Trump Is Making American Foreign Policy Racist Again
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When President Donald Trump’s administration issued its National Security Strategy document late last week, one phrase in particular caught many people’s attention: “civilizational erasure.” Specifically, with regard to Europe, the document warned that “migration policies that are transforming the continent” are part of a host of trends that threaten to render it “unrecognizable in 20 years or less.”
Such a discussion seemed misplaced in a document ostensibly focused on U.S. national security. But it was at least internally consistent in two ways. First, among the introductory laundry list of what the Trump administration wants to achieve with its strategy was “the restoration and reinvigoration of American spiritual and cultural health, without which long-term security is impossible.” And the criticism of Europe’s migration policies dovetailed with what the Trump NSS identified as the “primary element of national security,” namely “border security” and the need to end the “era of mass migration.”
Such phrasing already led Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institution to describe the NSS as “a profoundly racist document.” But then this week, in a speech ostensibly aimed at touting the success of his economic policies, Trump himself veered off-script and into an anti-immigration tirade laden not solely with xenophobic sentiment, but racist animosity. First, he blamed U.S. economic troubles in large part on refugees from the “Third World,” characterizing their countries as “hellholes” that are “filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime.” He then recounted and confirmed an incident reported during his first term that he denied at the time, in which he described Haiti and the nations of Africa as “shithole countries,” and wondered why the United States didn’t instead promote immigration “from Norway, Sweden, Denmark” and other white-majority states.
Of course, none of this is new for Trump, who built his political career on promoting a conspiracy theory that the country’s first Black president wasn’t born in the U.S. He made a mantra out of “Build the Wall” during his first presidential campaign, claiming that a barrier on the U.S. southern border was necessary to keep out what he characterized as “rapists” from Mexico. He then turned his anti-immigration stance into a core element of his first presidency and has made mass deportations of undocumented immigrants the central policy of his second administration. But if it wasn’t before, it is now clear that race, racial differences and even white supremacy inform Trump’s worldview and therefore the policies of his administration.
But Trump is not the first U.S. president, let alone the first U.S. foreign policy official, to allow such views to influence his foreign policy decisions. This is not solely because he is a throwback to American presidents of the 19th century, a time when hierarchical views of racial differences underscored the operation of colonialism and justified earlier practices such as slavery. Instead, it is because race has long played a fundamental role in shaping modern international politics.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the eminent Black American sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois famously observed that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” He meant this not only as a challenge within the United States, but globally. A few years later, amid what was then known as “the Great War,” Du Bois noted that while the death and destruction unfolding in Europe was shocking to much of the white world, what he called the “dark world” already knew the horrors of modern industrial war due to the colonial aggressions those same European nations had carried out in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
Trump’s racist remarks are disturbing. But the use of such language and the influence of such ideas in global politics is far from surprising.
Du Bois was of course writing during the peak years of European colonialism, a force that he identified as a key cause of World War I itself. It was a time when the world’s dominant power, the British Empire, was explicitly structured in terms of racial hierarchy, with the central metropole being overwhelmingly white Britain; the autonomous “Dominions” being majority-white Australia, New Zealand, Canada and white-minority-ruled South Africa; and the remaining colonial possessions, from India to the “West Indies,” being the nonwhite subjects of the crown. It was also a time when U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, in weighing whether to enter or stay out of the war raging in Europe, declared to his Cabinet, “We are the only one of the great White nations that is free from war today, and it would be a crime against civilization for us to go in.”
Because Du Bois was writing during the early 20th century, it is understandable to think that such views were limited to that earlier time. One might be tempted, for instance, to simply dismiss racial views of world politics as outdated ideas found in now-obscure texts like eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard’s treatise from 1920, “The Rising Tide of Color: The Threat Against White World Supremacy.”
But that would be a mistake. Race and racism continued to play fundamental roles in the practice of international politics after World War I. The IR scholars Robbie Shilliam and Richard Maass have highlighted how the desire to provide a “colorblind” analytical lens to international affairs “entails a refusal to consider the potential importance of racialized dynamics in world politics.”
Such a colorblind approach would, for example, cause us to miss how contemporary notions of “civilizational conflict” that influence policy discussions today bear striking similarities to the earlier ideas of Stoddard. It can lead us to see the “Cold War” as truly “cold” because we ignore the numerous wars, either directly or by proxy, fought between the United States and the Soviet Union throughout the majority-nonwhite nations of what was at the time still called the “Third World.” It can lead us to forget the racial motives underlying prominent ideas like “the West” itself as well as its enduring institutions, such as NATO, which a high-ranking State Department official defended before the Senate in 1949 as fostering a trans-Atlantic alliance composed not only of all the countries “that have our ideas and ideals of freedom” but also “of the white race.” It can also leave us unaware of the degree to which the intelligence reports and daily briefings presented to U.S. presidents throughout the Cold War period were riddled with racial tropes, particularly the use of animal analogies to describe nonwhite leaders from economically developing countries.
More recently, consider Russia’s full invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, when many observers pointed to the double-standard in Western media coverage of the war. In comments for which he later apologized, CBS News foreign correspondent Chris D’Agata, reporting from Kyiv, remarked, “This isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan that has seen conflict raging for decades. This is a relatively civilized, relatively European—I have to choose those words carefully, too—city where you wouldn’t expect that.” Besides the flawed historical understanding that war is somehow foreign to Europe, comments like these, particularly when wrapped in civilizational language, suggest that being a refugee from a war-torn region is simply not something that should be experienced by white people.
Make no mistake, Trump’s racist remarks and the National Security Strategy’s use of language more closely associated with “Great Replacement” conspiracy theories—the baseless notion that liberal progressives in America and Europe are engineering the immigration of nonwhite people to replace white-majority rule—are disturbing. But the use of such language and the influence of such ideas in world politics is far from surprising. Race and racism have long been powerful forces in international politics. The words Trump and his administration have chosen to use to promote and defend their policies and worldview simply make that role visible and explicit, rather than hidden and implicit.
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.