not, because Trump isn’t just a figurehead, but the overwhelmingly dominant force in American politics today, and he has no compunction about hiring someone and then promptly cutting them off at the knees. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he hired Rubio to do just that. But I also wouldn’t be surprised if he planned to give him a whole lot of rope, figuring that if Rubio manages to lasso something Trump will get the credit, and if not then Trump can always hang him with it.

There were some, during the campaign, who argued that this unpredictability was an asset in foreign policy, that America’s rivals and allies alike would be more wary of crossing us if they didn’t know what we might do. But the same thing applies to us. We don’t know what he—and therefore we—might do. We had to elect him to find out.

Now we have. Now we will.