Donald Trump: The Making of a World View by Brendan Simms & Charlie Laderman

Author:Brendan Simms & Charlie Laderman [Simms, Brendan & Laderman, Charlie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Endeavour Press
Published: 2017-01-24T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

Candidate and President, 2015-2017

In the 2016 presidential election campaign, foreign policy remained central to Donald Trump’s message, which was pushed out in an avalanche of tweets, television and radio appearances, speeches and debates. There were far too many of these to reprint either in full or in representative selection. Some were long and obviously “vetted” policy statements, where Trump was speaking from a script not necessarily his own. Most were short blasts in campaign mode, when the candidate was firing more than usually from the hip. If we step back from the fray, however, and attempt to listen above the “noise” it is clear that the underlying themes he addressed in those turbulent months were more or less the same ones that he had been elaborating over the past three and a half decades since his first documented foreign policy pronouncement in 1980.

During this period, Trump had laid out a crude, but distinctive and coherent foreign policy position to which he returned time and again, especially in the context of presidential election campaigns. The United States, Trump claimed, was being “ripped off” and disrespected internationally. Its supposed friends, Japan, West Germany, and Saudi Arabia, were “taking advantage” of the US over trade and pocketing their military protection by the United States through NATO and other alliances without giving anything meaningful in return. The economic problems besetting the United States were thus products of the nation’s bad “deals” internationally. What was striking about this critique was that it focussed more closely on America’s friends than its avowed enemies, and its complete lack of interest in the Cold War contest, which was at its height when Trump first entered the fray in 1980, and was a battle which the United States was widely perceived to be losing.

As is often the case with the politically active, there was ambiguity and contradictions. On the one hand, Trump generally identified himself as what political scientists call a “realist”, that is someone who eschews sentiment, “nation building,” humanitarian intervention and the provision of public goods, for the “hard” realities of power politics.[107] He seemed to have no qualms about doing business in Russia under the (late) communists or the current Putin regime. Trump also described himself as a ‘hawk’, determined to restore America’s military might. On the other hand, Trump, at least rhetorically, claimed that he refused to deal with the Castro regime for ideological reasons; he initially supported intervention against Gaddafi in Libya on “humanitarian” grounds; he objected to the Iraq war not only as a strategic error but also on account of the casualties inflicted on the Iraqi population; he acknowledged the talent and decency even of illegal immigrants; and he was much more concerned about the threat of nuclear war than is widely realised, particularly when compared to his apparent indifference to nuclear proliferation during the 2016 presidential campaign.

The record also shows a sometimes surprising Trump. Few who saw him in action in 2015-2016 would expect him to show much compassion with the Iraqi civilian victims of the American invasion, but he did on several occasions.

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