The Trump Turn: Shaping the Next Decade of American Foreign Policy

by Richard Grennell

The goal of American foreign policy in the decade ahead will be the creation of a world order in which the United States achieves intensive economic growth and technological innovation, to the degree that its national defense and primacy within the order are assured. The task for American diplomacy will be to tend this system by enforcing a global balance of power, and to persuade others that cooperation with US objectives is the best guarantee of their independence and prosperity.

To reach this outcome, the United States must focus on four key aims: (1) improve America’s position within the global system by reshaping it on terms more favorable to US interests and values; (2) form new alliances and deterrence capabilities and better mobilize established ones; (3) outcompete America’s adversaries in scientific and technological innovation; and (4) provide the world with economic and security goods that no other power is able or willing to deliver.

These aims will make it difficult to accurately define the United States of 2020 using the traditional great power categories of revisionist or status quo. Typically, a status quo power engages in competition, conflict, and compromise only to perpetuate the existing order, such as Great Britain during the 18th and 19th centuries, or the United States in the First Gulf War. A revisionist power, such as Napoleonic France, rejects the order’s basic architecture and seeks to overturn it. By remaking the current system to better reflect US national interests, and attempting to reach a fundamentally different and better future, the United States will likely embrace certain limited qualities of both a revisionist and a status quo power. 

This ambition does not require the United States to renounce all prior objectives. Certain longstanding goals of American foreign policy remain. The United States still aspires to leadership and prosperity under the conditions of a rules-based multipolar system and expects other powers to compete within this system without attempting to challenge or destroy it. The United States seeks to persuade other powers to support US strategic goals with as little interference from Washington as possible. The United States strives to champion human rights, and to serve as a beacon of freedom and democracy. And the United States pursues consensus and cooperation as a condition of global stability.

But in other significant ways, the United States is parting with its recent past. A number of changes in the international environment in recent decades raised doubts about whether America’s performance under the previous system could sustain its position in the longer run. President Trump’s guiding principle is that it could not, and that the United States must go beyond the continued provision of conventional post-Cold War goods in a world that has profoundly changed. Whether the coronavirus pandemic alters the course of history or simply accelerates changes already underway, its biggest consequence will be the emergence of a different world order. 

A US Foreign Policy of Equilibrium

A balance of power creates a regional or global order in which an equilibrium of power is sufficient to prevent hostile states from achieving unilateral domination or chaos. Devoid as it is of moral absolutes, the balance of power as a concept often provokes fear of conflict. While some credit the balance of power for the century of relative peace in the European state system after the Napoleonic Wars, for example, others blame it for the catastrophic logic of power relationships that led to World War I.

In truth, there is nothing timeless about the balance of power as a strategic goal of US foreign policy. It proved necessary during World War II, when the United States partnered with the Soviet Union to defeat Nazi Germany. It was less advisable during some parts of the Cold War, when the United States provided backing to regimes in Latin America and the Middle East it would come to regret. It was squarely not in the US national interest after the fall of the Soviet Union, when no serious anti-American coalition emerged to counter it. 

But the balance of power should not have fallen as far out of favor as it did at the end of the Cold War. Interpreting that event as a permanent moral triumph rather than a strategic victory, NATO Secretary General Manfred Wörner could claim in 1990 that Europe either “lapses back into the old power politics and balance of power diplomacy of past centuries or it moves ahead along the road leading to a new order of peace and freedom.” In 1992, the Pentagon eliminated all references to the balance of power from its Defense Planning Guidance, declaring instead, “It is not in our interest or those of the other democracies to return to earlier periods in which multiple military powers balanced one another off in what passed for security structures, while regional, or even global peace hung in the balance.”

This revaluation of the balance of power as a categorical enemy of progress and peace led to an era of foreign policy blunders. To take one stark example, economic sanctions and the counterweight of a neighboring power helped keep the revolutionary regime in Tehran from upsetting the Middle Eastern balance for nearly three decades. In 2003, the United States removed the Iraqi counterweight, and in 2015, removed the limits on Iran’s financial resources. Only then could Iran unilaterally threaten the oil supply in the Persian Gulf, and gain control of foreign capitals from Baghdad and Damascus to Beirut and Sanaa. By tipping the delicate Middle Eastern balance in favor of a revisionist state, the United States condemned itself to continual involvement in the region. 

In 2017, the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy reintroduced the balance of power as a core objective of US foreign policy. The purpose of this objective in our time is to protect the Eurasian equilibrium from hostile powers like China, Russia, and Iran. The motivation is that a Eurasian balance favors the core US national interests of economic growth and national defense. The Trump administration does not see the balance of power as an end in itself, but as the best guarantee of geopolitical stability on which prosperity and safety at home depend. The coronavirus pandemic has exposed the instability of the current balance of forces, in which a hostile power has amassed sufficient power to threaten the equilibrium. 

