Seeking coherence in Trump’s foreign policy
Free riding, regime change, dumb luck
Many analysts have expressed difficulty in finding coherence in President Donald Trump’s current foreign policy. They may be right, and, as they warn, a form of failure may loom.
However, there seem to be two inspiring, and perhaps coordinating, pillars in his foreign policy. They both derive from a remarkable success of previous eras: the historically-unprecedented decline in interstate wars that Israeli intellectual Yoval Noah Harari deems to be “arguably the greatest political and moral achievement of modern civilisation.”
The remarkable rise in anti-war sentiment
For these purposes, “peace” simply means agreement with the observation of American General Norman Schwartzkopf that “War is a profanity because, let’s face it, you’ve got two opposing sides trying to settle their differences by killing as many of each other as they can.”
Whatever the flaws and whatever international incivility may remain, a pronounced, essentially Schwartzkopfian shift in attitudes toward international war has taken place over the course of the twentieth century. This change can perhaps be quantified in a rough sort of content analysis. Before World War I it was very – even amazingly – easy to find instances in which serious writers, analysts, and politicians in Europe and North America enthusiastically proclaimed war to be beautiful, honorable, holy, sublime, heroic, ennobling, natural, virtuous, glorious, cleansing, manly, necessary, and progressive. At the same time, they deemed peace to be debasing, trivial, and rotten, and characterized by crass materialism, artistic decline, repellant effeminacy, rampant selfishness, base immorality, petrifying stagnation, sordid frivolity, degrading cowardice,
corrupting boredom, bovine content, and utter emptiness.
After World War I, however, such people became extremely rare. Where international war had been accepted as a standard and permanent fixture, the idea suddenly gained substantial currency that it was actually quite stupid, that it should no longer be an inevitable or necessary fact of life, and that major efforts should be made to abandon it.
The change has often been noted by historians and political scientists. For example, Arnold Toynbee points out that World War I marked the end of a “span of five thousand years during which war had been one of mankind’s master institutions.” In his study of wars since 1400, Evan Luard observes that “the First World War transformed traditional attitudes toward war. For the first time there was an almost universal sense that the deliberate launching of a war could now no longer be justified.” And K. J. Holsti observes, “When it was all over, few remained to be convinced that such a war must never happen again.”
In the end, the war seems to have been unique not in its destructiveness, but in the fact that it was the first war in history to have been preceded by organized antiwar agitation. Although still very much a minority movement and largely drowned out by those who exalted war, its gadfly arguments were persistent and unavoidable. And the existence of this movement may well have helped Europeans and North Americans to look at the institution of war in a new way when the massive conflict of 1914–18 entered their experience. At any rate, within half a decade, war opponents, once a derided minority, became a decided majority: everyone now seemed to be a peace advocate, and international war of that sort came to be regarded as profoundly stupid.
The real threat had become war itself, and the peacemakers of 1918 adapted many of the devices antiwar advocates had long been promoting, at least in part. Crucial among these was the establishment of a sort of world government, while aggression – the expansion of international boundaries by military force – was ceremoniously outlawed and disparaged.
World War I was not the first horrible or profoundly stupid international war in history, but, perhaps at least in part because of the exertions of the prewar antiwar movement, it was the first in which people were widely capable of recognizing and being thoroughly repulsed by those horrors and stupidities and in which they were substantially aware that viable alternatives existed.
Obviously this change failed to prevent a horrific repetition between 1939 and 1945, but the chief lessons taken from that experience were reinforcing: to the degree that international wars are about territory, a method for eliminating them was carve the world up into a set of territorial states which would then be banned from changing borders between them by force.
Progress has been imperfect, but, overall, the method has worked. Although civil wars and conflicts involving substate groups have persisted and although the number of states has vastly increased, there have been only four international wars as conventionally defined (1000 battle death per year) over the last 30 years: an old-fashioned one between Ethiopia and Eritrea at the end of the last century, two regime-changing wars by the United States in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Israel fought four conventional land wars with neighboring countries between 1948 and 1973, but, although it still has to worry about substate groups, there have been no substantial interstate wars there in the half-century since.
However, this process has been accompanied by two unpleasant developments: a rise in defense free-riding by rich countries, and the creation of a raft of protected “sovereign” states that in various ways have, whether through incompetence or veniality, set upon exploiting and impoverished their own populations. Insofar as Trump’s approach has coherence, it seems to seek to tackle these two defects.
