https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2023/05/pompeos-conservative-internationalism/
The coherent and successful foreign policy Ronald Reagan pursued from 1981 to 1989 might be referred to, at least in retrospect, as “conservative internationalism”. The American political scientist Henry R. Nau, in Conservative Internationalism: Armed Diplomacy under Jefferson, Polk, Truman, and Reagan (2013), argues that conservative internationalism features the best aspects of the three main US foreign policy traditions—liberal internationalism, realism or realpolitik, and nationalism—and in doing so creates a fourth, often overlooked, tradition. Conservative internationalism, according to Nau, aims to promote freedom no less than does liberal internationalism, augment diplomatic outreach with military superiority as does realpolitik, and maintain national sovereignty as per anti-globalist patriotism. Mike Pompeo, former director of the CIA, and Secretary of State from 2018 to 2021, makes the case in Never Give an Inch that the Trump administration, sometimes despite Trump himself, followed a conservative internationalist path and that its “peace through strength” attitude mostly worked.
Conservative internationalism, so defined, was the mainstay of US foreign policy for most of the Cold War years. There were exceptions. One of them was the realpolitik of Nixon and Kissinger bringing Beijing in from the cold in 1972 as leverage against the Kremlin. Nonetheless, it was the imprudence of liberal internationalism that explains why our power elites in the West thereafter downplayed Beijing’s imperial ambitions. Trump vociferously disputed the long-accepted Washington (plus Wall Street, the mainstream, academia, Hollywood and so on) consensus that Sino-American relations were a win-win for both sides. In Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again (2015), Trump fired off this broadside at Beijing:
They have destroyed entire industries by utilizing low-wage workers, cost us tens of thousands of jobs, spied on our businesses, stolen our technology, and have manipulated and devalued their currency, which makes importing our goods more expensive—and sometimes, impossible.