Trump II: The Birth of a New Foreign Policy Paradigm

The age of transactionalism has arrived.

[Photo Credit: The White House]

Whatever name you’d like to attach to the foreign policy of Trump II, at least it is straightforward; brutally so. From Cordell Hull to Steve Witkoff is a long distance to travel. The New York real estate world does not reward idealists. Neither does Trump. As such, it is no coincidence that Witkoff has emerged as primus inter pares among Trump’s foreign policy advisers.

We can come to better understand what foreign policy under Trump II is by describing what it is not. Remember the ways in which Jake Sullivan, John Kirby, Antony Blinken, Matthew Miller, Karine Jean-Pierre, and Vedant Patel used to twist themselves into knots up at the podium, trying to justify the unjustifiable all the while claiming that what the Biden administration was actually doing was advancing an already moribund rules-based international order?

Under Trump II there will be no such displays of pretzel logic. Ideology is dead. We have entered the Age of Transactionalism. So far, Trump’s foreign policy has been shorn of the hypocrisy that came to characterize Washington’s engagement with the world during so much of the post-Cold War period. It’s now: I’ll scratch your back, if you scratch mine.

The implications for US foreign policy have already been profound.

Trump has gutted USAID and plans are in the works to dramatically shrink the size and scope of the Department of State. Seen through the lens of Trump II’s Transactionalism, this makes a good deal of sense. A foreign policy based on transaction obviates the need for USAID, the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor at the State Department, and Intelligence Community cut-outs such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) to create and fund astroturfed “pro-democracy” movements abroad.

Trump II has zero use for “democratic” ideals Washington itself never had much use for in the first place – except, that is, as window dressing. Self-aggrandizing notions that, as Biden put it, “The world looks to us to solve the problems of our time” have at long last been set aside.

Prior to Trump II, Washington would interfere in the political affairs of foreign countries (usually, but not always, located in the developing world) both overtly or covertly in order to make it appear as though they were crying out for a secure and happy future under the American defense umbrella. The opinion-shaping agencies of the US government that funded “opposition media” and activist NGOs (such as the Russian election monitoring NGO, Golos) focusing on “democratization” or “voting rights” would succeed in capturing – if not a majority – then at least a vocal, sometimes violent minority of a foreign capital’s elite. The next step – capturing or creating the prevailing climate of opinion within the foreign capital, a step which, as we saw in the 2014 Maidan Revolution, climaxed with a frenzy of sniper fire orchestrated by the far-right opposition group Right Sector with links to Washington – was a foundational part of Washington’s regime change strategy.

Over time and at great expense (according to then US assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland, it took 20 years at a cost of $5 billion in taxpayer money to set off Maidan) an ecosystem of trans-national elites took root in European and Eurasian capitals who sought to further Washington’s hegemonic goals. But their actions would have to seem as though they matched the high-flown rhetoric about adherence to democratic ideals. These elites spoke (and still do, I suppose) a common language they picked up in the classrooms at John Hopkins’ SAIS, Columbia’s SIPA, Harvard’s Kennedy, and Tufts’ Fletcher which they would later utilize in the conference rooms and corridors of transatlantic think tanks like the German Marshall Fund, the Aspen Institute and Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung.

As a matter of course, these foreign elites, often members of political opposition parties at home, would travel to USAID (where the money was) and State (where the money wasn’t) seeking funds and political support for their parochial political projects which, invariably, were in line with Washington’s objectives. The funds would be laundered through “democratization” or “voting rights” projects.

Likewise, “Independent” media outlets would amplify the opposition’s messaging, and once elections or one or another policy referendum didn’t go their way, riots would ensue. These riots would then, in turn, be covered by credulous American media outlets as indigenous pro-democracy movements deserving of our sympathy and support. This, in turn, would set off a series of Congressional Delegations to these foreign capitals led by the likes of the disgraced New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez and his colleagues such as Ben Cardin, Chris Murphy, the late John McCain and his dutiful sidekick Lindsey Graham.

After months of fanning the flames of unrest (and burning millions of American dollars in the process) the desired outcome (regime change) would typically be reached.

In an astonishingly short time, Trump II has taken a wrecking ball to all of that.

The indignity with which this has been met in the metropolitan DC area has, of course, something to do with people being understandably quite put out by losing their jobs. But it isn’t just the federal bureaucrat who is going to suffer. Each of the major think tanks, which for decades served as cogs in the wheel of the old system, will also suffer. A recent Quincy Institute brief on think tank funding found that the US government “contributed at least $1.49 billion to U.S. think tanks from 2019 to 2023.”

Trump II’s vision is, needless to say, hardly a Rooseveltian one —but it has more in common with FDR’s post war vision of Great Power cooperation than is commonly assumed. For all their differences, both FDR and arguably the 20th century’s greatest statesman, Charles de Gaulle, believed that the world order should be shaped by the great powers in cooperation with one another. But such plans went nowhere; the Cold War had only room for two principals; and after 1992 there was, or so American theorists like Francis Fukuyama and Charles Krauthammer told us, room for only one.

Transactionalism has replaced Messianism. The question remains whether such an approach is the right one in a multi-polar world. Time will tell. But as the Biden administration proved, it can’t be worse than the alternative.