WALTER RUSSEL MEAD ON TRUMP FOREIGN POLICY
https://www.wsj.com/articles/ukrainegatetreason-or-common-sense-11575937739?mod=opinion_lead_pos9
EXCERPT:
Among the administration’s most consistent features is a belief that the U.S. should change the priority it gives to the different theaters in world politics. From this perspective, the center of gravity of American policy must move from the Atlantic to the Indo-Pacific. Latin America deserves more attention as a growing social and political crisis creates larger threats in the hemisphere—of which the chaos on the Southern border may be only a foretaste.
After Latin America, the threats of jihadist violence and Iranian expansionism make the Middle East the next-highest priority for the Trump administration. Europe, America’s highest priority for much of the Cold War, has fallen to fourth place. For the Trump administration and many of its Republican allies, Russia, because it is weaker and poorer than China, comes after Beijing on America’s list of geopolitical concerns—an important disagreement with the liberal Atlanticist foreign-policy establishment and not the only one.
Beyond geopolitics there is ideology. The rules-based world order means much less to Mr. Trump and to many Republican senators than it does to liberal Atlanticists. The president isn’t a believer in the application of the broken-windows theory of foreign policy—that a violation of one rule in one place materially increases the chance of other rules being broken in other places. A “realist” in the jargon of international relations, Mr. Trump thinks that national power matters much more than international law.
Given these views, it is natural that Mr. Trump and some of his Senate defenders don’t believe Ukraine matters much to the U.S., or that a few weeks or months of delay in military aid would have a discernible impact on world events. Even Republican Russia hawks like Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin tend to see developing a long-term strategy to combat China as a top priority for U.S. foreign policy.
Mr. Trump’s views on foreign policy aren’t always correct, and his conduct of foreign affairs is often destructively chaotic even when his instincts are sound. But he is not all wrong, either. The decline of Europe as a force in world affairs and the shift of the axis of world politics to the Indo-Pacific are realities that American foreign policy cannot ignore. The liberal Atlanticist consensus cannot guide American foreign policy going forward, and new ways of thinking and acting will have to be found.
The domestic political circus will go on as it must. But the need to replace the liberal Atlanticist approach with a new foreign-policy framework is a bigger problem than the future of President Trump. One must hope that Democrats and Republicans can find ways to advance this vital debate even as each episode of the Trump Show that airs is more dramatic than the last.
Comments are closed.
