A First Hundred Days Agenda for Trump’s Foreign Policy

Politics

A First Hundred Days Agenda for Trump’s Foreign Policy

Personnel, not just policy or processes, is key to a successful Trump second term.

“I think Trump may be one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretenses,” Henry Kissinger said in 2018, in one of his last major profiles in a major newspaper. “It doesn’t necessarily mean that he knows this, or that he is considering any great alternative. It could just be an accident.” 

I was thinking of the quote when I toured New York with my visiting parents a few months back and our taxi driver, an elderly Chinese-American gentleman, was arguing how New York would turn red for the first time in a generation and vote for Trump. When asked about whether he worries about a trade war with China, he argued that, one, it is nothing compared to millions of criminals having free run of the cities of the United States, and two, that a real war with Russia is far worse than a trade war with China. Trump ended up earning 44 percent of total New York votes, with unthinkable swings in the working-class areas of Bronx and Brooklyn. Trump even won a precinct in New York’s Chinatown/Two Bridges neighborhood by 51 to 48 percent. 

Political analysis is a funny job, as given the nature of our trade (and the personal stakes, in my case), it is usually a combination of clearing out your own biases as much as humanly possible in a field that remains, despite many liberal cries, not a science, but an art. But when a man destroys the most common myths of political analysis, then he has to be considered at least close to Kissinger’s idea of a major figure in history. Trump broke every single nugget of political wisdom one might have held dear, including those of his supporters. 

Consider these following statements. Trump won the greatest support among Hispanics in over a quarter century. He had record breaking support among Asians and Indians, running against a candidate who was herself half Indian. He wrested over 10 percent of black votes from a candidate who was herself half black. He turned California the reddest it’s been since the 1980s. New Jersey and Minnesota may now be considered battleground states, more so than North Carolina or Arizona. 

None of the myths about Trump’s winning message were true. He didn’t have to be an ethno-nationalist; in fact, he made the Republicans more multiracial than a Romney or a Bush would ever have dreamed of. He turned working-class places even in once-solid blue states completely red. He got the Muslim vote locked up running against Republican orthodoxy on Israel, and got the veteran’s votes locked up running against “forever wars.” 

Most importantly, on a macro level, he proved a couple of things. First, people don’t really care about abstractions like “democracy.” In fact, a corollary may be that normal people don’t really care about democracy in particular at all, despite relentless propaganda. They care much more about the tangible goods of foreign policy, immigration, and the economy. To paraphrase Peter Thiel, liberty and democracy need not be parallel or even compatible. The people like technocracy or even aristocracy, but a competent one, one that takes care of their core concerns: a good life, good jobs, secure borders, and no foreign wars. Second, the power of the mainline media and academia is almost totally broken, due to their self-created echo chambers. The academy and the mainstream media need reckonings for what they wrought. Consider the number of “historian here” posts on Twitter (now X) and consider just how disconnected they are from the trend lines; you get a fair idea of why academic and even public history is so irreparably doomed. This is not just a lament, but an opportunity to rebuild as well. Trump’s election will bring about an ignominious end to “resistance” history and media. 

What is to be done? As my colleague Jude Russo wrote, the work is only beginning. Winning isn’t everything, although it is a preferable start to losing. For all those who are hyper-optimistic and complacent, I’d like to remind them that Trump also “won” in 2016. Yet not much changed. For an easy way to understand why during the last term my own field of foreign policy was such a disaster, consider this particular report:

“I think there’s a new inner circle around Trump that is pushing him toward allowing Putin, Xi Jinping, and Iran to kind of do whatever they want to do, into a new isolationist approach, which we really haven’t seen before,” said a Republican national security strategist who held a senior post in the first Trump administration. 

Trump campaigned against embroiling the U.S. in “forever wars” and has voiced skepticism about Ukraine’s ability to push Russian forces off their lands. Carlson and other public personalities who backed Trump, such as the venture capitalist and podcaster David Sacks, have argued that U.S. and NATO military deployments essentially forced Russian president Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine. Israeli media has reported that Trump wants Israel to wrap up its war in the Gaza Strip by the time of his inauguration. 

There’s also a growing concern that Trump may rely mainly on political loyalists rather than seasoned national security staffers. It’s a temptation he largely resisted during his first term, though he moved in that direction toward its end. “Don Jr. and Grenell and Tucker have his ear in a way that’s very dangerous,” the first Republican leader told The Free Press on Sunday, referring to Ric Grenell, a close campaign adviser and former ambassador to Germany.”

The transition and staffing are still in their formative stage, but there are a couple of things in the field of foreign policy that the president-elect should keep in mind for his first hundred days.

Foreign policy is the key. One of the good first fights for the Republicans to have is not staffing, which will continue, but to stop the Ukraine supplemental bills. Enough money has been siphoned off to Ukraine, and it is an issue that is toxic to the core electorate that voted in the Trump/Vance team. President Joe Biden, along with the lame-duck Congress, will want to forgive Ukrainian debts and pass more aid for Ukraine in the next few months. There is no better way to say this, but that needs to be stopped by any means necessary. The instinct of the current foreign policy blob will be to box the incoming administration in by siphoning off funds and by placing personnel in harm’s way. The idea is to create a contingency where the money keeps flowing and there’s some loss of personnel which then appeals to the baser impulses of a vengeful electorate. Anyone in the congress who sides with Biden to push for further money or manpower in Ukraine should be held complicit in the conspiracy to push the United States further into Europe, against the mandate which is clear about a retrenchment from that continent. 

Second, the Office of Management and Budget should be the key to any appropriation fight in future. Omnibus bills should be broken up or vetoed, if necessary. Spending fights will be vital, as the bureaucracy gets what it desires by adding a fair amount of bad to the good. 

Third, there’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to change the paradigm and shape foreign policy in Europe. Of all theaters, that is one ripe for a change. Europe is rich and capable. Russia has been proven not to be a hegemonic threat. And, for the U.S., Asia and Latin America are both more important theaters than Europe. A simple recipe is to force burden sharing on Europe by pulling out and reversing the Biden surge in the first hundred days. 

Fourth, there’s a handy list of over a thousand personnel who opposed Trump and endorsed Harris in the current and former nat-sec community, who have security clearances that can be instantly and permanently revoked. 

Finally, match skillsets and talents to posts. Vivek Ramaswamy, Tucker Carlson, Tulsi Gabbard, Mike Lee, and Warren Davidson should each be part of any incoming admin. 

These are but a start. Of course, the incoming cabinet will never look like an editorial meeting of the International Security journal. But more than policy, or even processes, personnel is key. This time let there be no mistakes.

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