Peter Harris. Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs. Volume 13, Issue 2. July 2019.
In November 2016, Donald J. Trump became the first candidate for the United States presidency since Herbert Hoover to win election on a platform of unabashed opposition to American internationalism. Under the banner of “America First,” Trump promised a raft of foreign policies, which, if implemented, would have amounted to a wholesale repudiation of longstanding orthodoxies concerning US power and purpose. Trump’s iconoclasm involved opposing free trade, questioning norms against torture, and casting doubt on Washington’s commitment to nuclear non-proliferation and its security guarantees to core allies in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. During the campaign, Trump’s political opponents sought to paint these unconventional foreign policy positions as disqualifying. Both in the Republican primary contest and in the general elections against Hillary Clinton, Trump was variously accused of ignorance, inexperience, recklessness, volatility, and backward isolationism. Surely, his detractors seemed to reason, the American people would not elect to the highest office in the land a man so patently unfit to don the mantle of “Leader of the Free World.”
Yet Trump did become the forty-fifth president of the United States with a handy victory in the Electoral College—even if not in the popular vote, which he lost by 2.87 million—suggesting that a decisive portion of the US electorate was prepared to accept Trump’s ideas about how the US should conduct itself on the world stage. Since his inauguration in January 2017, Trump has continued to break with orthodoxy when it comes to foreign affairs. He regularly incenses his political opponents but never does anything objectionable enough to provoke a major fissure within the Republican Party, which has largely backed his agenda. Trump’s presidency thus raises an important set of questions about the future of America’s role in the world. Did his victory in November 2016 mark the beginning of the end of US internationalism? Or will the Trump “revolution” in foreign affairs ultimately fizzle—and, if so, why?
To be sure, Trump’s election constitutes a severe challenge to traditional, “liberal” internationalism in the United States. In order to bring about a more circumscribed world role, however, the president will have to shift from merely reflecting popular dissatisfaction with the status quo to positively reshaping the domestic landscape in ways that will favor anti-internationalist ideas and policies in the long term. Specifically, Trump and his allies—or, more likely, his successors—will have to engineer the manufacture, dissemination, and entrenchment of a new “geopolitical code” that commands adherents across the political system. Entrenching retrenchment as a hegemonic blueprint for foreign policy will be a difficult (and perhaps multi-generational) task, but not an impossible one.
The Trump Revolution in Foreign Affairs: What Was Promised
As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump promised nothing short of a revolution in US foreign relations. The unifying theme during his campaign was that the United States should “do less” in global affairs by prioritizing its strict national self-interest over misplaced internationalist (or “globalist”) concerns. US leadership in the international arena might have kept other nations secure and prosperous, Trump argued, but at an unforgivable cost to ordinary Americans. His answer was to prescribe economic protectionism over interdependence, national autonomy over multilateral institutions, and a pullback from collective security agreements. In short, Trump’s message was a call for retrenchment—for washing America’s hands of a corrupt world order and for putting US power at the service of narrowly defined national goals.
Trump’s enthusiasm for retrenchment was most evident in his foreign economic policy. Portraying international economics as a set of competitive and zero-sum interactions, Trump lambasted current and former US leaders for having suffered humiliating losses to economic competitors such as China and Mexico. In a pitch designed to appeal to working-class voters rather than the Republicans’ traditional supporters (and donors) in corporate America, Trump accused elites in Washington of outsourcing jobs, decimating domestic industries, and fueling a burgeoning trade deficit—all without regard for the interests of “regular” people. In place of an international architecture designed to submit US firms to the rigors of global competition, Trump proposed to negotiate a series of bilateral (“fair trade”) deals to stack the deck in favor of American industry—or at least to level the economic playing field by tackling what Trump viewed as the unfair trading practices of overseas competitors. In addition to a vague insistence that he was a better dealmaker than other candidates, Trump suggested that he would use tariffs and other economic policies (including, perhaps, capital controls) to return jobs and investment to the US. This unvarnished protectionism won Trump few converts from among the ranks of the political class but seemed to play well among certain slices of the electorate, especially in so-called Rust Belt states.
