America’s Long Goodbye
The Real Crisis of the Trump Era
In the end, 2018 was not the year of U.S. foreign policy apocalypse. Normally, this would not be a cause for celebration. But given the anxiety about President Donald Trump and what his administration might do—pull out of NATO, start a war with Iran or North Korea—it was something to be grateful for. In fact, Trump’s first two years in office have been marked by a surprising degree of stability. The president has proved himself to be what many critics have long accused him of being: belligerent, bullying, impatient, irresponsible, intellectually lazy, short-tempered, and self-obsessed. Remarkably, however, those shortcomings have not yet translated into obvious disaster.
But the surface-level calm of the last two years should not distract from a building crisis of U.S. foreign policy, of which Trump is both a symptom and a cause. The president has outlined a deeply misguided foreign policy vision that is distrustful of U.S. allies, scornful of international institutions, and indifferent, if not downright hostile, to the liberal international order that the United States has sustained for nearly eight decades. The real tragedy, however, is not that the president has brought this flawed vision to the fore; it is that his is merely one mangled interpretation of what is rapidly emerging as a new consensus on the left and the right: that the United States should accept a more modest role in world affairs.
One can and should hope that the forces that have constrained Trump so far will continue to limit the damage of his remaining years in office, but the push for a U.S. retreat from the world did not begin with the president and will not end with his exit. The crisis of the United States’ post–Cold War foreign policy has been a long time in the making, and it will last beyond Trump.
LIVING DANGEROUSLY
Although the worst has not come to pass, the president’s foreign policy has been curious and in some ways disturbing. On trade, his administration blew up the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), only to replace it with the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which includes somewhat better terms for American dairy farmers but mostly mirrors the original deal. What is more serious, Trump began a steadily mounting trade war with China while intensifying U.S. complaints about intellectual property theft, all in the context of increasingly aggressive interactions between Chinese forces and U.S. warships in the South China Sea. Such moves are risky, but they have not yet come back to bite him.
Trump’s diplomacy with U.S. rivals has been similarly erratic, but here, too, the damage so far has been limited. On North Korea, Trump dialed back his initial threats to unleash “fire and fury” and abruptly shifted toward placating the regime. He suspended U.S.–South Korean joint military exercises, met with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, and declared at a September 2018 rally that he and Kim “fell in love.” (These actions do not appear to have had any real effect on the North Korean nuclear program, however.) On Iran, Trump reversed the Obama administration’s more accommodating policy, pulling out of the nuclear deal with the country in May 2018 and hitting Tehran with a barrage of financial sanctions throughout the summer and fall. And on Russia, the government has continued with a confrontational policy despite the president’s friendly rhetoric.
U.S. relations with some allies, especially those in Europe, have at times been strained, but those with others have continued unimpaired. The United States has grown closer to India and strengthened relations with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The right-wing government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could not be happier with the Trump administration, which moved the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, cut funding to Palestinian charities, and looked the other way as Israel denied entry to young Americans affiliated with the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement. And Japan, whose prime minister, Shinzo Abe, has developed a friendly personal relationship with Trump, has managed, for now, to avoid the president’s wrath.
The United States’ wars have also continued. U.S. campaigns against the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Islamic State (or ISIS) in Iraq and Syria, and Islamist movements in Africa carry on apace, with little change from the Obama administration. In April 2018, when asked what he wanted to do with U.S. troops in Syria, Trump said, “I want to get out,” but then he reversed course, and today over 2,000 U.S. soldiers remain in the country, with an eye toward countering Iranian influence.
There is an idea behind Trump’s foreign policy (“America first”) but not a concept of geopolitics—a plan or set of priorities based on calculation and reflection. Under his leadership, the United States has picked fights not only with China and Russia but also with allies such as Canada, Mexico, and the EU. His hopes of denuclearizing North Korea and resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict strike most observers as quixotic. His policy seems driven by sporadic fits of belligerence or enthusiasm, unrelated to any coherent set of objectives or methods for achieving them. Yet on many questions of substance, the Trump administration, erratic though it is, has kept U.S. foreign policy more or less intact.
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