Politics
Trump’s former national security adviser files a Jacksonian treatise to Foreign Affairs. What to make of it?
“The Cold War practice of garrisoning large numbers of troops with their families on massive bases in places like Germany is now, in part, obsolete. Modern warfare is increasingly expeditionary and requires platforms with extended range, flexibility and endurance. While air bases and logistics hubs remain important, the Cold War-style garrisoning of troops makes less military and fiscal sense than it did in the 1970s,” the then-White House National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien wrote in the Wall Street Journal in 2020. With his name floated again as a potential national security adviser, O’Brien has written a long essay in Foreign Affairs about a potential Trump 2.0 foreign policy.
The crux of the argument is that Trump was a Jacksonian peacemaker who believes in peace through strength, as displayed in his administration’s efforts in Serbia and Kosovo and the crowning achievement of Abraham Accords. Another Trump achievement was his hesitation to launch foreign wars. “Trump was determined to avoid new wars and endless counterinsurgency operations, and his presidency was the first since that of Jimmy Carter in which the United States did not enter a new war or expand an existing conflict,” O’Brien reminds us.
He argues that Trump is different from traditional foreign-policy presidents in an old school way: He prefers diplomacy as a secretive personalized endeavor, as it was conducted in the 19th century (successfully, one might add).
“Trump has never aspired to promulgate a ‘Trump Doctrine’ for the benefit of the Washington foreign policy establishment,” O’Brien writes. “He adheres not to dogma but to his own instincts and to traditional American principles that run deeper than the globalist orthodoxies of recent decades.”
O’Brien provides three key foreign policy suggestions for a future Trump administration. On Ukraine, he thinks that Trump should keep the door of diplomacy open with Russia while pushing Europe to provide lethal military aid to Ukraine. “Trump’s approach would be to continue to provide lethal aid to Ukraine, financed by European countries, while keeping the door open to diplomacy with Russia—and keeping Moscow off balance with a degree of unpredictability.” This is different from the current Biden approach, as Biden is slow-rolling aid to Ukraine while shutting off the diplomatic route completely. “The Biden administration has since provided significant military aid to Ukraine but has often dragged its feet in sending Kyiv the kinds of weapons it needs to succeed. The $61 billion Congress recently appropriated for Ukraine—on top of the $113 billion already approved—is probably sufficient to prevent Ukraine from losing, but not enough to enable it to win. Meanwhile, Biden does not seem to have a plan to end the war.”
His second provocative plan is a complete decoupling from China, including moving toward a maximum tariff as well as rearming,