Opinion | Don’t Listen to Pompeo, O’Brien and McMaster. Trump’s Foreign Policy Was a Failure.
In this consequential election year, it’s important to remember the actual results of Trump’s actual decisions.
Donald Trump's presidency did real damage to America’s international economic, diplomatic and security interests, writes P. Michael McKinley. | Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Opinion by P. Michael McKinley
09/23/2024
P. Michael McKinley served for 37 years in the U.S. Foreign Service, including four stints as ambassador in Peru, Colombia, Afghanistan and Brazil and as a senior adviser to former Secretary of State Michael Pompeo.
Former officials of the Trump presidency appear to be on a campaign to whitewash his administration’s foreign policy record.
In recent weeks and months, there’s been a flood of articles and interviews from them that present versions of the same argument: Donald Trump’s foreign policy legacy is better than you think. The most prominent are by Robert O’Brien, Trump’s last national security adviser, and his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, but there have been others including by former U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Elbridge Colby and former national security adviser H.R. McMaster.
The common purpose appears to be twofold: reassure a broader audience that a second Trump presidency would be more mainstream than many fear, and, by extension, to present his first administration as one of successes which restored American leadership on the international stage.
Having served almost three years in the Trump administration as ambassador and senior adviser to the secretary of State, I can say that both contentions are wrong.
The promise is that a now-experienced “Trump the Realist” will be even better for America. O’Brien, using Orwellian doublespeak, suggests we could see “a Trumpian restoration of peace through strength” and seeks to recast in glowing terms a dark period for American foreign policy that did lasting damage to global stability and America’s leadership in it. McMaster, while somewhat more critical than the others, praises Trump’s “long-overdue correctives to a number of unwise policies,” which was hard to argue at the time and even less so now.
O’Brien and the others are having a good run in mainstream outlets. Commentators like Eliot A. Cohen, Stephen Walt, and Matt Kroenig have also argued that concerns about a possible second Trump administration’s foreign policy are exaggerated. Outreach to the former president by international leaders, from Viktor Orbán to Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and the strong diplomatic presence on the Republican National Convention floor, conveys the impression that a second Trump term could be relatively conventional.
But it’s important to remember the reality of what Trump’s foreign policy actually was and actually did. And to recognize that nothing in the interim has changed for the better in his worldview. In a vastly more complex global landscape than when he was first president, a second Trump term could do real harm to America’s international economic, diplomatic and security interests.
At least initially, the Trump administration’s approach to foreign policy wasn’t just the product of an unorthodox president, it was also a response to an unsettled period of American history. As I have written elsewhere, by the time he was elected in 2016, the U.S. had spent 15 years consumed by the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the country was also undergoing significant political, economic and social polarization exacerbated by the lingering effects of the 2008 recession. Globally, U.S. dominance was being challenged by emerging middle powers as well as Russia and China.
Trump did have some successes on a number of fronts: burden-sharing improved in alliances, our involvement in the conflicts of the Middle East was significantly reduced, and the Doha agreement with the Taliban provided an exit strategy for the U.S. from Afghanistan. His policies on China had bipartisan support and the agreement between the U.S. and Mexico slowed migration flows into the United States. Trade agreements with Mexico, Canada, and South Korea were updated to reflect the transformation of the global economy. The diplomatic breakthrough of the Abraham Accords, between Israel and Arab states, lowered tensions in the Middle East, and the ISIS Caliphate was eliminated.
On the other side of the ledger, however, there were the serious negative consequences of the policies the Trump administration pursued.
Then-President Donald Trump's decision to drop the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement shook the confidence of our East Asian allies and reduced our influence in the region, McKinley writes. | Andy Wong/AP
On the economic front, the decision to drop the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, which was the strategic counterweight to China’s expansion in the Asia-Pacific region, shook the confidence of our East Asian allies and reduced our influence in the region; the TPP’s successor excludes the United States as does the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), which includes East Asia, Australia — and China. It is not surprising that Chinese exports to the region have soared. Trade frictions with some of our closest partners arose over the arbitrary imposition of tariffs. Negotiations on a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with the European Union came to an end as concerns about protectionist America deepened, concerns which are very much alive about a second Trump presidency.
Trump administration policies also undermined our strategic rationale for working inside broader security collectives. This weakened commitments to the alliances that had kept the United States secure. Trump’s transactional approach to NATO and open questioning of the alliance’s Article 5 commitment to mutual defense lessened faith in America’s steadfastness. In East Asia, Trump’s insistence on greater burden-sharing with South Korea and Japan pushed the bilateral relationships near the breaking point. Allied concerns have been resurrected by the prospect of a second Trump administration.
