Will Trump Lose the World or Reshape It? Two Views
Where is President Donald Trump’s foreign policy taking us? Two prominent observers of the international scene look at the same facts yet come to very different conclusions. Hal Brands, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, penned a piece in Bloomberg that contends that Trump’s focus on the Western Hemisphere risks stripping American resources from Europe and the Middle East. Walter Russell Mead in the Wall Street Journal argues that far from being a hemispheric isolationist, Trump is reshaping the globe. Who is right?
Brands has a history of demeaning Trump’s approach to the world. He is an Atlanticist and a Eurasianist who believes that the United States must continue to take the lead in defending Europe, our allies in the Middle East and in Asia. Brands is fond of invoking Sir Halford Mackinder’s geopolitical concepts, but he does so selectively by omitting Mackinder’s last iteration of those concepts made during the Second World War. Brands seems to believe that America’s interests in the geopolitical pluralism of Eurasia means that we must be equally strong and equally committed to Europe, the Middle East, and the Indo-Pacific. But that is a recipe for imperial overstretch, as Walter Lippmann warned in his small but important book The Cold War in 1947.
Brands surprisingly praises Trump’s reinvigoration of the Monroe Doctrine, though he criticizes Trump’s “meddling” in Brazilian politics, his threatening messages to Greenland and Panama, his mass deportations of illegal aliens to Latin American nations, his attacks on narco-terrorists in the Caribbean, and his aggressiveness toward Venezuela. Apparently, Brands wants Trump to be kindler and gentler in his approach to our hemispheric neighbors. But Brands mainly worries that Trump’s America First policies are weakening our position in Eurasia.
Walter Russell Mead sees things quite differently. Trump, he writes, is busy all over the world engaging in a “blizzard of activity,” including negotiating trade deals with, and imposing tariffs on, friends and foes; attacking narco-terrorists at sea; escalating the conflict with Venezuela; promoting the fragile ceasefire in Gaza; threatening Islamists and the regime in Nigeria over the massacre of Christians; and his whirlwind trip to Asia, including a meeting with Japan’s new prime minister and China’s President Xi. Mead also cites President Trump’s recent interview on 60 Minutes, where he demonstrated, in Mead’s view, that he “isn’t retreating from the world. He aims to reshape it.”
Mead understands that the United States is a global maritime power. Where Brands invokes Mackinder, Mead would invoke Alfred Thayer Mahan. Back in 2008, Mead wrote an important book titled God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World, which celebrated America’s use of capitalism and sea power to promote and protect its global interests. “The decisive factor in the success of the English-speaking world,” he wrote, “is that both the British and Americans came from a culture that was uniquely well positioned to develop and harness the titanic forces of capitalism as they emerged on the world scene.”
For Mead, Mahan’s concept of sea power combined economic and military means to promote U.S. interests:
In Mahan’s sense, sea power is more than a navy. It is more than control of strategic trade routes. It means using the mobility of the seas to build a global system resting on economic links as well as on military strength. It means using the strategic flexibility of an offshore power, protected to some degree from the rivalries and hostilities of land powers surrounded by powerful neighbors, to build power strategies that other countries cannot counter. It means using command of the seas to plant colonies whose wealth and success reinforce the mother country. It involves developing a global system that is relatively easy to establish and which, once developed, proves extremely difficult to dislodge.
Mackinder, too, understood the value of sea power. In Britain and the British Seas, Mackinder wrote: “The unity of the ocean is the simple physical fact underlying the dominant value of sea-power in the modern globe-wide world.”
Unlike Brands, Trump understands that American resources are not limitless and American interests are not equal in the Western Hemisphere, Europe, the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific. Geography dictates that our first priority is the Western Hemisphere. China and India’s rise—both Mahan and Mackinder predicted this development—dictate that our second priority must be the Indo-Pacific. Europe and the Middle East, while not unimportant, are now peripheral interests to the U.S. in global geopolitics. So, Mead is right, and Brands is wrong.
Francis P. Sempa writes on military and foreign policy.