Foreign Policy and the Presidential Election: Trump

This blog is the third post in a four-part series analyzing the role of foreign policy in the 2016 presidential election.

When it comes to foreign policy, as with so much else, Donald Trump is sui generis. He is unlike the competitors he crushed on the road to the Republican nomination; he bears scant resemblance to the Republican nominees in recent decades.  Trump’s foreign policy cannot be easily pigeon-holed into those categories — never perfect, of course, but useful as a rough guide — that we routinely deploy: isolationist, interventionist liberal, realist or neoconservative.

Trump’s views, moreover, often change and are sometimes contradictory. Indeed, Trump’s comments on foreign policy often seem to be impromptu riffs, creatures of the political moment rather than expressions of any analysis of the issue at hand. Trump’s foreign policy team, hastily assembled after he was criticized for lacking one, largely consists of relative unknowns and gives few clues as to how he might govern. His much-delayed speech on foreign policy — again, given only after he had been criticized for not making one — assailed Obama for his lack of a coherent strategy in the international arena without providing one of his own beyond a general call to put U.S. interests first. (The speech was attacked — often savagely — by most foreign policy observers across the political spectrum; we can safely assume that Trump, long inured to abuse by elites, didn’t care.)

There is a clear sense, in foreign policy and elsewhere, that Trump cares little for policy, per se. What he seeks to convey is more an attitude: pugnacious, outspoken, self-confident, strong.

Still, there are certain strands to Trump’s statements that are fairly consistent. They give us at least a sense of what his approach to foreign policy might be.  First is his belief that the United States is receiving a raw deal in the international arena, whether through the Chinese manipulating their currency to increase exports to the United States or by NATO allies free-riding on U.S. security guarantees to Europe. This is part and parcel of what could be called the politics of resentment. It has a strong corollary in Trump’s pronouncements on domestic policy. If average Americans are being ill-used by their elites, the United States itself is being treated unfairly in the international arena. The second strand is Trump’s almost mystical belief in the “deal” and the inability or unwillingness of our leaders to strike better ones in the international arena. He has heaped scorn, for instance, on what he believes to be the Obama administration’s failure to acquire more advantageous terms in both the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact and the nuclear agreement with Iran. Trump’s narrow focus on the deal is hardly surprising. It reflects his long — if at times controversial — experience as a hotel and casino entrepreneur. We are speaking of a man, after all, who first penetrated our national consciousness with his 1987 bestseller, “Trump: The Art of the Deal.”

The third major strand to Trump’s views is his belief that he, by dint of personal experience and pugilistic character, is uniquely qualified to make precisely the sort of deals that other U.S. leaders have, in his view, so often failed to strike in the past. At an important level, this is perhaps the most troublesome of the strands, for it highlights the potential authoritarian streak that many have identified in Trump. The idea that Trump is a fascist or that his views are fascistic may be overdrawn. The United States is not Italy in the early 1920s; Trump is no Benito Mussolini (though he bears more than a passing resemblance to former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi). But Trump does imbue himself with near-magical qualities to sort out messy problems, at home and abroad, simply by force of personal will. Almost by definition, candidates for president possess a healthy ego. After all, they seek an office daunting in its responsibilities. They are, moreover, willing to endure the protracted madness that is a presidential campaign in order to attain it. In other words, we are not talking about shrinking violets. But, even in this rarified circle of healthy self-regard, Trump stands out.

I entertain serious doubts about Trump’s foreign policy, such as it is. In this I am hardly original or alone. The foreign policy establishment — that loose nexus of current and past government officials, intellectuals at think tanks, and foreign affairs journalists which shapes our debate on foreign affairs — has, by and large, been left agog and sometimes aghast by Trump’s rise.

We need not hold Trump to an impossibly high standard. The idea that a presidential candidate must have a comprehensive grand strategy — replete with a detailed list of policy prescriptions — may be naïve. Indeed, most foreign policy speeches by mainstream candidates are equal parts platitude and wishful thinking. Once in office, moreover, new presidents will face foreign policy challenges in which the clichés of the campaign will prove useless at best and a burden at worst. There may not be a steeper learning curve in the world.

But surely some sense of the complexity of the world and the painful trade-offs necessary to advance U.S. interests would appear not just useful but critical for someone seeking to oversee the foreign policy of the world’s only superpower. Even when Trump makes valuable points, they lack nuance. For instance, our NATO allies should in fact carry a substantially higher burden for European defense; U.S. leaders have been pressing them to do so for decades under the rubric of “burden-sharing.”  But it is another thing altogether to threaten to leave the 65-year-old alliance if our partners do not fully comply with our wishes. Similarly, Trump is surely right that we should be prepared to cooperate with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Syria and elsewhere; it is another thing to suggest admiration for an individual who, when all is said and done, is a nationalist with a taste for autocracy at home and adventurism abroad.

This lack of nuance, of course, has not harmed Trump’s rise to the Republican nomination; indeed, it may have helped him with the millions of Republican primary voters who clearly savor his “straight talk.” Whatever the views of the foreign policy establishment, Trump is today the presumptive nominee of one of our nation’s two major parties. And, if the latest polling is correct, he is within striking distance of Hillary Clinton.

Next in this series: the fall campaign.

Joe Barnes is the Bonner Means Baker Fellow at the Baker Institute. From 1979 to 1993, he was a career diplomat with the U.S. State Department, serving in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.

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