For the Last Time, Trump Is Not a Realist

We have been going over the same ground since 2016, and the case for “Trump the realist” never gets any better.

Andrew Byers and Randall Schweller write to us from another universe:

In Trump’s first term, these realist impulses were muted and sometimes stopped by hawkish national security staffers who did not share his vision. But having learned that personnel is policy, Trump will not make this mistake again. His next administration will, instead, result in perhaps the most restrained U.S. foreign policy in modern history.

There have been many attempts to paint Trump as a realist over the last eight years, and none of them holds up under scrutiny. We have been going over the same ground since 2016, and the case for “Trump the realist” never gets any better. The only thing that has changed since then is that we have a lot more evidence from Trump’s own words and actions that this is nonsense.

Sometimes opponents of Trump have tried to lump him together with realists because they want to discredit the realists by association. John Ikenberry and Daniel Deudney tried this with their sloppy broadside against restrainers a few years ago. Sometimes Trumpists have tried to hijack the realist label to make Trump’s reckless and destructive foreign policy seem more agreeable and rational. Occasionally Trump’s speechwriters might throw in a reference to realism in his speeches to create the illusion that Trump has “realist impulses,” but then we look at how Trump governed and remember that most self-described realists opposed almost everything he did while in office.

If Trump has any “realist impulses,” they evidently weren’t very strong because he appointed lots of people that hate realists and realism to run his foreign policy. Who is speaking for Trump on foreign policy today? Last I checked, it was the likes of Ric Grenell and Robert O’Brien, both of whom are Republican hardliners. It is questionable whether Trump is even capable of learning from past mistakes since he never admits error, but it is absurd to think that he is going to turn around and staff a new administration with restrainers.

Stephen Walt wrote one of the first articles repudiating the silly idea that Trump is a realist, and his argument is worth revisiting:

Indeed, there’s a deep contradiction in Trump’s entire worldview. On the one hand, he repeatedly tells Haberman and Sanger that the United States used to be strong but is now very, very weak. But on the other hand, he also seems to think the United States is so powerful that it can issue demands, impose sanctions, threaten to “walk away” (or worse), and expect other states to obediently fall into line. This isn’t “realism”; it’s the sort of fantasy world of U.S. omnipotence one associates with Bush-era neoconservatism.

Trump obviously isn’t a realist, but there are strong incentives for many of his liberal internationalist critics and his loyalists to keep pretending that he is. It is a convenient story that allows defenders of the status quo to ignore how much they have in common with Trump. It also lets Trump supporters pretend that his foreign policy isn’t just a grab-bag of grievances and hardline obsessions.

Byers and Schweller assert that Trump and his allies “do not see geopolitics as a grand ideological contest.” That would come as news to the Trump administration, which repeatedly cast rivalry with China in explicitly ideological terms. Trump’s second Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, delivered a big speech in 2020 in which he claimed that Xi Jinping was on an ideological mission to realize his “desire for global hegemony of Chinese communism.” Other Trump administration officials talked about U.S.-China rivalry in terms of civilizational conflict and said that the U.S. was in “a fight with a really different civilization and a different ideology, and the United States hasn’t had that before.” The Trump administration framed competition with China as an ideological contest, and there is no evidence that Trump disagrees with this framing.

The authors are right that “the United States no longer has the power it once did and is spreading itself too thin,” but is there any reason to believe that Trump shares this view? According to Robert O’Brien, Trump’s former National Security Advisor who recently wrote a ridiculous defense of Trump’s foreign policy for Foreign Affairs, the U.S. isn’t going to scale back its commitments anywhere in a second Trump term. On the contrary, O’Brien proposes that the U.S. increase its military presence in the Middle East and even more absurdly floats the idea of deploying the entire Marine Corps to the Pacific. It’s true that the U.S. “needs to sort its essential national interests from desirable ones,” but the people that Trump has advising him on foreign policy reject that.

Did you know that Trump “engaged adversarial states such as China, North Korea, and Russia in ways that lessened the possibility of conflict”? That is what Byers and Schweller claim. That conveniently ignores that Trump’s Russia policy involved very little engagement and was defined mostly by tearing up arms control treaties. How did scrapping the INF Treaty and Open Skies lessen the possibility of conflict? Trump’s pseudo-engagement with North Korea followed a crisis where the U.S. came dangerously close to nuclear war, and Trump’s hardline negotiating position effectively killed any chance of reaching a diplomatic compromise later on. As for China, Trump started a trade war and gratuitously insulted their government almost every chance he could.

The authors’ predictions are no better than their description of Trump’s record. They say that “he will likely withdraw from at least some current U.S. commitments in the greater Middle East.” What evidence is there that Trump wants to do this? During his presidency, the U.S. military presence in the region expanded, and U.S. support for regional clients intensified. During the dreadful Thursday debate, Trump made a point of bashing Biden for the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Do we really think he is going to make retrenchment from the Middle East a priority? Isn’t it more likely that his approach to the region will once again be defined by catering to regional clients, ratcheting up tensions with Iran, and putting U.S. forces in harm’s way with reckless policies and actions?

Trump isn’t a realist, so what is he? Stephen Wertheim has made a strong case that militarist is the right way to describe him, and I agree with that. Barry Posen has also made a good argument that illiberal hegemony is the best way to describe Trump’s foreign policy strategy. The illiberal hegemonist still wants the U.S. to pursue dominance and isn’t interested in scaling back U.S. commitments anywhere, but he doesn’t care about the norms and institutions that have served as the window dressing for that dominance. Posen put it this way:

[Trump] still seeks to retain the United States’ superior economic and military capability and role as security arbiter for most regions of the world, but he has chosen to forgo the export of democracy and abstain from many multilateral trade agreements.

That assessment holds up very well six years after Posen made it. Trump’s illiberal hegemonism is about as far removed from realism and restraint as it is possible to get. There should be no illusions about the foreign policy that we are going to get from another Trump administration. Whatever else you want to call it, it isn’t going to be a realist foreign policy.