The MAGA Doctrine Page 6

  This doesn’t much bother the mostly rich and (de facto or sometimes literally) aristocratic people who drift between private-sector jobs like banking and public-sector jobs such as diplomacy, overseeing this deceptively calm world order. It’s not run by outright socialists but often, on the contrary, by elite, superficially conservative figures such as members of the Romney, Rockefeller, or Bush families—and more recently, upstarts such as the Clintons, despite their 1960s peace-and-love roots. They all talk like entrepreneurs at times, which is how they sometimes win the allegiance of voters who like small business or who hope all non-communist politicians are patriots. But at the heights of international power, business acumen and innovation are treated as almost interchangeable with socialist programs and fiat currency (print all you like without regard to whether we actually have any gold or other valuables backing it and hope your relatives and colleagues will be among the first to get the resulting flood of loans).

  The elite planners no doubt truly believe they are the ones looking at the big picture, rising above what they think of as the pettiness of nation-state and flag. But that carries immense risks for the common citizens who may end up having to live with the international elite’s bungled economic plans, misdirected loans, and unnecessary, casually begun military interventions.

  I’m glad we’ve got a president more worried about whether we’re getting a raw deal than whether he’ll look “good” (as the entrenched elite define it) on the international stage. I’m glad the MAGA Doctrine puts America first. Americans are a charitable people, we give, we raise funds, and we help all over the world. But for far too long we have been led by a flawed belief that we become stronger when we borrow money from China to give to places like Pakistan. How about we fix our own problems first before we decide to rebuild the entire world? It’s one thing to support nations around the world when we have a surplus, but we don’t—we have a deficit. Would you go take out a bank loan to give your neighbors funds to rebuild their driveway? Essentially, for several decades the United States has continued to borrow and spend wildly all across the world, despite the fact that we can’t afford it and have forgotten to take care of our own backyard.

  Putting America first certainly doesn’t mean envisioning the United States vanishing from the world stage, either. It just means that the measure of the beneficial impact of the United States is not the degree of its immersion in international organizations and the socialist mind-set prevailing in many parts of the globe.

  In fact, many of those most bothered by the America First sentiment seem, when pressed, not to be calling for “American leadership,” despite their love of that phrase, but rather for American submersion or erasure. They don’t really want us to lead any of those international organizations they revere. They want us to submit to them, to become more like them, to take our place as just one more country, perhaps like one from Continental Europe, with dashes of developing-world flair.

  Chapter 5

  Ending the Endless Wars

  Might Donald Trump be remembered as the president who brought about world peace?

  The media focus on his sometimes-belligerent tone as if that best captures the spirit of his presidency. But as he told the people of Poland in a speech in his first year in office, most of us share “hope for a future in which good conquers evil, and peace achieves victory over war.”

  In that speech, he described Poland and the United States as kindred nations, not because of ancestry or a love of war but because both nations had retained their independent spirits and pride even when beset by outside enemies—as Poland, suffering under both fascism and communism, surely has been. He paused in the speech to praise Lech Walesa, the hero whose leadership of the Solidarity union put pressure on the then-communist Polish government to hold free elections, starting the process by which European Communism would unravel in the 1980s, freeing hundreds of millions of people.

  As President Trump said in that same speech, he was there “not just to visit an old ally but to hold it up as an example for others who seek freedom and who wish to summon the courage and the will to defend our civilization.” If that is what it means to stir up nationalist sentiment, the world could use more of it. This is not xenophobia or isolationism but the will to defend freedom. This has nothing to do with favoring hate-filled racial groups, which no matter how often we denounce them the left will be happy to connect to all nationalist impulses. I support America First. I have denounced and will continue to denounce racist groups who claim to be superior due to their race.

  While his critics see nationalism and patriotism as mere tribal drumbeating—of the sort they too easily associate with warfare—Trump makes the connection between nationalism and liberty when he tells the Poles, “This is a nation more than one thousand years old. Your borders were erased for more than a century and only restored just one century ago. In 1920, in the Miracle on the Vistula, Poland stopped the Soviet army bent on European conquest. Then, nineteen years later, in 1939, you were invaded yet again, this time by Nazi Germany from the west and the Soviet Union from the east. That’s trouble. That’s tough.”

  That’s Trump—appealing with ease to his audience’s most heartfelt concerns, not to divide Poland from its neighbors but to emphasize its resistance to tyranny. Trump was joined onstage that day by veterans of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, in which Polish resistance fighters fought off Nazi occupiers. Despite Trump’s critics making him out to be some sort of modern-day fascist or a vassal of Russia, Trump knows full well what the Warsaw Uprising represents to the Polish people—not just fighting against the Nazis but doing so without the aid of the Russians. The Soviet military was by then advancing on Nazi forces from the east, but it notoriously stopped its advance long enough to allow the Nazis to crush much of the Polish resistance, underground forces who the Soviets knew could later prove as much trouble to Russia as to Germany.

