But
as the hegemon’s dominance begins to fade, so, too, does this natural
harmony of interests. Rising powers become increasingly unhappy with
their global standing, with the international order’s rules and norms,
and with the interests and values the order promotes. Community
interests cease to overshadow individual ones. And as revisionist states
grow in power, they develop the capacity to realize their aims. In the
2002 report, for example, the Bush administration depicted China as a
team player, one that was “discovering that economic freedom is the only
source of national wealth.” But by 2017, the U.S. National Security
Strategy declared that China’s “integration into the post-war
international order” was a failure, labeling China a “revisionist” power
that wants to “shape a world antithetical to U.S. values and
interests.”
Rising challengers are not the only revisionists: as
the hegemon declines, it also becomes frustrated with the existing
order. Many of the deals it made at the peak of its power no longer make
sense. For example, U.S. policymakers from across the ideological and
partisan spectrum have become frustrated with the transatlantic
partnership. In the original bargain struck after World War II,
Washington provided security to its European allies and vital economic
assistance to their struggling postwar economies. In exchange, they
mostly supported Washington during the Cold War with Moscow and enabled
the United States to project power over the European continent. But once
the Soviet Union dissolved and Europe became rich, it no longer made
any sense for the United States to shoulder more than 70 percent of
NATO’s defense expenditure. The alliance ceased to have a clear raison
d’être.
It is, therefore, not surprising that many Americans are
turning away from presidential candidates who embrace a muscular,
expansive foreign policy. They see the compelling structural reasons to
demand a shift. And so many of them have embraced a candidate who has
called for global restraint, retrenchment, and narrow self-interest:
Donald Trump.
During his first term as president, Trump proved
that he was truly unique among modern U.S. leaders. Unlike any president
before him in the post-1945 era, he was skeptical of treaties and
alliances, preferring competition to cooperation. He defined the
national interest to exclude things such as the spread of liberal values
and military or humanitarian interventions. He did not view the United States
as a divine intervener for the mistreated abroad. Instead, he shifted
Washington’s focus to great-power competition and to regaining the
United States’ global power advantages. He was, in other words, a true
realist: someone who avoids idealistic and ideological views of global
affairs in favor of power politics.
In Trump’s first term, these
realist impulses were muted and sometimes stopped by hawkish national
security staffers who did not share his vision. But having learned that
personnel is policy, Trump will not make this mistake again. His next
administration will, instead, result in perhaps the most restrained U.S.
foreign policy in modern history.
REALITY CHECK
The
Republican Party is having an intense debate about international
relations. The party’s traditional establishment is made up of
neoconservatives and primacists who want the United States to exercise
its power around the world and use its military capabilities to achieve
many ends. For example, they support massive, continued U.S. aid to
Ukraine as a means of sticking it to Russia and have wholeheartedly
embraced the Biden administration’s framing of military support for
Ukraine as a contest between democracy and autocracy. Trump and his
allies, on the other hand, do not support more aid to Ukraine. They do
not see geopolitics as a grand ideological contest. And unlike
neoconservatives, they have a pronounced preference for U.S. allies
paying for their own security. In February, for example, Trump declared
that he would let Russia have its way with any European country that
does not spend at least two percent of its GDP on its own defense. “If
we don’t pay and we’re attacked by Russia, will you protect us?” Trump
recounted a NATO country’s leader asking him. “No, I would not protect
you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want.
You gotta pay. You gotta pay your bills.”
The traditional
Republican establishment still retains substantial power. The party’s
Senate leadership, for instance, is dominated by neoconservatives.
Slowly but surely, however, the Trumpist camp is winning. It is doing
so, most obviously, in primaries, where Trump and Trump-endorsed
candidates continue to prevail. But polling suggests that Trumpist
realism is also winning the hearts and minds of conservative voters. In a
recent poll by the Chicago Council on World Affairs, 53 percent of
Republicans answered “stay out” to the question “Do you think it will be
best for the future of the country if we take an active part in world
affairs or if we stay out of world affairs?” A similar number—55
percent—said the costs outweigh the benefits of maintaining the United
States’ role in the world.
