The world is a more dangerous place than it was on Jan. 20, 2017 — and far more dangerous than it was when Donald Trump left office — thanks to four years of epic mismanagement by the Biden-Harris administration. But our national interests remain unchanged, and Donald Trump remains Donald Trump. So what might Trump 47's foreign policy look like?
The question is important because, while we look to be in the opening phases of World War III, foreign policy has been conspicuously absent from the presidential campaign. You can blame a purposely incurious press that would rather not discuss President Joe Biden's deadliest failures.
Let's start our discussion close to home.
Mexico and points south remain a sore spot and increasing danger, and not just because of illegal immigration. In addition to the need for a border wall (a domestic issue) and coming up with creative new ways to reduce incentives (here and abroad) for illegal immigration, Trump will have to deal with Mexico as a base of Chinese operations. Beijing uses Mexico for fentanyl smuggling, and both Beijing and Moscow likely use it as a base for drone swarms over U.S. military installations.
"When the big war kicks off," Josh Trevino wrote to Glenn Reynolds today, "these swarms will be delivering munitions directly onto the targets they now only surveil, and in fact, the practice for that mission is likely why they conduct operations now. This is a solid and cost-effective alternative to developing a strategic bomber force."
Should war come during Trump's second term — or Kamala Harris's first — it will come right to the continental United States for the first time in over a hundred years. If we want to avoid that fate, I expect Trump to come up with creative rules of engagement for these surveillance drones. I expect Harris not to.
No more spy balloons. No more drones.
Of the two ongoing major wars — in Ukraine and the Middle East — sussing out what Trump might do in Ukraine is trickier, to say the least. Trump himself has been coy.
"Supporters of Ukraine have expressed concern that Trump intends to end the war quickly by selling Ukraine out at the expense of Russian President Vladimir Putin," Politico reported in September. Ukraine President Volodomyr Zelenskyy, according to the same report, told Fareed Zakaria that he had talked to Trump and that he was “very supportive."
Hardest hit: pro-Russian internet trolls. But I digress.
So why does Trump refuse to commit to a Ukrainian victory? His evasion in the debate against Kamala Harris might have hurt him electorally in some small way, given Americans' strong support for Ukraine.
It's all about the art of the deal, baby.
Putin has nukes (a subject I'll return to later in this essay), making it a fool's errand to villainize him as Biden constantly does. Striking a peace deal requires a couple of things. One is at least appearing as an honest broker. Trump's coyness allows him to do that. The other is to get serious about arming Ukraine — to make peace look more advantageous to Putin than continued war.
Biden's fear of escalation has made any kind of resolution in Ukraine impossible. If Trump is willing to wave a big stick while offering Putin a carrot in good faith, we might get a peace deal.
Peace is Trump's priority because the Russo-Ukraine War is a sideshow compared to the dangers lurking in the Indo-Pacific theater. Ukraine is a sideshow that deserves our attention (and our aid, as I've argued here endlessly), but not at the expense of countering China and protecting the interests that China threatens.
There is, however, only so much Trump can accomplish in the Pacific in four years. Trump's most important job will be to deter Beijing from trying anything stupid until the Navy's "terrible 20s" are over:
In 2016, popular military blogger and Navy Cmdr. CDR Salamander (ret.) coined the phrase “Terrible 20s” to describe the modernization challenges before the US military this coming decade. He offered an ominous overview of the next 10 years as “that horrible mix of debt bombs, recapitalizing our SSBN [ballistic missile submarines] fleet, and the need to replace and modernize legacy aircraft, ships, and the concepts that designed them.”
Trump promised in his first term to set us on course for a 355-ship Navy, up from not even 300 today. “We are asking too few ships to do too many things," Senate Seapower Subcommittee Chairman Roger Wicker said at the time, "and today the President took a major step toward rectifying that problem.” But Congress and the Navy are nowhere close to delivering on Trump's promise.