Trump also argued for a form of retrenchment in security policy. He made specific promises to end Washington’s support for anti-Assad rebels in Syria; sought to associate himself with opposition to the Iraq war; and repeated his longstanding calls for the US to pull its military forces out of Afghanistan. Trump suggested that American allies should either provide for their own defense—including, in some cases, the development of independent nuclear capabilities—or reimburse the US for the costs of security guarantees from Washington. In a controversial move, Trump offered rapprochement with Russia and other great powers as a means of lessening the scope of the US role. Trump did not run as an unalloyed anti-war candidate. On the contrary, he promised to pour money into the military and occasionally called for the aggressive and unilateral application of force against America’s foes (and even its allies, such as when he called for the forcible seizure of Iraqi oilfields). These inconsistencies notwithstanding, however, Trump’s overall message before becoming president was that the US should reduce its overseas commitments, extricate itself from entangling alliances in Europe and Asia, and move past the post-9/11 era of never-ending wars in the Middle East.
Trump’s refusal to articulate anything close to an ambition to lead on the world stage made him unlike any other major party candidate in living memory. Indeed, he seemed to revel in the prospect of breaking with prevailing standards of international behavior. For example, Trump endorsed the use of torture against suspected terrorists, challenged the wisdom of nuclear non-proliferation and the taboo against the use of nuclear arms, and promised a ban on Muslims entering the United States—all clear repudiations of international norms. Trump also made it obvious that as president, he would not be quick to participate in multilateral initiatives, announcing specific plans to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement, Iran nuclear deal, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Once in office, Trump captured his philosophy toward international cooperation succinctly: “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.”
Has Trump Retrenched?
Taken together, Trump’s foreign policy proposals on the campaign trail amounted to a wholesale rejection of traditional US internationalism and, indeed, the very notion of US global leadership. They were, in other words, a recipe for retrenchment. Trump continued to espouse similar rhetoric upon entering the White House in January 2017. Yet while President Trump has often talked like a “retrencher,” he has not always acted like one—at least, not unambiguously so.
Perhaps the most clear-cut area in which Trump has governed as a bona fide retrencher is with regard to US participation in international organizations. Trump has pulled the United States out of two signature international agreements concluded by the Obama administration—the Paris Climate Agreement and the Iran nuclear deal—as well as other, longer-standing international bodies such as UNESCO, the UN Human Rights Council, and the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA). As late as October 2018, nearly two years after his election, the administration had not appointed ambassadors to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), or at least thirty foreign capitals. At that time, the White House had not even named a nominee for nineteen such vacancies, including important ambassadorships, for example, to Mexico, Australia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. Critics accuse the Trump administration of having gutted the State Department by slashing its funding and making life almost intolerable for career diplomats, thereby significantly undermining America’s ability to project its voice on the world stage. But the reality is that President Trump does not aspire to play a leading role in the management of the international order. “I honor the right of every nation in this room to pursue its own customs, beliefs, and traditions,” Trump told the UN General Assembly in September 2018 in a speech that challenged the very concept of global governance. “The United States will not tell you how to live or work or worship. We only ask that you honor our sovereignty in return.”
Yet the Trump revolution has run up against some hard limits when it comes to shrinking America’s participation in global governance. At least during the first two years of his presidency, Trump struggled to find foreign-policy appointees who shared his critical views of international institutions. As secretary of state, for example, Rex Tillerson professed support for multilateral agreements as a way to safeguard core US interests, including the Iran nuclear deal. James Mattis similarly supported the Iran deal and resigned as Trump’s secretary of defense in December 2018 citing broad disagreements with the president’s approach to multilateralism. At the United Nations, Ambassador Nikki Haley (who served as Washington’s representative to that organization from January 2017–December 2018) could generally be relied upon to represent the president’s views in a faithful manner, but even she departed from Trump on key issues such as the importance of human rights and the need to condemn Russian violations of international law. Trump’s failure to staff his administration with diehard retrenchers or isolationists has undercut his ability to decisively break with past practices.
Foreign economic policy is another area in which Trump has attempted to follow through on his promises to retrench. Rhetorically, the President has continued to heap opprobrium upon the web of regional and global institutions that are intended to facilitate and deepen international economic cooperation, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the World Trade Organization (WTO). At his direction, US participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership was formally terminated and progress toward finalizing the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership has ground to a halt. If immigration can be considered a branch of foreign economic policy, then Trump has unmistakably been bent on curbing openness in that realm, too. Of course, the point is not that Trump has been silent on foreign economic policy. He has not. But whatever activism he has displayed has been aimed at curtailing America’s economic ties to the rest of the world and weakening the multilateral institutions that regulate those relationships—for example, his restrictions on immigration, the decisions to renegotiate NAFTA and terminate the mega-regional trade agreements with Europe and Asia, and the controversial “trade war” with China.