To most foreign policy elites, who view
U.S. power as a normative good, this trend appears dreadful. But the
former president’s “America first” agenda is an intellectually
defensible, fundamentally realist program that seeks to ascertain and
act on the United States’ national interests rather than the interests
of others. It is born of an inescapable premise: the United States no
longer has the power it once did and is spreading itself too thin. It
needs to sort its essential national interests from desirable ones. It
must devolve more responsibility to its wealthy allies. It must stop
trying to be everywhere and do everything.
In his first term,
Trump’s realist instincts were frequently thwarted by his senior
national security advisers. But the former president’s inclination for
restraint nonetheless shaped his policies. Trump avoided new military
entanglements, began extricating the United States from its 20-year
occupation of Afghanistan, and engaged adversarial states such as China,
North Korea, and Russia in ways that lessened the possibility of
conflict. He shifted the burden of paying for mutual defense to allies
and away from American taxpayers. He talked tough as a means of
pressuring other leaders and appeasing his domestic base. But he never
acted like a neoconservative primacist. Even when it came to Iran, the
country toward which he was most belligerent, Trump always pulled back
from the brink of using significant military force.
BREAKING FREE
In
his second term, Trump’s realist instincts would find fuller
_expression_. Trump will not completely turn Washington’s back to the
world (contrary to the claims of his opponents). But he will likely
withdraw from at least some current U.S. commitments in the greater
Middle East. He will surely demand that wealthy allies in Asia and
Europe pay for more of their security. And he will likely focus most of
his attention on Beijing, concentrating on ways to outcompete China
while avoiding military conflict and a new cold war.
Trump and his
allies have also talked about the need to become less dependent on
foreign sources of energy; they predict greater self-sufficiency would
lead to U.S. job growth and decreased energy costs for American
consumers. As president, Trump would likely follow through on this
rhetoric by eliminating many current regulations in the energy sector,
thereby making it easier for domestic oil and gas producers to drill.
Critically, such a policy would make the Persian Gulf much less
important to Washington. Over the last 50 years, every U.S. presidential
administration has been forced by circumstances to spend a
disproportionate amount of time, attention, and resources on the Middle
East—in no small part to ensure the flow of oil. A United States that no
longer needs to do so would be freed from having to care very much
about Iranian-Saudi squabbles and would no longer need to maintain a
significant number of U.S. troops in the Persian Gulf region. As the
Biden administration’s experiences have shown, U.S. troops spread out
across dozens of bases in Iraq and Syria are at risk of being attacked
by Iran and its proxies.
The former president, of course, would
maintain his belligerent rhetoric toward Washington’s adversaries,
criticizing their depredations and acts of aggression. Such talk can be
useful in reminding the rest of the world that the United States does
not share many values with countries such as China, Iran, Russia, or
even some U.S. allies, including Saudi Arabia—and that even a more
transactional, realist United States would not stoop to the level of
those countries. But Trump should not talk the United States into a new
cold war with China or a hot war with regional competitors such as Iran.
The Trump administration must hold other states accountable and extract
the very best deals it can for the United States. But military conflict
or prolonged periods of hostility are in no one’s best interest.
Trump,
thankfully, has an impressive track record at avoiding the use of U.S.
military force. This is not because he is more of a humanitarian than
his predecessors but because he views world politics more in geoeconomic
terms than geostrategic ones, and so he tries to conduct conflict via
economic rather than military means. “I want to invade, if I have to,
economically,” Trump said in 2019, when talking about Iran and its
nuclear program. “We have tremendous power economically. If I can solve
things economically, that’s the way I want it.”
This sentiment is
deeply held by the former president. As far back as 2015, when all of
Washington was under the influence of unfettered free-trade shibboleths,
Trump warned about the dangers of economic dependencies, built up over
decades of liberalization, that could be exploited for geopolitical
leverage. (The United States relies, for example, on foreign countries
for energy, medical equipment, semiconductors, and critical minerals.)
He also emphasized the enormous power wielded by the United States in
the forms of tariffs, sanctions, access to the dollar, and control over
global economic networks. Once in office, he wielded American economic
power, typically seen as a way to entice others to join the multilateral
free-trading system, as a stick to punish those who suckered Washington
during the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century. “We
are righting the wrongs of the past and delivering a future of economic
justice and security for American workers, farmers, and families,” Trump
declared at the signing of the interim trade deal with China. “It
should have happened 25 years ago.”
