The meat of Uri Friedman’s piece at Atlantic speculating on the incipient Trump foreign policy is this paragraph:
During Trump’s presidency, transactional thinking—the freewheeling pursuit of deals—could become the organizing principle of the administration’s foreign policy, rather than one element of it, as in past administrations. Previously unthinkable bargaining chips—including, apparently, a vulnerable island of 23 million people in the Taiwan Strait—could come into play. The question of what is negotiable, and what isn’t, will be a persistent source of uncertainty. Is America’s commitment to the most peripheral members of the NATO military alliance a tradable asset? What about U.S. security commitments to countries like Japan and South Korea? Developments that initially seem like one thing (a phone call suggesting closer U.S. relations with Taiwan) could turn out to be another (an opening gambit in complex U.S. negotiations with China). Trump and his team may prove to be masterful negotiators on behalf of U.S. interests. Or they may prove to be dangerous or incompetent ones. As Dominic Tierney points out, Trump has so far signaled that he will fulfill Putin’s desires in Syria and Ukraine in exchange for the mere possibility of improved relations with Russia—pretty weak stuff from a guy who claims to drive a hard bargain.
U. S. foreign policy has always vacillated among competing interests—mercantile interests, idealistic (some would say ideological) interests, populist interests. For most of American history mercantile interests have dominated our relations with other countries and I don’t think we should be surprised if a Trump administration puts the hands of Hamiltonians (realist pragmatic mercantilists) at the tiller for the first time in twenty-five years. At this point it’s too early to tell.
I don’t think it’s too early to tell that Trump is going to be the least Wilsonian since WWII. I don’t know that he would undo any of the Wilsonian artifice, but Wilsonians tend to believe that constant, vigorous American leadership is essential to building international norms that promote democracy and human rights. So we’ll see what happens.
Trump appears to be comfortable with the notion of the business of America is business, and could fall completely within the Hamiltonian camp.
But he also suggests Jacksonian impulses when he talks about building up the military, focuses on treatment of veterans, and discusses removing limitations on the military or CIA that make it harder to win against a dishonorable opponent.
Finally, the incident with Taiwan suggested one of the attributes of Jeffersonianism that Mead described, a disinterest in the high language of diplomatic ministers. (It could be Jacksonian/Hamiltonian if its true that it was a staged exchange with a long-term strategy, but if it was indifference to the nuances that the U.S. is supposed to maintain, then it strikes me as Jeffersonian)
We’re thinking along the same lines, PD. I’m inclined to think that Trump has tropes rather than strategies but I wouldn’t be surprised if the trend that emerged was some sort of Jacksonian/Hamiltonian fusion. That’s been the case for much of U. S. history.
I think we could use a healthy dose of Jeffersonianism these days but then I’m a Jeffersonian so I would say that wouldn’t I? BTW so is Mead.
For those who haven’t read Special Providence, the following cribsheet is useful:
Both neo-cons and liberal interventionists are Wilsonians. Generally speaking, George H. W. Bush was Hamiltonian. Also generally speaking, Ike was Jacksonian.
It would be good to stop thinking of foreign policy in terms of chess. Chess is a game of perfect information, and is also zero sum in all cases.
The first means that both players can know everything there is to know by looking at the position and knowing who has the move. Does that sound like any real-life situation involving interactions between nation states?
The second point is that life and international relations aren’t always zero-sum games. It’s possible for both sides to get ahead in an interaction in real-life situations, or for bot sides to lose (think of WWI, for example). Or, most often, for both sides to win a little and lose a little on each encounter.
The analogy breaks down further the more one looks at it. It’s time to retire the analogy, though I’m sure it won’t be. It flatters too many people who don’t actually know anything about chess specifically or game theory more generally.
American “interests” are deceptively subjective.
Which is to say, if you are a neocon imperialist they are full spectrum dominance.
If you are a realist, you might share a little more sphere of influence with another longstanding empire.
If you are a patriotic nationalist, you understand as does Pat Buchanan, NATO itself is not necessary to maintain the interests of
the average American citizen, who gains nothing from the Empire.