The list goes on. A complex relationship with Mexico was reduced to one issue: immigration. Trump’s exploitation of Ukraine for domestic political gain in the U.S., and pulling out of arms control agreements with Russia, may have helped give Putin the impression that there would be no consequences for an invasion of Ukraine — which he subsequently launched. Abandoning the nuclear agreement with Iran in 2018 corroded any leverage the U.S. might have in Tehran: Iran is now considerably closer to building a bomb and has meddled with ever-greater intensity in Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen. In Afghanistan, Trump’s order to accelerate the complete withdrawal of all U.S. forces after he lost the 2020 election was not implemented by his military commanders. But it surprised allies, and almost certainly emboldened the Taliban as they prepared to take Kabul in 2021. And while the Abraham Accords were a game changer for Israel’s diplomatic ties in the broader Middle East, they did not directly address the plight of Palestinians, raising concerns about the future of the two-state solution, the cornerstone of U.S. policy on the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
Key allies in Europe and East Asia began to re-think whether close ties with the U.S. could be sustained and, with the possibility of Trump’s reelection, are adopting a wait-and-see approach. African and Latin American nations increasingly realized they factored even less in American foreign policy calculations than they had in prior administrations. The withdrawals from multilateral institutions diminished U.S. influence on climate change, human rights, nuclear proliferation, trade, and in mobilizing a response to Covid-19. Jan. 6 cast doubts on America’s status as the standard-bearer for world democracy.
The Jan. 6 insurrection cast doubts on America’s status as the standard-bearer for world democracy, McKinley writes. | Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP
At the end of his four years in office, Trump had frayed both America’s alliances and the international rules-based order that was still largely in place when he took office. Rather than look to the U.S. as the ultimate arbiter of a fairer global order, Washington was now seen by many countries as another great power to be balanced against its rivals. And, critically, America’s strategic adversaries saw opportunities they could now exploit.
In this context, to speak of Trump in the same vein as George Washington, Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, as O’Brien does, seems absurd. O’Brien tries to argue that Russia did not invade Ukraine because of Trump; that Iran did not attack Israel because of Trump; that North Korea did not test nuclear weapons because of Trump. O’Brien suggests that China, Russia, Iran, and Mexican cartels only became serious concerns and a threat because of Biden’s weaknesses. To pretend these were not challenges before and during the Trump years seems a fanciful interpretation of what actually happened. For his part, McMaster offers a vigorous defense of Trump’s policy acumen. It doesn’t land.
Pompeo takes a different approach, stating, like O’Brien, that Trump “could reestablish peace through strength.” His suggestions for a second Trump administration, however, are largely already in place under Biden. He proposes to “rebuild ties with Saudi Arabia and work together against Iran” — efforts that are already well underway. He advocates imposing “real sanctions on Russia” — which is already subject to the broadest set ever levied on a major economy. He wants to “revitalize NATO” — which the less said about the better, given the undermining of the alliance under Trump. Pompeo also advances “a $500 billion lend-lease program for Ukraine” — when Trump’s vice presidential pick and surrogates like retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg have argued against assistance for Kyiv.
Former U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer proposes to build on Trump’s first administration by weakening the dollar and imposing a 10 percent tariff on all imports into the U.S., which could have serious ramifications for both the American and global economies, McKinley writes. | Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times via AP
On the economy, Lighthizer proposes to build on Trump’s first administration by weakening the dollar and imposing a 10 percent tariff on all imports into the United States, which could have serious ramifications for both the American and global economies. On China, Trump’s advocates, including O’Brien and former State Department special representative Dan Negrea, pocket Biden’s already robust policies on China, and propose, among other things, cutting off all commercial ties with China, preparing for war in the Taiwan Strait, pursuing regime change in China and resuming nuclear tests.
Given the record of his first term, there is no need for a crystal ball to discern what a reelected President Trump’s priorities would be. He would return to the destructive, nationalist, inward-looking, transactional policy of his first administration — except he is far readier now to pursue it. A second Trump administration would also seek to completely politicize the security and foreign affairs agencies and departments, a process that was well underway in the time I served as senior adviser to Pompeo.
To be fair, O’Brien and company may genuinely believe the former president they served achieved great things — but we can’t let them fool the rest of us in this most consequential of presidential election years.