The Biden Administration is stuck with 1970s assumptions, prioritizing facing down Russia and uncritical support of whatever Israeli policy is being pursued at the moment. (1) The formal strategic approach of the US since the Obama Administration has been to prioritize balancing against China’s rising influence:
Originally called a “return to the Asia-Pacific”, the [Obama foreign policy] strategy was later rephrased as a “strategic pivot” and finally a “rebalancing”. Despite the rhetorical changes, its intent remains consistent —to contain the rise of China. The strategy was first introduced by then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the ASEAN Regional Forum held in Hanoi on July 23, 2010, which outraged China because there was no prior consultation with it. The then foreign minister of China, Yang Jiechi, demanded an adjournment, followed by a one-hour rebuke to Hillary. (2)
But the political focus in the US right now is much more on the Ukraine situation - the press isn’t yet calling it a “quagmire,” the description so often used for the Vietnam War - and on the stunningly brutal Israeli war on the Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip, with mass starvation being deliberately imposed on the ghetto that Gaza is.
There is a partisan divide over the Russia-Ukraine War. The Republicans are opposed to continued military aid to Ukraine, basically because they prefer a pro-Russian policy in that case. (3) But at the moment, the US and NATO options are severely limited by what appears to be a protracted stalemate at the moment. The economic sanctions against Russia haven’t proven to be the body blow against the Russian economy its advocates hoped. Daniel Fried, who was once the State Department Coordinator for Sanctions, tried to be upbeat on their effectiveness in a December 2023 article. But even he had to describe the effects as underwhelming:
These sanctions had bite but they are wearing off as Russia adjusts and learns to evade them. The Russian economy has started to grow again, amid ramped up military spending that has reached 10% of GDP, compared with 3-4% before the full-scale invasion. There are a lot of reports of goods, including banned ones, making their way to Russia via third countries (for example, there have been huge jumps in German exports to Kyrgyzstan, with a lot of those products moving swiftly to Russia). And Russia is using a “shadow fleet” of oil tankers and fraudulent bookkeeping to undermine the oil price cap.
While the biggest Russian banks have been cut off from the international financial system, especially the SWIFT clearing mechanism, smaller ones and Gasprombank, the big energy bank, remain in the international SWIFT system. This has weakened the financial pressure. (4)The effectively unconditional support of Netanyahu’s Gaza war is appalling on many levels. And the Biden Administration’s regular public claims that it is urging restraint on the Israeli government are hardly credible at this point. Only when Biden stops all or most military aid to Netanyahu’s government will anyone be able to take those claims seriously.
In general, criticism of the current US policies is coming almost exclusively from within the Democratic Party. Trump has given us no reason to think he would depart from the support for Netanyahu’s policies that the Christian Zionists in the Republican Party demand:
US President Donald Trump said Monday that his 2017 decision to move the US embassy to Jerusalem and recognize the city as the capital of Israel was done for evangelical Christians.
“And we moved the capital of Israel to Jerusalem,” Trump said at a rally held at an airport in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, apparently referring to his decision to move the embassy from Tel Aviv. “That’s for the evangelicals.”
Jerusalem has been Israel’s capital since its founding in 1948, although much of the international community does not recognize it as under the initial UN Partition Plan, Jerusalem was to be an international city.
“You know, it’s amazing with that — the evangelicals are more excited by that than Jewish people,” he said to cheers from the crowd. “That’s right, it’s incredible.” (5)
I’ve never taken Trump’s claims to have a restrained foreign policy seriously. Because to the extent that he has a general foreign policy perspective, its Old Right Isolationism. William Hawkins back in 1991, when Republican interventionists in both parties were fretting about Pat Buchanan’s “paleo-conservatism” that used isolationist rhetoric, “it is the America First movement led by Herbert Hoover, Robert Taft, and Charles Lindbergh that the Old Right has in mind as a model.” (6)
Hoover himself wrote a long manuscript he completed in providing an Old Right foreign policy view, which was first published in 2011. (7) Ron Radosh profiled several major rightwing isolationist figures (more-or-less sympathetically) in Prophets on the Right: Profiles of Conservative Critics of American Globalism (1975).
The core of this Old Right view is hardcore nationalism and militarism, at least in its more influential and coherent forms. Trump's former lawyer and most important political mentor, former Joe McCarthy senior staffer Roy Cohn, may have contributed to this orientation on Trump's part. Although there were various other sources available.
