By Noah Rothman
Thursday, August 24, 2023
Events tend to force ‘America First’ officials to abandon
their campaign rhetoric.
An epochal shift in how the Republican Party
conducts America’s foreign affairs began on April 27, 2016. Or, at least,
that’s what Republicans were told, ad nauseam and at a deafening decibel, by
elements of the Republican coalition who resented conventional conservative
foreign-policy prescriptions.
With the Republican presidential nomination all but
formally secured in the spring of 2016, Donald Trump took the stage at the
Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., to deliver a speech announcing that a sea
change was under way. America would “no longer surrender this country or its
people to the false song of globalism,” the future president averred. From
behind the Resolute Desk, Trump would reorient the GOP so that it might once
again cast a skeptical eye on overseas commitments. He would blur the
distinctions between American ally and adversary, sideline the promotion of
liberal-democratic ideology, and turn U.S. foreign policy toward smaller, more
attainable goals.
Trump retailed his hostility toward “the ideology of
globalism” so frequently on the campaign trail and in international forums that
it was taken for granted that most Republican voters shared his vision. Trump’s
loudest supporters never failed to remind his conservative critics that their
time had come and gone. The modest squeaks of disapproval from center-right
advocates of an extroverted American presence on the world stage were regarded
as little more than the death throes of a defunct ideology. If their
foreign-policy vision was to be remembered at all, the New Right’s bombastic
polemicists insisted, it would be regarded with contempt.
But President Donald Trump never lived up to the
expectations he set for his supporters. Then-president Trump’s first national-security-strategy
review was a conventional document. It announced no effort to redefine
America’s relationship with its “strategic competitors” such as China or
Russia. It showed no inclination to retreat from America’s commitment to target
terrorist “sanctuaries” abroad “before they can threaten the U.S. homeland.”
Nor did it stress the failures of democracy promotion abroad. Rather, it
attacked “rival actors” who “use propaganda and other means to try to discredit
democracy,” a system that is “an inspiration for those living under tyranny”
and, thus, an indispensable tool of statecraft.
The document was no artifact of a bygone time. It
appeared to inform the Trump administration’s conduct of American affairs
overseas. Within his first 100 days in office, Trump ordered a strike on a Syrian
missile facility believed to be the launching point for chemical-weapons
attacks on a rebel-held area of the country. In 2018, he ordered another
similar attack on a Syrian weapons depot in defense of the international
prohibition on the battlefield use of chemical weapons. The following year, the
U.S. responded with force to Iranian-backed rocket attacks on American military
installations in Iraq — a response that culminated in a January 2020 strike
that killed Qasem Soleimani, a top commander in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard
Corps.
True believers in the nationalist project, such as former
Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson, were aghast at Trump’s recklessness.
Carlson bemoaned the rush to hostilities with Iran — a distraction from the
class struggle at home, engineered by the permanent bureaucracy with its
“built-in bias for war.” But by and large, the president’s supporters were not
repulsed by Trump’s willingness to court risks overseas. Rather, they gushed
over these muscular displays of American resolve.
Likewise, Trump’s overtures to Moscow — culminating in a
cushy 2017 Oval Office sit-down with Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov and
Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the U.S. at the time — ended up being
little more than rhetorical. In contrast with the president’s stated objective
at the Mayflower Hotel to “improve relations with Russia from a position of
strength,” the Trump administration pursued strength despite its
cost to bilateral ties with Moscow. Under Trump, the U.S. expanded sanctions
targeting Russian enterprises, kicked Moscow’s diplomats out of the U.S.,
seized Russian consular property, withdrew formally from the defunct
Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, broke the Obama administration’s hold
on the provision of lethal armaments to Ukraine, and even fought in combat
against Russian-aligned Wagner Group mercenaries in Syria. Were Trump
supporters appalled by this contradictory policy toward Russia? Not
discernibly.
Trump talked often about his desire to see America’s NATO
allies spend more both on their collective defense and to compensate the United
States for its beneficence. As Trump said at a NATO plenary-session breakfast
in 2018, “massive amounts of money is owed,” and he even reportedly discussed
withdrawing from the Atlantic Alliance unless its member states ponied up. But
talk was all it amounted to, and, in the end, Trump presided over the expansion
of the alliance with the admission of Montenegro in 2017. Trump complained
publicly of the accession of this “very aggressive” country, but it was
Montenegro that was the target of a Russian-backed coup plot designed to derail
its NATO membership. Since the Balkan country joined the alliance, Russia has
given it a wider berth — demonstrating both NATO’s value and its purpose. If
Trump regretted allowing Montenegro to join the alliance, he didn’t show any
indication of that in 2020, when North Macedonia became NATO’s 30th member
state.
