Cancel the Foreign-Policy Apocalypse

Donald Trump will likely become president again come January 20, 2025. The drama of an aging and diminishing President Joe Biden clinging to office despite the despair of Democrats who can read their candidate’s prospects clearly is not without its Shakespearean elements. As Regan says of King Lear, “He hath ever but slenderly known himself.” Like many a tragedy, Biden’s choice and its consequences were eminently foreseeable.

But if Trump is destined for a second term, it then falls upon us unapologetic and unrepentant never-Trumpers to think about the consequences of one of the most remarkable comebacks in American political history. The gravest concerns are domestic: Will Trump attempt to unleash the FBI and IRS on political opponents, or as he might think of them, enemies? Will he tamper with civil liberties, or undermine institutions, or sow so much bitterness and acrimony that the United States will face years of worsening partisan strife and violence?

I will leave those questions to people more qualified to answer them, choosing instead to reflect on the other side of presidential activity, foreign policy. And here, as hard as I find it to admit, it is possible that things may be less bad than they seem. Despite the warnings, a second Trump term may not be a riot of alliance-shattering isolationism, bellicose warmongering, or catastrophically stupid diplomacy.

[Tim Alberta: Trump is planning for a landslide win]

Begin with the Republican platform, which is not so much binding for Trump as it is a reflection of his priorities. It starts with a celebration of 20th-century victories over Nazism and Communism, but also features a robust effort to stop illegal immigration; a commitment to military strength; a promise to reinforce American alliances, particularly, but not exclusively, in the Indo-Pacific; support for Israel; and protection of U.S. infrastructure against “malign influences of Countries that stand against us around the World.”

Setting aside the random capitalization of nouns, an illiterate twitch now pervasive in official and personal documents of all kinds, it is boilerplate, and not especially scary boilerplate at that. It has an edge, but it is not an isolationist pronunciamento.

One of the deeper truths about American foreign policy, rejected every four years by Democrats and Republicans alike, is that it has much more continuity to it than rupture. Tariffs and supply-chain protection? The Biden administration has already gone down that path. Preoccupation with China and serious efforts to build up alliances and partnerships to contain and balance its growing power? Policies initiated in the first Trump administration have extended into the Biden years. A commitment to Israel and an interest in cementing relationships in the Persian Gulf? Same thing. A desire to disentangle ourselves from the Middle East and Afghanistan? That wish was shared by Obama, Trump I, and Biden.

The biggest potential outlier on this list of commitments is Europe, and specifically NATO. But the Biden administration’s willingness to arm Ukraine and allow it the full exercise of the military potential that we and others have too slowly and stintingly provided has been limited. Quietly, Biden-administration officials have made clear that they are providing enough to keep Ukraine afloat but not enough to let it win in any meaningful sense of the word, and that they prefer it that way. George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan would probably have behaved very differently, but they are not in office. Trump is less dissimilar from this administration than either he or Biden would prefer to have Americans believe.

Even Senator J. D. Vance—the Republican vice-presidential candidate, who has been particularly callous and obtuse about Ukraine—has conceded that it would not be in America’s interest to let Russia occupy the country, and that the U.S. should guarantee Ukraine’s independence. What his views of Russia will be if he begins getting intelligence briefings and contemplates the consequences of American abandonment of Kyiv are unknown—he is, as we have learned, extraordinarily flexible in his choice of unalterable principles and consequent moral and political judgments.

A $60 billion aid package to Ukraine went through with the support of a MAGA House speaker, Mike Johnson. More important, it went through with the acquiescence of Donald Trump. Republicans who voted in favor of it did not pay a domestic price, and although Lenin’s term useful idiots applies to some prominent right-wing commentators, there is no sign, yet, that a second Trump administration would simply dump Ukraine and exit NATO. What it would do, unquestionably, is put more pressure on European states to dramatically increase their defense spending. That is in no way a bad thing, and indeed, the prospect of Trump’s return seems to have had some good effects in that direction.

[From the May 2017 issue: The brilliant incoherence of Trump’s foreign policy]

Hand-wringing about the likely absence of “adults in the room” may also be misplaced. Trump, new to government and probably shocked at his 2016 win, selected generals and experts—James Mattis, Rex Tillerson, H. R. McMaster, John Kelly, John Bolton, among others—to steer his foreign policy. They secretly and sometimes not-so-secretly despised him, and he came to loathe them as well. He will not choose their like again. The question is whether he goes instead for some of the marginal figures in his camp, such as the disgraced and dotty Michael Flynn, or for political figures like Senator Tom Cotton and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. If the former, serious trouble awaits. If the latter, something much more normal lies ahead, not least because such experienced politicians who have known Trump for years and have considerably better personal skill at dealing with him than technocrats or soldiers are likely to steer a more typical course.

Foreign leaders, too, will be better prepared. Mark Rutte, the new secretary-general of NATO, has been adroit in avoiding any criticism of Trump. He may well have been chosen for possessing the combination of Dutch bluntness and diplomatic skill needed to establish rapport with him. Other countries managed Trump’s first term quite well. The Poles, whose proposal of a Fort Trump was reluctantly turned down by the administration, nonetheless secured an agreement in 2020 for the deployment of thousands of American troops. The Japanese did a similarly good job of managing the erratic president. And the Ukrainians can do the same. They would be well advised to send General Kyrylo Budanov, the head of military intelligence, to meet with Trump—who, as he often says, likes a killer.

Trump and the Republicans around him have visceral preferences and views, but not necessarily firm policy lines. Too much of policy consists of reactions to events. It would be a mistake to think that Vance, the firmest neo-isolationist in Trump’s circle, would necessarily have an outsize voice. He, after all, is a neophyte to this level of government, and he has not been chosen for his willingness to tell the boss things Trump does not already believe. Rather the reverse, in fact. Moreover, in the nature of things, a brisk young vice president who will undoubtedly think of himself as a crown prince to a man in his 80s will soon incur his suspicion and even hostility. Trump has probably never read Henry IV’s dying rebuke of Prince Hal—“O foolish youth, Thou seek’st the greatness that will overwhelm thee”—but he will come to recognize the sentiment.

Which brings us to the man himself. During second terms, most presidents have an eye on the judgments of history, and that does not incline them to wildness. The most inveterate Trump opponents have to admit that his intimate encounter with mortality did not immediately produce venom or incitement, but instead, a kind of Trumpian grace. We do not know how it will affect his worldview, and although no one should expect it to turn him into a statesman, it may very well moderate a man who stands on the verge of an astonishing personal as well as political victory. That verge may turn out, for the rest of us, to be a precipice. But honesty compels me to admit that it may not, and to contemplate the possibility of that rarest commodity in contemporary politics, modestly good news.