  As Trump recounted in the speech, Poland would escape Nazi domination only to find itself subjugated for four decades by Russian communism—and he went on to urge Russia to end its support for present-day authoritarian regimes such as Iran’s and Syria’s and to avoid interfering in Ukraine. This is not the language of a man indifferent to global affairs. This is the language of a man who wants to see each nation free to solve its problems without being steamrollered by vast global empires.

  The Poles present at that speech understood the implicit message: Leave the fate of your nation in the hands of large military alliances beyond your borders, and you may be abandoned—or subjugated. Better to maintain your independence.

  We often talk about armed conflicts as though one man can lead a nation to war. In fact, it’s usually a bunch of out-of-control bureaucracies forcing a nation into it. We now live in a world where our alliances are more likely to push us into war than to keep us out of one.

  The MAGA Doctrine means trusting more of the world to solve their own problems, without the American government thinking it is responsible for, or capable of, doing it.

  For avoiding war, what sort of thanks does Trump get from his domestic political rivals? In an early 2019 presidential primary debate, Democrat senator Kamala Harris identified what she considered the “greatest national security threat to the United States—it’s Donald Trump,” dismissing his talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un as a mere “photo op.”

  This superficial reading of Trump’s dealings with foreign leaders captures an important difference between the way Trump thinks and the way the political and foreign policy establishment thinks. Contrary to the impression Harris gives, it’s mainstream liberal politicians such as former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton who live for mere photo opportunities.

  Whether they’re announcing an ineffectual climate treaty in 2015 (which would not make a substantial change in the level of gases that may not even threaten us in the first place) or the early-1990s agreement with Kim Jong-un’s predecessor Kim Jong-il to completely dismantle the North Korean nuclear p
rogram (which North Korea proceeded to ignore), elite politicians love to congregate together in fancy settings and pretend the whole world is unified in its sentiments. Are gala events for dozens of diplomats in settings such as Paris not, at least in part, photo ops? But these are the photo ops that keep elite politicians convinced they’re shaping the fate of the world for the better, so they’re considered acceptable—records of history rather than public relations fluff.

  Trump’s approach—not so unlike the frenetic phone-calling, hand-shaking, and deal-making he describes in books about his career as a real estate mogul—is to eschew gigantic group agreements that often as not amount to nothing in practical terms, instead dealing with world leaders one-on-one, with the intimacy that makes individual personalities and small cues part of the negotiating process. It’s analogous to the difference between centralized planning and individualized service.

  The approach is also based on Trump’s assumption that getting along with the rest of the world is a good thing. He doesn’t think you achieve that by spending decades advocating “regime change,” which very often means war, all over the world. By contrast, many politicians on both sides of the aisle, whether commonly thought of as “neoconservatives” or “neoliberals,” have been united in their advocacy of frequent military action. Ask yourself whether you can distinguish between the foreign policies of Hillary Clinton and the late John McCain. Both advocated toppling governments around the world. Both backed the Iraq War. Both were aghast at the election of Donald Trump, who had said for decades that wars are a terrible waste of lives and money.

  Make no mistake: Trump knows a strong US military is a key to maintaining world peace, and he wants the United States to intervene in a decisive, strong fashion when it absolutely must. But his preference, unlike that of so many establishment figures in Washington, is for peace.

  Is there more to diplomacy than showing up on time to assemble with two dozen other world leaders all working from the playbooks arranged for them by dozens of handlers and international lawyers, most likely yielding a rubber-stamped extension of whatever the previous agreement was? World leaders like to come back home with some front-page pictures reminding their voters that the world might fall apart without them. Instead of sacrificing our sovereignty for a photo op, Trump likes to have one-on-one meetings with people who can change the outcomes.

  As CNN’s Chris Cillizza acknowledged in a piece chronicling Trump’s frequent use of the line “We’ll see what happens,” Trump likes to maintain flexibility in his political dealings similar to what he describes in The Art of the Deal: “I never get too attached to one deal or one approach . . . I always come up with at least a half dozen approaches to making it work because anything can happen, even to the best-laid plans.”

  We’ll see what happens—not because the man doing the negotiating is chaotic or out of control but because he’s watching for the best available opportunities, wanting the best outcome for America. (And the sheer number of political factors the president has to keep in mind in dealing with foreign leaders is a reminder that there would be far easier, more direct, more efficient ways for him to set up hotel or media deals for himself if, as the left sometimes absurdly alleges, his entire presidency were a self-interested exercise in enhancing his business credentials. Imagine how much he might make if he devoted eight years just to creating golf courses and restaurants in Continental Europe instead of trying to get member dues out of NATO.)

  He recognized immediately upon taking office that he and America had been saddled with a dangerously bad deal on Iran by the Obama administration, which had been eager to appear to have struck a peace deal of any kind, no matter how flimsy the enforcement mechanisms, no matter how unrepentant and insulting the Iranian leaders remained, no matter how quickly Iran appeared to be ramping up to future nuclear weapons production, and no matter how much de facto bribe money had to be flown to Tehran to grease the wheels.