Again, however, the president’s attacks on economic globalization have enjoyed only limited buy-in on the domestic front. Most Republican lawmakers have decided against issuing public rebukes of Trump’s tariffs but are working behind the scenes to rescue the party’s attachment to trade liberalization. Outside of Washington, the general public remains “generally positive” about free trade despite Republican voters having become more supportive of protectionism in response to Trump’s clear leadership on the issue. Perhaps most importantly of all, several of Trump’s chief economic advisers differ sharply with him when it comes to the question of economic nationalism. This cleavage has been evident in Trump’s “trade war” with China, with some advisers urging the president to use tariffs only as a tactic to restore a healthy trading relationship with Beijing, while others argue in favor of “decoupling” the world’s two largest economies. In other words, the administration is split on whether the goal should be to improve economic relations with China or purposefully make them worse. This is emblematic of the indecision and inconsistencies that plague the Trump administration more generally.
Still, President Trump’s individual record on foreign economic policy demonstrates his desire to reshape America’s relationship with the rest of the world, even if he has not always managed to convince his advisers, Congress, or the voting public to go along. The same cannot be said of Trump’s defense policy. Trump has shown himself to be a committed and enthusiastic proponent of US military power—someone not inclined to shrink America’s global military footprint in any meaningful sense. As others have pointed out, Trump is something of a Jacksonian president—a leader who puts great stock in the ability of unilateral and overwhelming displays of force to convey resolve and protect US interests. The president has increased the military budget; launched two sets of missile strikes against Syria; expanded the US war effort in Afghanistan; presided over military deployments from Niger to Somalia; threatened war against North Korea and Iran; ordered an expansion of America’s nuclear arsenal; and issued strategy documents that frame US foreign policy as primarily designed to compete with great power challengers. Even when Trump has signaled a willingness to downsize US commitments in specific geographic locales—such as his calls to withdraw military forces from Afghanistan and Syria—he has tended to back away from following through. These policies run contrary to the idea of retrenchment, ensuring that the US remains enmeshed in a network of bilateral and multilateral security alliances, committed to policing an endless stretch of turbulent frontiers. Under Trump, the whole world is America’s backyard—and there is no sign that he intends to change that approach until the time comes to pass the torch on to his successor, whoever that may be.
The Stickiness of Internationalism
Overall, the major facets of US internationalism have proved to be stubbornly resilient under Trump (especially in the military sphere), illustrating just how difficult it will be for today’s would-be retrenchers to succeed at hacking off the tentacles of America’s sprawling global presence. The main problem is that, even with a nominal retrencher in the White House, American elites and the general public remain committed to a belief that sustained international engagement serves US interests. Even if Trump can cut back in some areas, lasting retrenchment cannot happen unless broad cross-sections of the public and political class buy into the project. Yet under Trump, nothing has happened to win Americans over to a revolution in foreign affairs—no exogenous shock to jolt them into rejecting old orthodoxies, and no convincing narrative from the administration to persuade key actors to embrace such a shift. The result is that the president lacks a sufficiently large power base from which to implement major changes.
The stickiness of internationalism is evident across the US political system and civil society. Take the government bureaucracy as an example. As noted above, Trump’s options have been limited when it has come to appointing adherents of “America First” to key positions. Internationalism has been hegemonic for so long in the private sector, the bureaucracy (including the military), and the political parties that there is a very shallow pool of qualified candidates for public office who would be well suited to the implementation of a radical anti-internationalist agenda. Almost by default, Trump’s foreign-policy appointments have come from the traditional wings of the Republican establishment, resulting in a largely bifurcated approach to foreign affairs (at least for the first two years of his administration).
