Three Cheers for Trump's Foreign Policy; What the Establishment Misses

... As his critics charge, Trump does reject many of the core tenets of the liberal international order, the sprawling and multifaceted system that the United States and its allies built and have supported for seven decades. Questioning the very fabric of international cooperation, he has assaulted the world trading system, reduced funding for the UN, denounced NATO, threatened to end multilateral trade agreements, called for Russia’s readmission to the G-7, and scoffed at attempts to address global challenges such as climate change. But despite what the crowd of globalists at Davos might say, these policies should be welcomed, not feared. Trump’s transactional approach to foreign relations marks a United States less interested in managing its long-term relationships than in making gains on short-term deals. Trump has sent the message that the United States will now look after its own interests, narrowly defined, not the interests of the so-called global community, even at the expense of long-standing allies.

The typical FOREIGN AFFAIRS issue since 2016 election has been downright hostile to President Trump. I surely might have missed some exceptions to that, but this is the first article I recall in this magazine that has had anything favorable to say about President Trump. Prof. Schweller also notes some foreign and domestic policy successes of the Trump administration: "... A year into Trump’s first term, the Islamic State, or ISIS—a fascist organization, by the way—had been virtually defeated in Syria and eliminated from all its havens in Iraq, thanks to the Trump administration’s decision to equip the largely Kurdish militia fighting ISIS in Syria and give U.S. ground commanders greater latitude to direct operations. All the while, Trump has continued the Obama doctrine of avoiding large-scale conventional wars in the Middle East and has succeeded where his predecessor failed in enforcing a real red line against Bashar al-Assad’s use of nerve gas in Syria by launching targeted air strikes in response. In North Korea, Trump’s strategy of 'maximum pressure' has cut the country’s international payments by half, forcing Kim Jong Un to realize that his only choice is to negotiate."

"On the domestic front, the unemployment rate fell to 3.8 percent in May, a level not seen since the heady days of the dot-com boom—with unemployment at an all-time low among African Americans; at or near multidecade lows among Hispanics, teenagers, and those with less than a high school education; and at a 65-year low among women in the labor force. Meanwhile, on Trump’s watch, the stock market and consumer confidence have hit all-time highs, the number of mortgage applications for new homes has reached a seven-year high, and gas prices have fallen to a 12-year low. Finally, with Trump pledging to bring to an end the era in which 'our politicians seem more interested in defending the borders of foreign countries than their own,' illegal immigration was reduced by 38 percent from November 2016 to November 2017, and in April 2017, the U.S. Border Patrol recorded 15,766 apprehensions at the southwestern border—the lowest in at least 17 years. ..."

The magazine is published by the Council on Foreign Relations, which is notorious for being a propaganda organ established by the same powerful interests who have been striving to rip apart our precious experiment in self-government since we declared independence from England. As odious as they might be, every crooked politician is far down from the top of this well-organized group. A book by former John Birch Society CEO Arthur R. Thompson (To the Victor Go the Myths and Monuments, 2016) includes a lot of information about many coordinated efforts to push God out of the public square and replace Him with global governance.

Randall L. Schweller is Professor of Political Science, Director of the Program for the Study of Realist Foreign Policy, a Social and Behavioral Sciences Joan N. Huber Faculty Fellow at Ohio State University, and editor-in-chief of Security Studies. Schweller joined OSU in 2004. He is the author of Maxwell’s Demon and the Golden Apple: Global Discord in the New Millennium (Johns Hopkins University, 2014); Unanswered Threats: Political Constraints on the Balance of Power (Princeton University Press, 2006); and Deadly Imbalances: Tripolarity and Hitler’s Strategy of World Conquest (Columbia University Press, 1998). He has also published many articles in leading journals, including World Politics, International Studies Quarterly, International Security, American Political Science Review, Global Governance, American Journal of Political Science, Review of International Studies, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, The National Interest, International Theory, and Security Studies. He is currently a member of the editorial boards of International Security, Security Studies, Foreign Affairs Review (China), and the Studies in Asian Security book series published by Stanford University Press.

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