  Ending the bogus Iran “antinuclear” deal did not, however, result in all channels of communication being cut off between the United States and Iran—as Trump’s critics predicted not so much based on experience but based on their need to make the Obama plan seem essential in retrospect. Despite pressure from administration hawks and an understandably Iran-wary Israel, Trump reached out in mid-2019 to one of the most steadfast opponents of unnecessary military interventions abroad, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, as an informal ambassador. Others, such as Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, have traveled to Tehran and delivered messages in hopes of restarting negotiations. Trump, long known for constant daily phone calls to people of influence—including the media—likes to keep the channels of communication open at all times. Unlike so many before him, President Trump is willing to meet with anyone, without preconditions. Who can forget the dozens of impossible conditions that previous administrations demanded of hostile nations before even sitting down for a meeting? How can we improve relations or tone down hostilities if we can’t even talk around a table? President Trump will talk.

  We’ll see what happens—and the range of positive possibilities multiplies when we’re still engaged in diplomacy, not hunkered down back home giving lofty but arrogant speeches meant to prime a nation for war. Better a statesman who finds a way out of war than one who too eagerly relishes looking statesmanlike in war. Liberals should know that. They long claimed to understand it.

  One of the great dangers of basing international relations on a few sketchy ideals—instead of getting to know the opposition in an up-close and personal manner—is that one may fail to perceive what it is your rival wants. See what makes him smile, what makes him perk up and look as if he sees a chance for mutually beneficial action. Don’t just read the long manifestos cooked up by the international relations experts far from foreign capitals. Look for a chance to make deals—not just opportunities to please international organizations like the World Trade Organization or United Nations.

  The core Trump foreign relations principle of national self-determination is not novel. It only appears so to people invested in the stagnant foreign policy establishment as it has existed for the past century, since President Woodrow Wilson’s grandiose but failed schemes to make the world safe for democracy through World War I and the subsequent abortive establishment of a League of Nations.

  Tragically, the United States has rarely known a year without some military conflict, large or small, and has shed blood and lost money involving itself in conflicts the world over since its founding over two hundred years ago. President Obama became the first in history to preside over a war every single day of his presidency. We did, however, establish a history early on of avoiding “entangling foreign alliances” (quite unlike the explicit promise of NATO to treat any attack on any member as an attack on all, a formula ripe for World War I–like quagmires).

  Trump supporters use phrases such as “America First” to express our renewed interest in pursuing our actual national interest rather than just blundering into any overseas conflict in which we think we can give a small boost to an ally, an ideal, or an oil company. For using the slogan, we sometimes get condemned as “isolationists” or even fascist sympathizers in the style of some (by no means all but some) members of the World War II “America First” movement that hoped to keep the United States out of World War II.

  But the avoidance of unnecessary wars—anti-interventionism—is not isolationism. On the contrary, in the absence of unnecessary wars, the United States can reach out to the world with tendrils of trade and culture. In the absence of war, we can form lasting and influential relationships instead of leaving behind bombed-out cities and the bodies of our heroic troops. Cultural, educational, tourist, and business engagements between the United States and others often create stronger bonds than overthrowing regimes in hopes of discovering a modern-day George Washington. So many wished and hoped for a George Washington–like figure to emerge in the Middle East after countless wars. Instead radical Islam stepped in and fille
d the void after we intervened and left.

  Trump’s desire to keep the United States out of unnecessary foreign wars—and to protect our sovereignty by protecting our borders—has an important precedent in the Monroe Doctrine, an idea easily forgotten by the present-day foreign policy establishment in its eagerness to reshape the globe.

  America’s fifth president, James Monroe, was elected in 1816, two hundred years before Trump, and he governed a nation that only a year earlier had completed another war with England, the War of 1812. During that conflict, in the summer of 1814, the nation’s Capitol was set on fire by enemy troops. One could hardly ask for clearer evidence of the threat foreign empires and war could pose to national integrity.

  But that was not the only potential imperial threat the Old World posed to the newborn republic in North America. While monarchies reasserted themselves in Continental Europe in the wake of Napoleon’s defeat, the presence of Russia loomed in the form of that nation’s 1821 assertion of sovereignty over much of what is now Alaska and the Pacific Northwest. By contrast, the nations of Latin America were on the brink of breaking free from the Spanish and Portuguese empires.

  The United States, a fledgling democracy eager to avoid becoming a plaything of the Old World’s tyrannies, saw an opportunity to stand with—and of course to influence, for good or ill—those fledgling Latin American republics and to tell Europe’s monarchs and tsars very politely to “Keep Out.” President Monroe did roughly that in his seventh State of the Union address in 1823, explaining to Congress that the United States had conveyed to both Russia and England its intention to make North and South America off-limits to any future colonization by outside powers:

  In the wars of the European powers in matters relating to themselves we have never taken any part, nor does it comport with our policy to do so. It is only when our rights are invaded or seriously menaced that we resent injuries or make preparation for our defense. With the movements in this hemisphere we are of necessity more immediately connected, and by causes which must be obvious to all enlightened and impartial observers . . .