Maintaining the Eurasian Balance of Power

There are two main ways the United States enforces a balance of power in key regional theaters and in the world as a whole. The first is to ensure the largest number of actors possible. A wide array of existing formal and informal alliances is America’s greatest asset. Major allies like NATO and the European Union (EU) in Europe; Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt in the Middle East; and Australia, Japan, and South Korea in the Pacific help ensure that hostile powers such as China, Russia, and Iran cannot unilaterally upset the balance of power in Eurasia or the Indo-Pacific. Power realities have changed, however, since many of these relationships were first formed. In 1958, for example, Italy had a bigger defense budget than India, and the Benelux economy was larger than China’s. Global bodies like the United Nations (UN) arguably played a constructive if limited role, and served as force multipliers for US power. But the relative decline of some traditional US allies, and the decay of the UN and other corrupt institutions, are being offset by deepening cooperation with newer allies. That is partly why the United States is pursuing ever-closer ties with India, Vietnam, Indonesia, the United Arab Emirates, and other Eurasian powers. 

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That the United States was destined to decline under such conditions remains one of the key foreign policy insights of President Trump, and drives his administration’s focus on the most powerful rule-breaker within the system, and thus the biggest challenge to the balance of power.

Meeting the Challenge of China

American diplomacy is currently forced to maintain two somewhat opposed concepts with regard to China: (1) Chinese power rests on precarious foundations, and (2) China’s desire to become the unchallenged hegemon of Eurasia is not farfetched. This seeming contradiction is explained by the logic of China’s primary national project, the Belt and Road Initiative.

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America cannot hope to prevent China’s ambitions by merely reaffirming the status quo ante, as several members of the US foreign policy establishment continue to argue. Instead, the United States is confronting China on the terms of its own ambition: To reduce American influence over the world system. 

Balancing Power in Europe and Asia

Under different circumstances, the United States would likely seek to balance Chinese power by forging closer ties with China’s most powerful neighbor. Unfortunately, the most logical counterweight to Beijing is also the most implausible. As long as Vladimir Putin presides in Moscow, Russia will not develop the economic strength to balance China, nor is it likely to choose a path—no matter the net gains to Russian national power—that would also benefit US interests. In fact, despite Russia’s historical inclination to remain an independent pole between Europe and Asia, Russia has felt compelled by circumstances to form an alliance of convenience with China. From Africa to the Arctic, gas pipelines to military exercises, Beijing and Moscow are collaborating along a number of strategic dimensions aimed at diminishing US power.

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Seizing Opportunities, Overcoming Challenges

Every administration proclaims a doctrine. But what does it take to achieve the new foreign policy goals identified by the Trump administration, and does the United States have the resources, determination, and foresight to do it? 

The United States embarks on this strategy with a number of advantages built up over generations. The most important is its aforementioned network of multilateral, bilateral, and informal alliances that keep the United States included in the big strategic questions facing key regional theaters and help shape a consensus in support of US objectives.

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Recovering the National Interest 

Tying this all together is a development no less significant to the future of the global system than the rise of China. Since 2017, the United States has recovered the national interest as the lode star of its foreign policy. In the wake of the last few decades, this is no small event.

What is common sense in most other societies, the national interest has always been a difficult concept for a people as idealistic as Americans, who have long been intoxicated by their own version of the convergence myth: That the arc of history bends towards justice. In a foreign policy context, the arc of history is meant to bend toward liberal democracy and market economics, regardless of the diverse national histories, traditions, and values of other societies.

At least dating back to the Woodrow Wilson administration, Americans had grown attached to the idea that the core objective of US foreign policy is to make every corner of the world safe for democracy. For Wilson’s ideological descendants, disagreements were mainly had over how to achieve the same goal—that is, over whether the United States should administer progress by actively intervening, or by simply getting out of the way. Even if the desirability of the goal was absolute, its soundness as a credible policy objective was seldom challenged.

This type of missionary foreign policy was destined for national and international instability. It carried the flawed assumption that all foreign societies must eventually reflect some version of the Western or American model. And it made the equally dangerous mistake of not constraining the objectives of US foreign policy with the country’s social, political, and military limitations. 

As obvious as they may appear in the political climate of 2020, these seemingly basic conceptual errors were all but baked into the strategic thinking of America’s governing class, leading presidents as different as Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama to make the same core mistakes. These leaders believed that the increase in the number of democracies in the world was inevitable and irreversible, and that this trend eliminated the need for old concepts like the national interest, geopolitical competition, and the balance of power. Thus US foreign policy almost depended for its coherence on unenforceable global accords, illusory transitions to democracy, and illusive “wars of ideas,” regardless of whether they had a clear understanding of the threats the United States faced or the outcomes it could realistically achieve.

For the first time since the end of the Cold War, the United States has shaken off its peculiar expectations of history. Nation-building, international protocols, and the absolutist promotion of Western-style democracy are no longer independent, standalone objectives of American foreign policy. Starting with domestic growth, innovation, and defense as its ultimate purposes, the Trump administration’s foreign policy has aimed instead to reshape a more stable and favorable global system. The core tenets of this foreign policy will likely guide the United States not only through the current pandemic, but also in the years to come.

Richard Grenell is currently the Special Presidential Envoy for Serbia-Kosovo Peace Negotiations and a Senior Fellow in the Institute of Politics and Strategy at Carnegie Mellon University. He has previously served as US Ambassador to Germany, Acting Director of National Intelligence, and US spokesperson at the United Nations.