AND ANOTHER THING: It sure would be nice if we still had Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan — within bombing range of China's nuclear weapons development facilities — but wringing anything positive out of the mess Joe Biden left in Afghanistan is a lost cause, and I would expect Trump to treat it as such.
For a fraction of what Biden-Harris frittered away on "green" boondoggles, we could have put a major down payment on the infrastructure required to grow and maintain our naval force. The United States has been a maritime trading power since before we were the United States. The Navy has always been our first line of defense — and will remain our first line of defense for the foreseeable future.
Trump understands this. He needs to make Congress — and the American taxpayer — understand it, too. Otherwise, war with China and the loss of some of our most valuable trading partners are inevitable.
Looking further ahead, Trump's foreign policy team might start laying the groundwork for managing the potentiality of the Chinese Communist Party's decline, much as George H.W. Bush did with the Soviet Union. China's slow-motion demographic implosion is accelerating, and its economy appears headed for a "lost decade" like Japan in the '90s.
There's also our economic rivalry with China, and on that, a harsh truth needs to be told.
Tariffs don't bring jobs back. They just don't. They didn't in Trump's first term, and they won't in his second.
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If we want our manufacturing jobs back, we need to increase competitiveness here at home. That means tax cuts, and that means deregulation on a scale that would make Trump's excellent first-term performance look like a small down payment on competitiveness. And it means throttling DEI and ESG by the neck until well and truly dead. But that's domestic policy.
Tariffs can be, however, a useful tool to punish rivals and enemies. If Trump won't have time to do as much regulation-smashing as this country needs, tariffs can and will encourage businesses to continue moving jobs out of China and into friendlier countries like India and Vietnam.
The less significant (but perhaps more immediately dangerous) Pacific irritant is North Korea, currently in the business of sending arms and (it's been reported) soldiers to fight for Russia in Ukraine. South Korea is undergoing a massive up-armament program, complete with a new tank that might be the world's toughest and a home-grown 5th-generation stealth fighter. Maybe the best Trump can do to deter North Korea is to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Seoul. The more daylight enemies and rivals see between Washington and our smaller allies like Israel, Taiwan, and South Korea, the more likely conflict becomes.
Which brings us to the Middle East.
I've written before about how Trump's first term brought relative calm to the Middle East. Three Trump policies — economic containment of Iran, the Abraham Accords, and showing almost no daylight between us and Israel — were responsible.
Biden undid all three of Trump's Middle East policies, and the result is a regional war. You can expect Trump to double down on his first-term successes — but first, Israel must be let off the leash to deal with Iran. "Hit [Iran's] nuclear [program] first, and worry about the rest later," Trump advised earlier this month.
The following exchange is from a Trump interview with Hugh Hewitt last week:
HH: If Israel hits [Iran’s] nuclear sites, will you applaud?
DT: Yeah. I dealt with Kim Jong-un. And he has nuclear weapons. And you tend to speak a little bit differently when they have nuclear weapons.
HH: Yes.
DT: Does that make sense to you?
HH: Yes, it does. Well, Nixon met with Mao, who was the greatest murderer of the 20th Century, because they had nukes. He met with Brezhnev.
DT: Right.
HH: I noticed you didn’t meet with Khamenei, and he did not have nukes. Can they be allowed to have nukes?
DT: No, they can’t have nukes.
That's a far cry from Biden's endless efforts to micromanage Israel's effort into a losing "forever war."
I'd like nothing better than for Trump to snap his fingers and restore the status quo ante Biden, to corrupt the Latin, but that isn't possible. The road back to peace is through Israeli escalation against Iran — the one thing Biden refuses to contemplate and the one thing Trump has made explicit that he understands.
Those are, I believe, the foundations of the Trump 47 foreign policy, based on the current world situation, our shared experience of Trump 45, and decades of watching the man operate. None of what needs to be done will be easy or cheap. But if you think waging peace is expensive, try waging a war.
Trump gets that. God help us if voters don't.
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