The Elite Hates The Trump Doctrine Because It Puts America First

Written by Kurt Schlicter — Townhall

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not represent the views of Townhall

What our betters – those same smug geniuses who brought us Iraq, let NATO deadbeats string us along, and who let Mexico and China exploit us – truly hate is the fact that the American people stood up in 2016 and demanded that our foreign policy stop sucking.

Americans are sick of always getting handed the bill for some lame ruling caste priority, whether it’s paying for the privilege of defending Europe on behalf of ungrateful continentals or funding the weird climate religion or letting China get rich off of gutting our industries. Mostly, we are sick of shipping our magnificent warriors off to die in ill-conceived, poorly-planned, ineptly-executed wars where we ended up shedding our boys’ (and girls’) blood refereeing fights that go back a dozen centuries.

The coastal elite gets to bask in the radiance of its own moral superiority for deploying young people in camo from Nebraska farms and Texas towns, and we get to hold the funerals. 

Hard pass.

We’re done being suckers. We’re done being at the back of a line that consists of the entire world when it comes to who our master caste protects. And we’re done with the elite cashing-in – have you noticed that all the outrage out there among the hoi polloi is directed not at the manifest corruption itself but at Donald Trump for calling out the manifest corruption of noted-Boliviaphile Hoover McPaternity Biden?

America First is a commonsense response to decades of America Last. It’s a repudiation of those who get elected by Americans to protect and promote American interests yet think of themselves as “Global Citizens.” 

The elite scoffs at the notion of a “Trump Doctrine,” imagining that no one but them could construct a coherent geopolitical paradigm. Of course, their neo-Wilsonian faculty lounge geopolitical paradigm has been a disaster, but if there’s one thing our garbage elite is good at – it is certainly no good at its core responsibilities of preserving American power, prosperity and freedom – it is weaseling out of accountability for its myriad failures.

Yet the Trump Doctrine – the notion that American power should be directed toward serving the interests of the American people – is a coherent foreign policy vision of the kind we have not had in the United States for decades. For the last 35 years, since the Reagan Doctrine of using American power to bring down the Soviet Union, we have had no coherent framework within which we could develop sensible national strategies. 

The Cold War ended and we sort of implemented a mishmash of strategies, but without a clear objective to aim them at like the Reagan and Trump Doctrines offer. One strategy was to try to turn nations toward global mega-corporate capitalism, but the purpose of that was what? How was it helpful to America when we subsidized international development through bad trade deals that wrecked our manufacturing base and traumatized our working class? Sure, it was helpful to the pocketbooks of the globalist elite’s US Franchise, but if you want to see the true cost walk through the opioid-scarred, despairing ruins of the Midwest that are only now, under Trump, stirring back to life.

And then there was the strategy of encouraging “freedom” (the Bush Doctrine was less a doctrine than a subordinate strategy), as if the denizens of these backwaters were yearning for Jeffersonian Democracy rather than a chance for their own tribe to take charge and get their shot at some prime pillaging.

What this turned out to entail was us deploying then going beyond killing the people who needed killing and sticking around afterwards to try to turn populations of Third World psychos into lil’ Norman Rockwell subjects. Sometimes it worked out okay – Kosovo went fine, though we’ve been there 20 years. Sometimes it went disastrously – Iraq’s free in the same way Brian Stelter is ripped. And sometimes it just went on and on – how many decades have we been in Afghanistan again?

In the hands of our loser elite, now the term “Democracy” is to American foreign policy as the term “fetch” is to Mean Girls.

I watched Secretary of State Mike Pompeo articulate the Trump Doctrine at this year’s Claremont Institute dinner with the kind of depth and clarity our useless foreign policy elite can only dream of (BTW, you know that the right is embracing conservative wokeness when the loaded donor class boos as pictures of George Will and Paul Ryan flash on-screen). He was remarkable and worth watching. In the hands of Secretary Pompeo and other believers (as opposed to the Deep State moles in the foreign policy bureaucracy), the Trump Doctrine means an on-going re-ordering of our foreign relations priority toward the only proper priority – American interests. 

You see that when Donald Trump wields US economic power by imposing tariffs (Oh, summon the smelling salts!) on China to finally force it into an equal relationship with the United States. This horrifies those who are quite willing to put up with the PRC’s trade malfeasance because it lines their pockets, or because taking the side of US workers is just too hard, or because zombie Milton Freidman would be sad.

You see it when Ambassador to Germany Ric Grenell spins the euroweenies into a tizzy by demanding that they stroke checks for their fair share of the NATO bill. My favorite elite talking point is always how demanding members pay the dough they owe to defend against Russia helps Putin because [reasons]. And you also see it when Grenell drops the figurative Adam Schiff in the party punchbowl and demands the Krauts and the Frogs and all the rest stop playing business-as-usual footsie with the mullahs in Tehran.

But mostly you see it when the President avoids new wars no matter how hard the smart set demands he create his own quagmire. Iran has been ham-handedly trying to provoke a fight by poking our allies. Trump won’t bite. He sees the trap. And in Syria, he is keeping his promise to leave. There’s always a good reason for going into these conflicts (ISIS is bad), and there’s always a good reason to stay (Many Kurds are fine people). But there are betterreasons to pack up and leave. The phase “endless war” used to be irritating, except then it became clear that’s exactly what many foreign policy “experts” are advocating. If your exit criteria for closing out some overseas adventure is “We can leave when things are stable” in a place that hasn’t been stable in 5000 years, you are advocating for “endless war.”

Getting out of wars requires getting out of wars. And sometimes, it’s going to be ugly. But unless you can explain to the family of a dead soldier why it’s worth it to stay, it’s not worth it to stay. The American people, at least those who aren’t in DC or the media, understand that every problem around the world is not our problem. If you’re one of those Citizens of the World, then feel free to enlist in the Army of the World. Just count us out of your bloody altruism.

It’s particularly galling to see people you know would screech if Trump used force (like against NATO ally Turkey) screeching because he won’t. President Trump ought to throw this back in their pouty faces and tell them that if the members of the House and Senate are so eager for war, they should avail themselves of the Constitution’s War Powers Clause at Article I, Section 8, Clause 11, and declare one. Let them sign on the line that is dotted if they’re so psyched to rumble in Whocaresistan.

But they won’t. Our representatives know full well that the people back home voting next November don’t think like the smarmy suits from McLean and Foggy Bottom these elected officials mingle with over cocktails in Georgetown. The American people have had enough of stupid trade deals, of stupid border shenanigans and of stupid wars. 

The Trump Doctrine is really just a fancy name for the common sense view that America’s leaders should use American power to advance the interests of Americans. And that’s why the elite hates it.