Predicting Trump’s Foreign Policy
Three different sources have asked me to weigh in about how Trump’s return to office would affect US foreign policy. What follows is an amalgamation of my answer(s), cohered into a pleasant enough—if terror-laden—prose. ✌️
In one sense, nothing could be harder to predict than foreign policy under a second Trump administration. By now, everyone knows Trump is personally erratic, has few if any coherent ideological commitments, and treats everything as tradable. You never know where narcissism, greed, and racialized politics will clash with existing powder kegs and balances of power in the world.
In another sense, nothing could be easier to know in advance than the overall shape of Trump’s foreign policy. Trump has personal animus toward US alliances with Japan, South Korea, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. His transactional approach to everything necessarily means that no nation, institution, or law is more than a means to an end, and that end is typically either his power or the power of the American state. His social milieu is a mix of hawkish neoconservatives, Silicon Valley tech bros, and financiers—oligarchs, and violent ones at that.
Perhaps most importantly, a small but influential movement of reactionary elites has moved in behind Trump to develop an intellectual architecture that both rationalizes and steers his foreign policy. The “national conservatives” (NatCons) are post-liberal, explicitly patriarchal, and above all ethnonationalist.
Taking all this into consideration, there are certain kinds of questions that have no reliable answer. Will Trump return to “fire and fury” threats with Kim Jong Un, or indulge in more presidential summitry? Will Trump order a military invasion of Mexico? Will the United States fight World War III to defend Taiwan militarily, or come to some diplomatic arrangement that renders Taiwan a province of mainland China? Will the United States finally withdraw troops from East Asia, as Trump half-heartedly attempted several times during his first term in office?
Who knows.
But these sorts of questions are less interesting than the structural ones that give rise to them, and the latter sort are far more predictable.