The triumph of the Trump doctrine
IN THE US PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION SEASON of 2016, Peter Navarro, a key international adviser to candidate Donald Trump, set out what a Trump Doctrine would look like in foreign affairs. “Peace through economic and military strength,” would be the policy. It was, wrote Navarro, “a page right out of Ronald Reagan’s playbook”.
Some find Trump’s personality distasteful. Others believe that only an outsider with the thick skin of a New York City property developer could bring real change to American politics. Either way, the time for cartoons is behind us. A measured appraisal of the record is due. In foreign policy, Trump was consistent, coherent, traditional, multilateral and highly successful.
Ronald Reagan’s presidency is the gold standard for American foreign policy since the Second World War. Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama shared the combination of personal weakness and American self-abnegation that gave the world the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and Isis in 2014. Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush will retain their current judgment by history, as middling pragmatists. When George W. Bush left office in 2009, Iraq — his main foreign policy legacy — was on the path to significant success as a stable-enough American ally at peace with its neighbours, gushing cheap oil and embracing the ballot box.
From the first President Bush onward, every one of Trump’s predecessors handled China exactly wrong. Regardless of party, they embraced the absurdity that a strong and rising communist China would be a “responsible stakeholder”, to use the George W. Bush administration’s expression when the People’s Republic was ushered into the World Trade Organisation in 2001, in a liberal world order. This wishful thinking, visibly ridiculous since the Tiananmen massacre and operating everywhere against the interests of the free world, was the greatest strategic error by the Western democracies since the 1930s.
If peace-through-strength was Trump’s strategic doctrine, America First was the strategy itself. It was successful because America is exceptional.
for judging the success or failure of a foreign poli-cy. Some countries are so important that distinctions between the national and the global interest are
