Over the years we have often lamented the absence of grand-strategic thinking within the U.S. foreign-policy establishment. For the past quarter-century, successive administrations have displayed a chronic inability to deploy America’s political, military, economic, and moral resources in a balanced and proportionate manner, in order to protect and enhance the country’s rationally defined security and economic interests. Washington’s bipartisan, ideologically-driven obsession with global primacy (aka full-spectrum-dominance) has resulted in a series of diplomatic, military and moral disasters, costly in blood and treasure and detrimental to the American interest.
Donald Trump and his team have a historic opportunity to make a fresh start. The moment is somewhat comparable to the advent of Ronald Reagan’s first administration in January 1981: the global context is different, but the challenge of reestablishing a national-interest-based paradigm is not. Reagan used grandiloquent phrases at times (the Evil Empire), but in practice he was an instinctive foreign policy realist.
Likewise, Trump’s “America First” is not a triumphal slogan of exceptionalist grandomania jointly practiced by the Duopoly for the past quarter-century. It is a call for the return to realism based on the awareness that the United States needs to rediscover the value of transactional diplomacy aimed at promoting its security, prosperity, and cohesion in a Hobbesian world. In terms of any traditionally understood calculus of national security, America is the most invulnerable major power in the world: sheltered by oceans, and supremely capable to project her power to the distant shores. Unlike Russia, China, and India, America has no territorial disputes with her neighbors and her integrity is not threatened by ethnic or religious separatist forces. As I wrote in last month’s Chronicles,
Today’s America has the potential to be a satiated power, like Rome under the Five Good Emperors, Britain for many decades after Napoleon, or the German Kaiserreich until the 1890’s. That status did not imply those powers’ withdrawal from world affairs. Trajan, Castlereagh, and Bismarck were not isolationists; they were prudent fine-tuners of their external environment, always cognizant of proportionate costs in pursuit of limited objectives.