Nor did Trump retreat from support for our partners
abroad who were engaged in conflicts that advanced American interests — both
material and ideological. He supported Saudi Arabia’s war against the Houthi
rebels in Yemen, whose alliance with Iran threatened to imperil commercial
shipping on the coasts of the Arabian Peninsula. When Congress tried to force
him to abandon the Saudis, he vetoed the measure. His administration backed
what was ultimately a failed effort to replace Nicolás Maduro’s brutal
socialist regime in Venezuela, and he refused to withdraw the “option” of
direct Western military intervention in the region.
Trump did try to make good on his pledge
to abandon at least some of America’s partners abroad — notably, the Kurds in
Iraq and Syria, prompting Defense Secretary James Mattis to resign in protest.
When he eventually repositioned the handful of U.S. troops on the ground in
Syria, it paved the way for a Turkish invasion of Syria and the subjugation of
some of America’s fiercest allies in the war against the Islamic State. If
Trump’s “America First” proponents are proud of this accomplishment, they don’t
talk about it much.
Donald Trump never had a foreign-policy doctrine. He had
moods, and those moods were subject to volatile shifts. When Trump wasn’t “the
most militaristic person” in the GOP, he was the only figure in its firmament
who could “expel the warmongers” in its ranks. Republican reformers who
attached themselves to Trump’s carapace read more meaning into the former
president’s mental gestures than they deserved. But as Trump’s behavior suggests,
his preference was for policies that produced the greatest tangible rewards in
the shortest term. And the policies he pursued indicate that the most tangible
rewards are available to the president who engages with the world as it is
rather than retreats from it.
Not only were Trump’s policies more continuous with those
of his predecessors than his wild-eyed nationalist allies would like to admit,
but that continuity is also observable in how the GOP has acted since Trump
left office. Under Joe Biden, the world has become a much more dangerous place,
and Republicans are responding to that undesirable reality in familiar ways.
Operating on some vestigial assumptions from the Trump
era, a number of prominent Republicans actually defended Joe Biden’s decision
to execute Trump’s unfulfilled desire to withdraw all U.S. forces from
Afghanistan. But the GOP’s tune swiftly changed when the consequences of
America’s evacuation became impossible to ignore. Republicans who just weeks
earlier had eagerly anticipated the American pullout from Central Asia became
vicious critics of the Biden administration’s Afghanistan strategy when the
evacuation devolved into chaos, as it invariably would have under any president
and on any time line.
As the New York Times amusingly
chronicled, one of the populist Right’s more visible proponents, Senator Josh
Hawley, championed the withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan as
“expeditiously as possible” and criticized Biden’s four-month postponement of
the withdrawal deadline. When the consequences of that withdrawal materialized,
however, he insisted that we should have rejected “the falsehood peddled by a
feckless president that this was the only option for withdrawal.” We’re left
with a vaguely Marxian counterfactual, which asks us to believe that true
retrenchment was never tried.
Trump himself assailed the Biden administration’s
shambolic approach. “This is not a withdrawal,” he told the crowd at a rally.
“This was a total surrender.” But Trump would have presided over something
similar if he had pursued his withdrawal plan, which would have afforded the
West even less time to manage and mitigate foreseeable consequences of American
retreat from a nation without a stable successor regime in control of the whole
of its territory.
Perhaps the biggest test of the New Right’s worldview has
come in response to Vladimir Putin’s war of territorial expansionism in
Ukraine. The “obsession with Ukraine from our idiot leaders,” future senator J.
D. Vance exclaimed on the eve of Putin’s second invasion of Ukraine, “serves no
function except to distract us from our actual problems.” Spooked by the
looming war, the American Conservative’s Rod Dreher denounced the
“eagerness” displayed by “American elites” to provoke a shooting war with
Russia — a bizarre inversion of aggressor and aggressed against. “Has Putin
ever called me a racist?” Carlson asked in an unmistakable echo of the
sentiments Muhammad Ali expressed about the Vietcong. “Is he teaching my
children to embrace racial discrimination?” the host continued. “Is he trying
to snuff out Christianity? Does he eat dogs?”
