On Monday, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump will return to the White House. The key question is: What comes next? For those who follow U.S. foreign policy, it seems that the only thing predictable about Trump is that he is unpredictable, even a bit of a madman.
That may well be true, but perhaps the best way to anticipate Trump’s future actions is to recognize that he’s a throwback. Or, more accurately, his foreign policy views hark back to a bygone era, one that he seems to want to make relevant, even great, again. In other words, to understand Trump is to recognize that he wants to bring a 19th-century foreign policy into the 21st century.
I am not the only one to note Trump’s preferences for policies more in line with presidents from over a century ago. He’s been explicit in his admiration of William McKinley, who was president from 1897 to 1901. During his first term, some likened Trump to Andrew Jackson, the U.S. president known not only for being an outsider, but also for his forceful ethnic cleansing policies toward Native Americans. Trump appeared to embrace that comparison, with Jackson’s portrait hanging in the Oval Office. Even before he was elected in 2016, observers pointed to how Trump’s worldview seemed more at home in the late 19th or early 20th century.
The core of a 19th-century U.S. foreign policy was to see the U.S. as lacking global interests and global obligations. By contrast, the historian Gorden Levin wrote that U.S. foreign policy during much of the 20th century was largely driven by reactions to World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, which he labeled “the two seminal events with whose endless consequences the foreign relations of the United States have since been largely concerned.”
Stated differently, U.S. foreign policy in the 20th-century was predicated on preventing another massive great power war as well as constraining the influence of any worldview that threatened the global reach of U.S. economic power. U.S. foreign policy in the 19th century viewed neither of those as primary concerns. It wasn’t isolationist, but it also wasn’t internationalist.
But a 19th-century foreign policy should not be confused for what some call the “restraint” view of U.S. foreign policy, namely that the U.S. should pull back from serving as a global police force and allow other nations to take the lead in their respective regions. To see how and why, consider again Trump’s admiration for McKinley.
McKinley had a busy and noteworthy presidency. He pushed for the imposition of tariffs while a member of Congress, a policy tool he continued to embrace as president. He acquired new territories for the U.S. through what he called his “splendid little war” with Spain. He was a gold bug who ran for president on the promise of ensuring “prestige abroad” and “prosperity at home” by keeping the U.S. on the gold standard.
When Trump says that America should be “great,” that includes being a great power. But Trump thinks the U.S. should be a great power in the 19th century sense of the term.
Trump’s preferences echo all of these features of McKinley’s foreign policy. He shares McKinley’s imperialist aspirations in the Western Hemisphere, having asserted his desire to take control of the Panama Canal zone and acquire the island of Greenland. While the overtures toward the Panama Canal are new from him, he put forward the idea of purchasing Greenland during his first term. To be sure, there seem to be sensible reasons for controlling those territories related to national security and safeguarding key shipping lanes. Indeed, the U.S. only gave up control of the canal in 1999, and Trump isn’t the first president to have given consideration to acquiring Greenland. Nevertheless, the eagerness with which Trump is pushing to acquire U.S. control absent an immediate threat or issue prompting the proposal appears more driven by a desire to expand U.S. territory for its own sake.
Similarly, Trump has an expressed preference for large across-the-board tariffs not only as a tool of economic statecraft but as a source of government revenue. Trump has not been shy about his love of tariffs and his equal disdain for imports. But as I wrote recently, the allure of tariffs reflects his confusion of today’s U.S. economy with that of the late 19th century and, even more directly, of the fiscal needs of today’s U.S. government with the much smaller U.S. government of that time.
In addition to tariffs and territorial acquisition, one could add Trump’s views on alternatives to the U.S. dollar to the list of his 19th-century obsessions. While Trump is keen on maintaining the dollar’s status as the global reserve currency, he is also enamored of the idea of developing a strategic Bitcoin reserve to underpin the dollar’s status. This echoes McKinley’s fixation with the gold standard, which he formally established in 1900 after it having been in place informally for several decades, and which fully ended in 1971.
Then there is the issue of immigration. One might initially see Trump’s restrictive views on immigration as going against the argument of him being a 19-century foreign policy president. After all, the U.S. is considered to have had an open immigration policy during the 19th century, especially the late 19th century. But while the U.S. was open to immigration from Europe at that time, immigration from Latin America was rather low until the 20th Century. Additionally, immigration from Asia, and particularly China, was perceived as problematic, leading to restrictive policies such as the Chinese Exclusion Act.
The comparison of Trump to McKinley is particularly apropos, as McKinley, while clearly a nationalist, was not isolationist. He believed in U.S. power and to that end oversaw an expansion of U.S. naval capability after years of decline. It was under his administration that the U.S. began to gain status as a major power, something he embraced. McKinley officially established the “open door” policy with respect to U.S. exports toward China. In that process, he also completed the U.S. annexation of Hawaii to support the expanded role of the U.S. Navy in the Pacific Ocean, joined the intervention of the European powers in the Boxer Rebellion and initiated the creation of the Panama Canal.
But while McKinely wanted the U.S. to maintain an open door, he also wanted the country to have a free hand. As he remarked in his inaugural address, “We have cherished the policy of non-interference with affairs of foreign governments wisely inaugurated by Washington, keeping ourselves free from entanglement, either as allies or foes, content to leave undisturbed with them the settlement of their own domestic concerns.” Of course, he also said that the U.S. should avoid the temptation of territorial aggrandizement, an issue he obviously changed his mind on.
Similar to McKinley, Trump views the U.S. as having a role in the world, and even sees the U.S. as the country best positioned to play the key role in global affairs. When he says that America should be “great,” that includes being a great power. But Trump thinks the U.S. should be a great power in the 19th century sense of the term. This means the U.S. should fill that role on an “as needed” basis. He would prefer flexible ad hoc arrangements over permanent institutions, and he would rather cut a deal that can be renegotiated if circumstances change than feel locked into a long-term commitment.
Trump doesn’t want the U.S. to not engage the world. Instead, he wants the U.S. out of the business of shaping and protecting the world. And that is a view of the U.S. role that would be familiar not just to McKinley, but to many other 19th-century presidents.
Paul Poast is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago and a nonresident fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.