The rise of the free-rider
As by far the wealthiest county in the world at the end of World War II and as the only victor in that cataclysm that remained substantially intact, the United States took the lead in fashioning the postwar order. By and large, it has proven to be a spectacular success. Not only has much-worried-about great power war been avoided, but the losers, Germany and Japan, have embraced defeat and have come to view the world in much the same way as the enemy that bombed Dresden and Hiroshima during the war—perhaps the greatest achievement of enlightened self-interest in human history.
At the same time, however, liberated and protected by the US, many friends and former enemies have been quite happy to underpay for their protection, free-riding on US defense efforts as they recover from the war they had instituted and systematically become some of the richest countries on the planet. Resentment at this arrangement has been around since the 1950s, and it has animated endless discussions about “burden-sharing” in which the US has suggested that its initials should stand for “Uncle Sucker,” snarling over an inequality in which, as one analyst calculates, “Since roughly 1960, the United States has averaged about 36 percent of allied GDP but more than 61 percent of allied defense spending”—though the gap might be narrower if the US had frittered away fewer resources on costly nuclear weapons which have proven to be substantially useless.
Exploitation by “sovereign” governments
The other unpleasant development in the new system was the rise of an essential tolerance, under the cover of the doctrines of “self-determination” and “sovereignty,” for systematic efforts by regimes that were nonaggressive in the interstate system to persecute and impoverish their own citizenry. Thus, for the most part the international community watched quietly as Robert Mugabe’s management reduced wages in the Congo in its first 30 years of independence by 90 percent. And much the same reaction held for civil wars even when the government in Rwanda in 1994 committed genocide against a subgroup.
Stung by such developments, UN secretary general Kofi Annan in 1998 issued a paper, “Two concepts of sovereignty,” in which he proposed military action under UN auspices by member states against such developments. Nonetheless, there are countries today, like Venezuela, Iran, Myanmar, and Cuba, in which impoverishment has taken place under incompetent or venal governments in potentially rich countries, and ones, like South Sudan, in which civil wars have reached annihilation proportions. Also alarming has been the rise of criminal gangs to control governments in Africa and Latin America.
Trump’s changes, luck, and the prospects for success
Whether deemed “coherent” or not, Trump’s foreign policy has been to shatter precedent and to bypass the UN by applying bullying tactics to have the United States military, under the auspices of his self-proclaimed “Board of Peace,” use force to correct some humanitarian anomalies. He has also pressured rich allies to spend more on their defense by effectively seeming to threaten the abandonment by the US of some of its alliance commitments.
Although often puzzlingly selective, there has been some progress on pursuing these goals under Trump. Defense spending by America’s rich allies seems to have grown some, and audacious applications of military force have removed the entrenched leaders of Venezuela and Iran. Thus far, these developments have also been carried out with little loss of American lives—an apparent key component of Trump’s policy that reflects earlier policies of “by, with, and through” in which involved locals are required to accept the vast bulk of any casualties.
However, much of this gain has been the product of luck. Allies have increased their defense spending in considerable part not because of American policy but because they have become alarmed, perhaps over-alarmed, at the seemingly-aggressive machinations of China and Russia in their areas. And the apparent military success in Iran can be attributed in considerable part to the local leadership’s bizarre decisions to hold a meeting of hard-liners in a readily-raidable area above ground while under siege and then to alienate potentially supportive states in the Middle East by shooting ordinance at them.
Whether such luck will continue to hold remains to be seen. Rich allies may decide to waste a lot of their defense spending on getting expensive and fundamentally useless nuclear weapons. Moreover, the record of armed attempts by outsiders to affect regime change is not impressive. It frequently leads to internal civil warfare, to the replacement of old hardliners with even worse new ones, or to dedicated long-term armed resistance by locals and to the attendant requirement to send in policing foreign troops.
But Iran might come up with a regime that sees wisdom in Trump’s demand that it trade in its absurd, costly, and futile quest for nuclear weapons for productive admission into the full world economy. And both Iran and Venezuela do contain citizenries deeply disillusioned with the reining ideological regimes that have brought such misery to their country, and each has a well-heeled diaspora that is well aware of their country’s potential and that may be ready, willing, and anxious to help if it can be done safely. So, while there are no guarantees, there is something for luck to work with, and perhaps the result may even resemble a degree of coherence in the policy.