Trump’s foreign policy: Two years of living dangerously by Ian Bond
US President Donald Trump came into office in 2017 with an instinctive approach to foreign policy, and little knowledge. He strongly believed that alliances weakened the US, because allies took more than they gave, and spent less than the US on their defence. He was convinced that free trade enabled America’s trading partners to cheat it, because America imported more than it exported. He disliked international organisations, which he saw as fettering US power, and preferred to deal bilaterally with other nation-states. He respected foreign strongmen (notably Russian President Vladimir Putin, but also Xi Jinping of China and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey) more than other democratic leaders, whom he saw as weak. The last two years have not changed Trump’s view of the world, or reassured US allies. A Trump doctrine of sorts has emerged, particularly in Trump’s own speech to the UN General Assembly in September 2018 and in speeches by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at the German Marshall Fund in Brussels in December 2018 and to the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 22nd 2019.
Image: © NATO
In his UN speech, Trump attacked international organisations, reiterated his opposition to free trade and proclaimed: “We reject the ideology of globalism, and we embrace the doctrine of patriotism”. Pompeo in Brussels attacked the EU, as Trump often does, suggesting that it placed the interests of “bureaucrats in Brussels” before those of member-states and their populations. In Davos he argued that no international
body could stand up for a people as well as their own leaders could. Allies’ anxiety levels increased when media reports in January 2019 claimed that Trump had several times raised the possibility of the US withdrawing from NATO. Trump’s officials say that while some of the principles that have governed international relations in the last 70 years are still valid, others need to be jettisoned. They claim that Trump’s views on international organisations reflect those of ordinary Americans (who do not see how the ‘Western project’ of the postCold War period has helped them) and even ordinary Europeans. Trump is said to be willing to work through international organisations where the US is dominant, but not those where power is distributed among several significant players.