It’s hard to see how Trump’s four years as President contributed to the prospects for peace. Despite the Trumpistas’ current criticism of Ukraine aid, the sale of “non-defensive” weapons to Ukraine came during his Administration. Trump failed to reach an nuclear-arms-control agreement with North Korea, despite the “love letters” he bragged about receiving from North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. He did nothing to advance any constructive peace process for Israel-Palestine, and in fact his policy encouraged Israel’s aggressive and illegal conduct toward the Palestinians. He flushed the JCPOA nuclear-arms-control agreement with Iran, a decision that supported a key foreign-policy goal of Bibi Netanyahu’s. And his targeted assassination of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani - in Iraq, supposedly on friendly terms with the US - was a reckless act that was the opposite of a peace-oriented foreign policy. (8)
If Trump has any coherent idea of foreign policy or any meaningful vision of what he want US foreign policy to be, he is keeping it well concealed. Not unlike Richard Nixon’s 1968 still-not-yet-revealed secret plan to end the Vietnam War.
Trump is also making plans for more wars and domestic militarization if he becomes President again.
Trump stood up the Space Force. He threatened military force against North Korea. He sent thousands of active-duty troops to the U.S. border with Mexico, augmenting National Guard units there. He diverted billions of dollars of Pentagon funding to help build his border wall.This is who Roy Cohn’s political protégé Donald Trump is.
He floated other ideas, too—shooting civilian protestors, for instance, which he asked then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper about, according to Esper’s memoir. Reporting from The New Yorker and other outlets has detailed how Esper, Milley, and other officials intervened to prevent the military from being overtly politicized in the run-up to the 2020 election and Jan. 6. In January 2021, all 10 former living defense secretaries wrote a public letter urging the peaceful transfer of power amid Trump’s false insistence that the election was stolen. ...
In a policy video released in December, Trump said that, as president, he would declare drug cartels “foreign terrorist organizations” and order the defense department to use “Special Forces, cyber warfare, and other overt and covert actions to inflict maximum damage on cartel leadership, infrastructure, and operations.”
Last spring, Rolling Stone reported that Trump had asked advisers for military options to “attack Mexico” if he’s reelected. One policy paper from The Center for Renewing America, a think tank staffed by Trump administration veterans, lays out justifications for “waging war” on drug cartels. Esper, the former defense secretary, also revealed that Trump had asked about the possibility of launching missiles into Mexico to target drug labs during his first term. (9)
Notes:
(1) To be fair, despite the limitations of the Camp David Accords, Democratic President Jimmy Carter, he understood that the US needed to play an active role to defuse the potential for war in the Middle East. Jimmy Carter himself was the original author of the current Britannica Online entry on the agreement. <https://www.britannica.com/event/Camp-David-Accords>(Accessed: 2024-22-02).
(1) To be fair, despite the limitations of the Camp David Accords, Democratic President Jimmy Carter, he understood that the US needed to play an active role to defuse the potential for war in the Middle East. Jimmy Carter himself was the original author of the current Britannica Online entry on the agreement. <https://www.britannica.com/event/Camp-David-Accords>
(2) Canrong, Jin (2024): How America's relationship with China changed under Obama. World Economic Forum 12/14/2016.
(3) There’s nothing inherently wrong with pursuing a “pro-Russia” policy. Because all of foreign policy involves choosing what countries to favor or oppose on particular issues. Whether a pro-Russia or pro-any-other-country is good or bad depends on the actual policy and its context in the broader US policy. The Democrats aren’t doing themselves a favor by indulging in simplistic Russia-Russia-Russia scare talk. The talking heads on MSNBC think it’s great. But it also adds a lot of fog to the already-foggy foreign policy debates.
(4) Fried, Daniel (2024): How the West Can Make Russian Sanctions Bite Again. Time 12/13/2023.
(5) Trump says he moved US embassy to Jerusalem ‘for the evangelicals’. Times of Israel 08/18/2020. <https://www.timesofisrael.com/trump-says-he-moved-us-embassy-to-jerusalem-for-the-evangelicals/>
(6) Hawkins, William (1991): Isolationism, Properly Understood. The National Interest 24:1991, 61-66. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/42894747>
(7) Hoover, Herbert (2011): Freedom Betrayed : Herbert Hoover's Secret History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath. Stanford: Hoover Institute Press.
(8) Lee, Carol & Kube, Courtney (2020): Trump authorized Soleimani's killing 7 months ago, with conditions. NBC News 01/13/2020.
(9) Kehrt, Sonner (2024): Trump Sketches Future of US Military—Hunting Cartels, Quelling Unrest, and Immigrant Detention Camps. The War Horse 02/15/2024. <https://thewarhorse.org/trump-hints-at-new-military-policies-if-he-wins-reelection/>
Also in: Trump's vision for the military: hunting cartels, patrolling US cities, quelling dissent. Defense One 02/21/2024.
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