The Trumpist turn in US foreign policy

So dramatic is Donald Trump's return to the presidency that it begs us to draw far-reaching conclusions about America’s future as a global power. For instance, it might once have been argued that Trump’s first term was an aberration from the post-Second World War norm, a radical break with American traditions of global leadership and liberal internationalism, which Joe Biden’s election in 2020 then corrected, returning the United States to “normalcy”. It is now much harder to maintain this argument. It is Biden who looks like a temporary throwback to the post-Second World War consensus about US exceptionalism, and Trump who represents the new normal.

Of course, foreign policy was not a major factor in the campaign, which makes it difficult to claim that voters passed a decisive judgment on Biden’s foreign policy and the 80-odd years of American global leadership he represents. But as New York Times commentator Ezra Klein pointed out on his podcast, Trump attracted voters who are not particularly political – in other words, those who are not deeply engaged with either of the parties and not ideologically committed. This is evidenced by the fact that Trump’s rally turnouts were modest compared to the enthusiasm and long lines at Harris events, and that the Trump-era Republican Party has done poorly in mid-term elections, which have a lower profile than presidential races. To this disengaged group, Trump is the standard-bearer of anti-politics, the man who can deliver a shock to a sclerotic system. And what better evidence of the system’s weaknesses than the multiple failures of American foreign policy since 9/11, overseen by both parties?

Then again, Trump’s election-night claims notwithstanding, he was not a clear anti-war candidate. As president, we cannot say with certainty that he will reduce America’s alliance commitments, force an unjust peace on Ukraine, and oversee a wholesale rejection of Republican Party orthodoxy about America’s global military role. Certainly, the chances of such a revision are now higher because Trump himself appears to believe deeply that the United States needs to get out of foreign entanglements and that American taxpayers are being fleeced by allies.

But he won’t necessarily get it all his own way. It was a safe bet well before the election that, whoever occupies the key foreign policy and national security posts under Trump, there will be internal contestation between primacists, prioritisers, and restrainers over the direction of policy. Trump’s selection of the hawkish Marco Rubio (as Secretary of State) and Mike Waltz (as National Security Adviser) reinforces the point. They are both likely to be more militarily assertive than Trump himself.

Australians can choose various interpretations of what Trump’s election means for them. The national security establishment is likely to believe (or just hope?) that nothing much will change. Australia got through one Trump administration with minimal damage, so it can manage another. But the last time around, our strategy was to work around Trump, or more accurately, beneath him to the second and third tiers of government. Whether that strategy works this time, in an administration likely to be staffed by people more loyal to Trump and less to the Washington foreign policy “blob”, is an open question.

Pessimistic interpretations come in two forms: abandonment or war. Trump has been a lifelong critic of America’s alliances, and if these instincts face less resistance than in his previous administration, then the unprecedented tightening of the US-Australia alliance (under AUKUS and several new basing arrangements) could be reversed. If Trump is as belligerent towards China or North Korea as some of his hawkish advisers would like and as he himself sometimes was in his first term, Australia could be dragged into a cataclysmic war.

My own interpretation is more mundane, but equally consequential over the long term: Trump will oversee a continuation of American strategic inertia in Asia, evident since the end of the Cold War. In the simplest terms, the United States is becoming a more “normal” great power and a less “indispensable” one, to use former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s term. This has happened under every administration since China began its rise and would have continued under a Harris presidency too. What Trump’s election offers is the possibility that the turn to normalcy (and thus away from hegemony in Asia) could accelerate.

Keep in mind, it was not just Trump who was elected last week. Vice President-elect JD Vance must now be considered the presumptive Republican nominee for the 2028 presidential election, so the Trumpist instinct to revise down America’s global role appears locked in, on one side of politics at least. The big question is what Trumpism now does to the Democratic Party. Joe Biden was the final link to the Second World War generation (Biden even invoked “arsenal of democracy” rhetoric to support his Ukraine policy) and to Cold War liberalism, a tradition to which Harris offered only pale and unconvincing deference. The next Democratic presidential nominee may sniff the winds of US opinion and decide even that is too much.