Trump’s New World Order
For too long, the ideology of the so-called “rules-based international order” (RBIO) has functioned as a mental straitjacket, as a barrier to thinking. Its strictures made it impossible to see, as Orwell famously put it, what was right under our noses.
Thanks to a blind faith in the rightness and efficacy of the RBIO, the cognitive dissonance of American foreign policy under the previous administration reached tragicomic proportions: In the first major foreign policy speech of his presidency, President Joe Biden boasted, “America is back. Diplomacy is back.”
Instead, what the world saw during the Biden interregnum was a country that only honored the highest ideals of the RBIO—peace, security, cooperation, respect for human rights—in the breach.
In practice, the Biden-led RBIO meant, as the historian Charles A. Beard once put it, perpetual war for perpetual peace. Under Biden, the US provided nearly limitless financial, intelligence, and military support (including the deployment of special operations forces) to Ukraine. It ratcheted up tensions with China in the South and East China Seas. And above all, it evinced a pathetic subservience to the whims of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The rest of the world had long since caught on that the RBIO was simply rhetorical window-dressing for Washington’s right to do what it wanted.
We can perhaps date the rebellion of the “rest” against “the West” to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s speech to the Munich Security conference in 2007, in which he took aim at the pretensions of the American-led order.
Less remembered, but perhaps more ramifying in this context, was Putin’s speech to the UN General Assembly in September 2015 in which he noted that, “attempts to push for changes within other countries based on ideological preferences, often led to tragic consequences and to degradation rather than progress.”
Whatever the case, it was during this time period—between the end of Bush II and the dawn of Trump I — when it became clear to “the rest" that the sun was setting on “the West.” During his first term, Trump and his advisors were unable to perceive this sea change. Yet for the better part of two decades, the most important question facing Washington was how to respond to the global shift from unipolarity to multipolarity. Unlike Trump I, Trump II seems to understand that the RBIO is an outdated operating system, fundamentally unsuited to the new multi-polar world.
And so, in a manner not dissimilar to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s various and sundry attempts at trying anything to beat the Depression, Trump has tried his hand at a mix of policy responses in the (reasonable) expectation that anything would be an improvement over the moribund RBIO.
There is no better evidence that the times are indeed a-changing, than the speech Trump delivered in Riyadh on May 13, in which he noted that:
…The gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called nation builders neocons or liberal nonprofits like those who spent trillions and trillions of dollars failing to develop Kabul, Baghdad, and so many other cities. Instead, the birth of a modern Middle East has been brought by the people of the region themselves.
In the end, the so-called nation builders…wrecked far more nations than they built, and the interventionists were intervening in complex societies…that they did not even understand themselves.. they told you how to do it but they had no idea how to do it themselves.
This is—if nothing else—a full-throated rejection of the internationalist pretensions of the RBIO. Trump’s vision amounts to a kind of “live and let live” realpolitik—it replaces values with sovereignty as the cornerstone of international relations. Ultimately, it is a defiant trashing of the rationale behind the disastrous run of “humanitarian” interventions characteristic of the Obama and Biden terms.
Yet, as it has played out over the last three months, Trump’s new world order is one that at times seems at variance with itself. It is a vision that has at least three discernible core elements: Transactionalism; Neo-isolationism; and Neo-colonialism.
Trumpist Transactionalism
“The business of America is business,” is a statement often attributed to President Calvin Coolidge. Similarly, the business of Trump II is “deals.” Both Trump and Steve Witkoff, the New York real estate magnate now serving as Trump’s principal foreign policy troubleshooter, speak the patois of corporate America. Trump’s discarding of ideology in foreign policy created a void that the principles (such as they are) of transactionalism are now filling.
At a minimum, a transactional foreign policy, rather than one based on allegedly “universal” precepts, is a more straightforward affair. A bilateral quid pro quo obviates the need for Washington to stand up an expensive and expansive national security apparatus that has as its mission the fomentation of covert and overt operations against both friendly and unfriendly countries in order to impose Washington’s agenda. Such operations—in Libya, in Syria, and in Ukraine—ultimately (perhaps purposefully) undermined the security of those regions. In that way the RBIO became, to borrow a phrase from the renowned Pentagon critic Franklin “Chuck” Spinney, a self-licking ice cream cone.
Trump II seems, so far anyway, to evince little interest in what his Director of National Intelligence, the Army combat veteran and former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, has long derided as “regime change wars.” As such, the new administration moved quickly to shutter USAID, Voice of America, as well as offices within the State Department such as the Global Engagement Center that had as their mission the creation and funding of allegedly “independent” media outlets—outlets that often worked with pro-Western political opposition parties, in concert with American- and European- funded NGOs—in stirring up discontent against regimes Washington viewed less-than-favorably.
Under Biden, the RBIO devolved into a Manichean vision of a world divided between autocracies and democracies. And so, if you portray your adversary as the second coming of Hitler (as was often done in the case of Putin), how can you negotiate with them? You can't. No deal is possible. But, as Trump and Witkoff surely understand, the “art of the deal” is the art of the compromise. And thus far, Trump II has rejected the division of the world as envisioned by the Biden-led RBIO.
Trumpist Neo-Isolationism
The extent to which Trump II augurs the return of isolationism and a return to the “bad old days” of the interwar years —when an allegedly blinkered US Congress passed a series of Neutrality Acts in the run up to the Second World War—has always been overstated.
In his short time in office Trump has, inter alia: effected a cease-fire with the Houthis of Yemen; lifted crippling sanctions against the long-suffering people of Syria; cajoled and threatened Putin and Zelensky to come to a peaceful settlement over Ukraine; and sent American officials to Oman to find a peaceful way forward with Iran.
Isolationist? Hardly.
But the charge is not wholly without merit and usually stems from Trump’s impolitic comments regarding our immediate neighbors to the North and South—as well as his equally impolitic language regarding immigrants.
Still more, commentators wrongly mistake, or conflate, Trump’s neo-mercantilist economic policies with isolationism. Yet Trump’s oft-stated criticisms of our NATO allies adds ballast to the isolationist charge while the proposed dismantling of the offices within the National Security Council and the State Department having to do with international and multilateral organizations—as well as the proposed shuttering of US consulates and embassies across Africa— are indeed indicative of a neo-isolationist strand in his overall thinking.
One might note, however, that the most expensive (as well as expansive) pillars of the national security behemoth, the Intelligence Community and the Pentagon, remain largely unscathed. There are no plans, as far as this author knows, to shutter the principal tools of American force projection abroad: Ramstein Air Base in Germany and Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar.
Trumpist Neo-Colonialism
Trump’s rhetoric, particularly during his second Inaugural address, has been replete with neo-colonial sentiments. The veneration of President William McKinley, under whose watch the US embarked upon an unwise pursuit of an empire that stretched from Cuba to Hawaii to the Philippines, has been accompanied by the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as well as threats to retake the Panama Canal Zone. Still more, Trump has frequently threatened to annex Greenland and—ignoring the lessons of the War of 1812—Canada.
Some of this isn’t as new or radical as it now appears. Neo-colonialism was most certainly a tool employed by Washington during the forty-year Cold War with the Soviets. Trump simply appears to be dusting off that old playbook for what his advisors no doubt see as the burgeoning Cold War with China.
The extent to which the three strands will work together or will be at odds with one another remains to be seen.
It all may yet work—or it may not. But given what came before, Trump can hardly be condemned for trying.
James W. Carden is editor of The Realist Review and a former State Department adviser.
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