However, even if Trump had been able to staff his administration with individuals convinced of the need to retreat from the world stage, the Republican party in Congress would still have remained an obstacle to long-term and wide-ranging plans to dismantle US internationalism. To be sure, GOP lawmakers have been willing to back Trump on most domestic and many foreign policy questions. But notwithstanding a small number of libertarian lawmakers such as Rand Paul (R-KY), there is no institutionalized caucus inside the Republican conference that supports international retrenchment—that is, no cadre of legislators committed to retrenchment for ideological or practical reasons. Indeed, congressional Republicans have rebuked Trump on more than one occasion over issues of foreign policy. Amid suggestions that the president might move to withdraw from Syria and Afghanistan, for example, the Republican-controlled Senate voted in January 2019 to support the continued deployment of US troops. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was unambiguous: “It is incumbent upon the United States to lead, to continue to maintain a global coalition against terror, and to stand by our local partners.”
Opposition to most forms of retrenchment is also the norm among America’s intellectual class, although this domestic group is obviously less important to the administration’s efforts at foreign policymaking than members of Congress. To be sure, there are some academics and public intellectuals willing to praise the incipient Trump Doctrine. But such figures comprise a distinct minority among their peers. In July 2018, forty-three international relations professors went so far as to take out a paid advertisement in The New York Times to condemn what they saw as the Trump administration’s vandalism to the liberal international order. It was later made available for others to endorse, ultimately attracting the signatures of hundreds of scholars. Even those scholars who count themselves as retrenchers are loath to recognize Trump as one of their own.
Support for a broad-based policy of retrenchment does not exist in the public at large, either. In 2018, polling by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found that over two-thirds of Americans prefer that the United States take an “active role” in world politics; that 91 percent support multilateral cooperation with US allies, with large majorities registering faith in collective security; and that overwhelming numbers of Americans support international trade. True, opinion polls also point to war-weariness among the general public, especially the younger generations. But this anti-militarist sentiment does not outweigh the public’s robust support for alliance commitments and economic openness. At best, public opinion provides a basis for “doing less” militarily in international affairs, but not a springboard from which to pursue wholesale retrenchment.
Shifting the domestic sentiment in favor of retrenchment, restraint, or isolationism will not be easy. At least, this seems to be the lesson from the World War II era, when America decisively broke with the broad policy of non-interventionism in confronting the threats posed early on in the Cold War. Prior to December 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had struggled in vain to convince Americans that a more activist approach was necessary to deal with the ascendancy of the Axis Powers. It was only the shock of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that catalyzed support for engagement. After the war, it required an enormous programmatic effort for Harry Truman and his successors to build and maintain domestic backing for an expansive policy of overseas engagement and global leadership. Today, it is difficult to predict what would have to happen for the public’s views on foreign policy to shift firmly in the direction of broad-scale retrenchment.
None of this is necessarily a problem for Trump’s prospects for reelection in November 2020. His performance in 2016 demonstrates that what matters for winning in the Electoral College is not universal appeal but rather the ability to stitch together an electoral coalition that commands a decisive plurality in the right geographic locales. However, if Trump or some future leader wants to entrench retrenchment as an enduring operational code in US foreign policy, widespread support in the foreign policy establishment and the country at large will be essential. Even if they are currently on the back foot, supporters of internationalism remain more numerous and better entrenched across the political system than their anti-internationalist rivals. Without changing this basic political reality, the best that retrenchers can hope for is an uncoordinated, sporadic effort to chip away at the internationalist superstructure. Lasting success will prove elusive without broader social and political change.
Entrenching Retrenchment
Several years into his presidency, it seems clear that Trump will not retrench. Even if the president were truly committed to a sweeping diminishment of the US global role, the political system within which he must operate will not support those efforts. What would it take for “America First” or some other branded version of retrenchment to become the dominant geopolitical code in US politics? Part of the answer is that in order to realize their desired goals, anti-internationalists would need to alter the intellectual and ideational fabrics of US government and society. They would need a reliable and capable cadre of public officials to fill bureaucratic posts as well as a reservoir of support among elected representatives. Prominent think tanks, foundations, and academic departments would have to be coopted or colonized, or else new ones established. Retrenchers would have to become much more effective at using established media outlets to cast their views and policies as mainstream, non-threatening, and even natural. The general public would also have to be given an ideational and economic stake in the dismantlement of American leadership abroad. In sum, a true revolution in foreign policy will depend upon the displacement of both internationalism and internationalists in public life—a project that might well require a generation to complete rather than just one or two presidential terms.