THE WEARY TITAN
As
a conservative realist, Trump should be clearheaded about what really
matters to Washington and avoid steps that might provoke military
confrontation. Whenever possible, he should delegate responsibility for
global problems to U.S. allies, leaving the United States to focus only
on what is truly necessary for the American national interest.
Trump
can start by focusing on China. Securing a relationship with Beijing
that ensures American prosperity and does not increase the likelihood of
war may be the supreme challenge facing the United States. Beijing and
Washington are contesting global economic and political leadership, and
there are multiple flash points between them. But none of these should
lead to conflict. The primary point of military contention—the fate of Taiwan—does
not require U.S. military intervention. The United States ought to arm
the island so it can deter and hopefully defeat a Chinese invasion. But
Taiwan is not a U.S. ally, and so Washington should not risk war with
China to outright defend it.
In other areas, Trump can constrain China
by relying, as he usually does, on trade restrictions. The Trump
administration’s innovative use of export controls on cutting-edge
technology has become the new tool of choice for twenty-first-century
power politics. Unlike traditional balancing, which amasses power
through arms and allies to offset a target’s military power, Trump’s
strategy seeks to prevent, not counter, the further rise of a peer
competitor. In the coming years, both the United States and Europe will
want to ensure their firms avoid sharing certain technologies with
Beijing and rely on non-Chinese suppliers for critical sectors, such as
telecommunications and infrastructure.
Trump has an impressive track record at avoiding the use of U.S. military force.
But
Washington can constrain China without launching a full-blown trade
war, and so it should avoid issuing new tariffs, except in direct
response to Chinese trade restrictions against American goods. U.S.
officials should also avoid belligerent military initiatives that would
risk an actual war between the two states. And in the event the
countries do find themselves at risk of a hot conflict, the United
States should push a coalition of Indo-Pacific countries, including
Australia, India, Japan, South Korea, and Vietnam—whose aggregate power
roughly matches that of China—to take the lead in containing Beijing.
With
other U.S. adversaries, Washington should be even less involved. Russia
may be militarily dangerous, but it is not an existential threat to the
United States—a fact that its middling performance in Ukraine has made
clear. It therefore makes no sense for Washington to continue writing
blank checks to Kyiv, especially when Ukraine’s European neighbors are
so rich. The United States should apply significant pressure to these
countries to start paying for Ukraine’s defense, especially given that
they are the states actually threatened by Moscow. Washington should,
similarly, pressure South Korea to assume leadership in containing its
poor, northern neighbor. The United States should even push its Arab
partners and Israel to work together to hold Iran in check, so that
Washington can withdraw most of its own forces from the Middle East.
The
reality is that, after almost 80 years of U.S. leadership, the world
has entered a transition phase from hegemonic order to a restored
balance of power. Like all prior balance-of-power systems, this one will
feature global dissent, disharmony, and great-power competition. Today,
such dissent most obviously comes from China, Iran, North Korea, and
Russia. Yet disruption of global stability during this transition phase
comes not only from rising challengers but also from the hegemon itself.
To forestall decline, the dominant power undermines its own system,
which it begins to see as a drain. It grows increasingly unwilling to
accept subsidizing the security of allies and the well-being of the
world in general. It increasingly views trade policy not in terms of
price optimization, efficiency, and corporate profits but in terms of
whether it makes the country weaker or stronger, whether it helps the
working class find and maintain good-paying jobs, whether it builds or
destroys communities, and whether it causes trade surpluses or deficits.
A hegemon in decline no longer believes that trade is free.
The
United States has become exactly this type of weary titan, less able to
honor external commitments and less interested in doing so, too. This
explains the rise of Trump and his appeal to his followers, who disdain
what they see as a corrupt governing class that puts the world’s
well-being above their own country’s interests. It explains why his rise
coincides with the rise of Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Both men, though they have entirely different personalities, pledged to
make their countries great again by upending the liberal world order.
This should alert analysts to the fact that neither is responsible for
the system’s demise. Instead, there are greater structural factors at
work. Trump may still shock many in Washington, and he no doubt has a
divisive personality. But his foreign policies are the predictable
product of deeply impersonal forces.