But Republican voters were never sold on the revisionist
notion promoted but little pursued by Trump — the idea that Russia and America
should make common cause around shared cultural objectives and mutual hostility
toward Islamist terrorism. A majority of the GOP rank and file never saw the
autocrat in the Kremlin as anything other than an adversary. Nor did they view
the preservation of peace on the European continent as a “distraction” from core
U.S. interests. And when the shooting started, the GOP’s voters adopted a
posture consistent with that outlook.
Despite near-constant haranguing from more-nationalistic
quarters on the right, most of the party’s representatives in Congress
continued to back material support for Ukraine’s cause throughout 2022 and
2023. And they did so with the understanding that the lion’s share of GOP
voters also supported that effort.
Polling of the GOP on the issue of support for Ukraine
has proven volatile. It increases with Ukrainian victories and evidence of
instability inside Russia. It wanes following Russian battlefield victories or
prolonged periods of hard-fought stasis. It is highly dependent on the wording
of the question that is asked. But even now, 18 months into the war and despite
the endless denunciations of America’s support for Ukraine’s cause, only 34
percent of Republicans and 38 percent of conservatives told Echelon pollsters
in July that providing “military assistance to Ukraine” was a “bad idea.”
Once again, it was Donald Trump himself who illustrated
the folly of thinking that the GOP had undergone ideological renovation. When
pressed this summer about how he would mastermind a resolution to the war in
Europe in just one day, as he maintains he can, the former president said he
would achieve this feat by forcing all parties to sit down and negotiate. And
if that fails? Well, in that case, Trump confessed, we will arm Ukraine to the
teeth. “We’re going to give him a lot,” Trump said of Volodymyr Zelensky.
“We’re going to give them more than they ever got if we have to.”
Again, Trump has moods, not policies, and it’s unwise to
invest too much significance in any particular remark. But in this case Trump
was not advocating retreat from the world stage but robust engagement with it
on its terms. And if diplomacy fails, there is always the clarifying threat of
overwhelming military force.
To all these criticisms of the nationalist Right’s
emphasis on rapprochement with America’s adversaries and retrenchment from the
world’s hot spots, nationalist advocates of a new American foreign policy often
respond by emphasizing their hawkish approach to China. They are apt to argue
that America’s global commitments — an inevitable outgrowth of America’s role
as the sole hegemon — take its attention away from the long-delayed “pivot to
Asia” that Barack Obama tried and failed to orchestrate. Many advocates of a
policy superficially devoted to countering China’s regional ambitions are
clever enough to avoid articulating the ultimate logic of their
preferences.
Vivek Ramaswamy, upstart that he is, takes a blunter
approach. He routinely performs the public service of articulating the
unavoidable and undesirable outcomes that a consistently nationalist approach
to foreign affairs would invite. The New Right argues that the threat posed by
an expansionist Russia is a distraction. Ramaswamy ostensibly agrees with this
observation but adds that Russia and China are now so closely coupled in what
has become an all-but-formal alliance that the West will have to give Putin
everything he wants if we hope to sever these ties. According to Ramaswamy, the
U.S. must consent to Ukraine’s unambiguous loss in its war of territorial
survival if we expect to coax Russia to give up its economic and military
cooperation with China. But wouldn’t that spook America’s partners and allies
on the Pacific Rim? Perhaps, Ramaswamy concedes, but so what?
“Xi Jinping should not mess with Taiwan until we have
achieved semiconductor independence,” he recently told conservative radio host
Hugh Hewitt. “Our commitments to Taiwan,” Ramaswamy added, “our commitments to
be willing to go to military conflict, will change after that, because that’s
rationally in our self-interest.” This barstool statecraft disregards alliance
theory and the interests of America’s partners, who will seek
accommodations with China and Russia at America’s expense in response to a U.S.
policy that conveys our indifference toward the continuation of their
independence. Ramaswamy has articulated a functionally isolationist vision, and
it is consistent with the nationalist Right’s geopolitical policy
prescriptions.
Slinking back into “Fortress America” is the subtext of
any “America First” foreign policy. It may be a uniquely American instinct, but
it is a naïve one. And it is a failure in practice. George W. Bush, Barack
Obama, and Donald Trump ran for the White House on the promise that they would
preside over a humbler America on the world stage. Each of them abandoned that
promise when events abroad required him to. Unlike his predecessors, Joe
Biden has succeeded in his effort to make America into a
smaller, less self-assured feature of the geostrategic landscape. That
experiment has produced one unambiguous disaster after another.
There’s a lesson here for anyone willing to recognize it.
What the nationalist Right sees as a corrupt “uni-party” consensus on foreign
policy is, in fact, a bipartisan agreement on American national interests and
the most efficient methods of advancing them.
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