Remaking a country’s political landscape is, to say the least, a tall order, though not necessarily an impossible objective, provided that environmental conditions are favorable, political leadership is available, and the effort is sufficiently resourced. Aluf Benn, editor of Haaretz, argues that Benjamin Netanyahu helped catalyze exactly such a transformation of Israeli society over the past two decades by challenging the post-Zionist hegemony associated with the Labor Party. In the 1990s, Netanyahu’s first premiership was beset by criticism from Israel’s mostly left-wing social, cultural, and political institutions. According to Benn, Netanyahu emerged from the experience determined to create “new, more conservative institutions to rewrite the national narrative.” The broad-based effort included the work of newspapers such as Israel Hayom, institutions such as the Tikvah Fund and Shalem Center, and journals such as (the now defunct) Azure—all of which collectively helped to shift intersubjective assumptions about government and politics in Israel, especially regarding foreign policy and relations with the Palestinians. By the time Netanyahu was elected prime minster for a second time in 2009, Israeli politics was much more hospitable to his ideas and policies.
It is at least imaginable that retrenchment and restraint can be institutionalized in America similar to how neo-Zionism has become entrenched in Israeli politics and society. But it would take a sustained movement to achieve such a political transformation. As Trump’s presidency is demonstrating in real time, even putting an outspoken anti-internationalist in the White House is not sufficient. One question is whether one of America’s two political parties will move to “own” retrenchment as a set of policy proposals. Given America’s divided constitutional order, a narrowly partisan effort at imposing retrenchment is unlikely to succeed: partisan promises of restraint will inevitably be met with reflexive resistance from the opposing party whose members will commit to reversing course at the first chance. The only hope is to make retrenchment so popular that it becomes a bipartisan, trans-partisan, or even non-partisan position—a valence issue from which neither party has an incentive to deviate. Such a future, however, is a long way off.
Even if an anti-internationalist coalition capable of drawing support from across the political system is difficult to imagine today, it is worth remembering that internationalism itself has never been a unified creed. For the past seventy years, American leaders committed to the cause of US global leadership have worked hard to bring together free traders, anti-Communists, militarists, humanitarian interventionists, Christian internationalists, liberals, conservatives, neo-liberals, and neo-conservatives, to name just some of the disparate domestic groups that have had (or have been given) a vested interest in the exercise of American power abroad. The goal of retrenchers must be to package their preferred foreign policies in similarly inclusive ways, such that neither of the political parties and none of the country’s influential national figures benefit from becoming standard bearers for traditional internationalism. Again, this will not be an easy task. But it would be wrong to believe that internationalism is natural, neutral, or unassailable. It is none of these things.
Retrenchment: Flash in the Pan or Incipient Masterplan?
In 1990, the conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer predicted that US primacy in the post-Cold War era would face its biggest challenges not from foreign challengers but from domestic actors frustrated with bearing the weight of global leadership. With the Soviet Union no longer constituting an existential threat to the United States, Krauthammer saw that America’s newfound abundance of external security could be construed as a reason to disengage from world affairs instead of a vindication of internationalist policies. Nearly thirty years later, his prediction seems to be coming true: President Trump’s election amply demonstrates that domestic faith in deep overseas engagement is flagging and has been for some time—at least in certain quarters—so much so that leading political figures, including the incumbent president, now feel emboldened to denounce America’s global role. This is an historic shift—marking the first time since World War II that the nation’s political elite has been visibly split on the fundamental question of whether international leadership is a desirable ambition.
But it is not an equal split. Anti-internationalism is, in fact, a minority position. Notwithstanding the allegiance of the president, the most powerful groups in American politics and society are still invested in a continuation of America’s expansive global role. Those groups are also the most numerous. Such stakeholders are unlikely to quietly accept a policy of abandoning the international order or abdicating global leadership. The Trump presidency should thus be considered an important beachhead for those who wish to reimagine America’s relationship with the rest of the world, but in this respect, it is not transformative in itself. If they wish to build upon Trump’s successes to achieve lasting and wide-ranging change, critics of US internationalism must become more cohesive than they have been to date. There is every indication that they will try to do just this—but still, as of yet, there is no way to predict whether they will succeed. A battle over the fundamental assumptions of American grand strategy is thus in the offing, with the fate of US internationalism as a foreign-policy superstructure in the balance. Given that the present international order depends in large part upon America’s willingness to remain engaged in global affairs, the whole world has an interest in who wins.