Donald Trump’s three major foreign policy priorities – opposition to US alliances and free trade agreements, and support for authoritarianism – are linked directly to his domestic agenda of making America great again by restoring lost industrial jobs, cutting corporate taxes, opposing multiculturalism and stopping immigration.
It is the greatest challenge to have faced the liberal international order dominated by the United States and developed over decades. This was first a unipolar order, with the US by far the most powerful political and military player after the Soviet Union collapsed, but it has gradually become more multipolar as the relative power of the US declined, China emerged as a major player and other world regions asserted their influence.
Barack Obama’s “pivot to Asia” recognised the changed order, putting it up to the European powers and the EU to develop more effective and committed foreign and security policies in their own and neighbouring regions. The pivot sought to engage rather than contain China, but has had mixed success, partly because continuing crises in the Middle East keep on demanding US attention. The accompanying trans-Pacific and transatlantic free trade agreements pursued by Obama are intended to reinforce the liberal order within a new context of US-dominant partnership.
Trump's victory puts that order fundamentally in question. His opposition to military alliances flows from a longstanding conviction that they encourage freeloading by allies of the US. He demands that allies such as Germany, South Korea and Kuwait pay the full cost of the US presence, amounting to many billions of dollars, not the 2 per cent contribution usually demanded in Nato.
Thomas Wright, of the Brookings Institute in Washington, who has studied Trump's foreign policy positions, describes this as a crude reversion to imperial models of US hegemony rather than Obama's burden-sharing one. It rejects the case for a US presence in Europe or Asia, and denies its strategic interest in paying the costs of such global hegemony. Hence Trump's belief that Nato became obsolete with the end of the Cold War, that a strategic deal with Russia is preferable, and that Japan and South Korea should develop their own nuclear weapons. His opposition to the multilateral nuclear agreement with Iran flows from Saudi and Israeli lobbying. His outlook returns the US to an isolationist posture, albeit one with greater military spending financed by foreigners.
Mercantilist agenda
Repudiating trade deals is part of a wider mercantilist agenda, seen as a zero-sum game with competitors such as China, where US jobs have been outsourced at great cost to the rust-belt states where increased turnout by blue-collar workers gave Trump electoral victory. Returning US capital from overseas by halving corporate taxes will release trillions of dollars for an investment-led recovery, he argues. Cutting off immigration would see the resulting jobs go to US citizens.
Trump denies that such a disruptive programme would spark an international recession. He has raised so many and varied domestic expectations – impossible to meet in the short to medium term – that he may be attracted to foreign policy activism. There he will have more autonomy from constitutional checks and balances, and can pursue a more authoritarian path in search of international scapegoats that can be blamed for preventing him achieving his domestic goals.
That would make this coming period more dangerous. Such a foreign policy would encourage a shift to greater multipolarity in the international order. More centres of power would emerge to fill the vacuums left by a retreating US. If Nato becomes increasingly ineffective, the Trump victory would reinforce a similar weakening of the UK-US special relationship after Brexit and encourage greater foreign and security policy cohesion in the EU. Asia and the Middle East would also have to adapt rapidly.
Finding alternative sources of order is difficult when interests compete as much as these ones would. Trump could not retreat completely from world affairs, however preoccupied he becomes with domestic policies. His impulsive authoritarian personality would resent other centres of power emerging as US alliances are recast. International relations scholars who analyse multipolarity recognise such periods as unsettling and insecure transitions.
Nor can these effects be confined to the US itself. The huge political and media interest in this election tells a story of intensified global interdependence and entanglements, however isolationist and xenophobic the Trump impulse. He too has an international following, as Marine Le Pen, Nigel Farage and Geert Wilders acknowledge.
That makes it all the more urgent that liberals and progressives should forge a constructive opposition to the forces unleashed by these right-wing populist movements, including their foreign policy manifestations.
pegillespie@gmail.com