Where Donald Trump goes, chaos follows. With that in mind, Max Boot speculates what foreign policy would be like in a second Trump term:
Every president but one since Franklin D. Roosevelt has believed that the United States should exercise preeminent international influence for its own good and that of the world. Trump is the lone exception. He is committed to an “America First” agenda — the same label embraced by the Nazi sympathizers and isolationists of the pre-Pearl Harbor period. He has nothing but scorn for the twin pillars of postwar U.S. foreign policy: free-trade pacts and security alliances.
In Trump’s first term, he did not manage to overturn more than 70 years of American global leadership, but he certainly undermined it. He pulled out of the Paris Climate Accords, the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Iran nuclear accord. He tried to pull all U.S. forces out of Syria and about a third of them out of Germany. He temporarily blocked arms deliveries to Ukraine to coerce President Volodymyr Zelensky into helping him politically. He launched a pointless trade war with China that inflicted considerable costs on the U.S. economy.
It’s a safe bet Trump will not be appointing any moderates next time. He has vowed to purge apolitical civil servants — a.k.a. “Communists, Marxists, Racists, and Radical Left Thugs.” The Heritage Foundation is compiling long lists of MAGA loyalists to staff a Trump administration.
Thus, there would be little — aside from his own mental fog — to stop Trump from carrying out his isolationist agenda. According to Thierry Breton, a senior European Union official, Trump in 2020 told E.U. leaders “that if Europe is under attack we will never come to help you and to support you” and “NATO is dead, and we will leave, we will quit NATO.” Congress recently passed legislation to prevent a president from exiting NATO without congressional approval, but Trump could still make the alliance a dead letter by refusing to honor the Article 5 obligation to defend members under attack.
Trump would almost certainly cut off U.S. aid to Ukraine — as his followers in Congress are already attempting to do, at his behest. He says he would end the Ukraine war “in one day” by telling Zelensky that Ukraine would have “to make a deal.” Such a deal would presumably turn over at least 20 percent of Ukraine’s territory to Russian occupation while dictator Vladimir Putin readied his forces to take the rest. Zelensky called Trump’s talk “very dangerous,” but Trump is far more interested in courting Putin than Zelensky. (“I was the apple of his eye,” Trump recently boasted about his Kremlin pal.)
The leaders of some countries — e.g., Russia, North Korea, Hungary, Saudi Arabia — might be enthused about Trump returning to power, but it’s a safe bet that Mexico, America’s top trade partner, won’t be one of them. Trump has vowed to “carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” with most of those migrants presumably being sent south of the border over the opposition of the Mexican government. Trump, who talked in office about firing missiles at drug labs in Mexico, is also developing plans to unilaterally use military force against Mexican drug cartels — a move that no sovereign nation could tolerate.
Most elections are about domestic policy. Let's hope that American voters are interested in foreign policy. Under Trump, the world will not be a better place.
Image: Quartz
