Daniel DePetris of The Spectator tells us what Donlad Trumps foreign policy might look like in a second term. He writes (abridged):
Former president Donald Trump is in a world of legal trouble. Not only is he the first president in history to be impeached twice, he holds the unenviable distinction of being the first president to be indicted. He doesn’t do things by half-measures — he’s been indicted twice. So far, he faces a total of seventy-one criminal charges of various severity in two separate investigations, from falsifying business records and retention of national defense information to obstruction of justice. And as this magazine goes to press, we still haven’t heard from Fani Willis in Georgia, or from the second Jack Smith investigation.
Yet despite his legal woes, Trump remains a top contender for the highest office in the land. Polls show him besting Florida governor Ron DeSantis by thirty-eight points for the GOP presidential nomination and smoking former New Jersey governor Chris Christie by sixty. In head to head matchups, Trump is either leading President Biden by a few points or losing by a couple. It’s not an endorsement but an acknowledgment of real possibility to say that Trump has a good chance of becoming the first president since Grover Cleveland to win a second, non-consecutive term in office. Let’s say Trump does win. On the home front, he has promised an unchained version of his first term, with an emphasis on the uncompromising pursuit of his political enemies. What about foreign policy, which tends to be more stable across administrations? How would it change?
Such predictions are never easy to make with confidence; someone as unpredictable as Trump ratchets up the uncertainty. But that isn’t stopping other countries from guessing about, and preparing for, a second Trump term. Germany, which was his giant punching bag during Trump’s first White House stint, is already gaming out various possibilities and reaching out to the former president’s inner circle to prepare for a “Trump-Comeback” — what Der Spiegel calls “the worst-case scenario.”
To the extent the former president has a worldview of his own, it is best understood as a smorgasbord of nationalism and pseudomercantilism. Historically, US presidents tend to be welcoming, if not overly deferential, to allies in Europe and East Asia. Trump, by contrast, is intensely suspicious of allies; indeed, he views the very concept of alliance as a potential threat to US wealth and flexibility. Whereas Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Joe Biden have all regarded the US-led alliance system as a valuable commodity in international statecraft, Trump sees it as a burden to the US taxpayer at best, and a rip-off most of the time.
This is a rare fixed point in Trump’s political life. He was riffing on Japan as far back as the 1980s, for “taking advantage of the United States” and arguing for high tariffs on Japanese goods. Trump has long considered European countries the equivalent of lazy house cats who have forgotten how to protect themselves in the wild. NATO was a ripe target throughout his presidency, and he wasn’t afraid to use the customary summits in Brussels to blast the organization for expecting the US to do most of the work. In 2017, Trump insisted that “NATO members must finally contribute their fair share and meet their financial obligations.” A year later, he singled out Germany for relying on the US to protect it from Russia, even as Berlin spent billions of dollars importing Russian natural gas. Senior administration officials even told the New York Times in 2019 that Trump was openly talking about withdrawing from NATO.
South Korea and Japan experienced the Trump wrath as well. Talks on how much money Seoul and Tokyo should contribute to housing US troops there, normally a boring affair, resembled a cage match. The Trump administration demanded the South Koreans increase their contributions by a whopping 400 percent. Trump wanted Japan, which hosts around 50,000 US troops, to quadruple its own contributions. He made his rationale clear: if you want continued US protection, you ought to pay for it.
It’s hard to envision any of these core beliefs changing in the event of a second Trump term. As the popular saying goes, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. This certainly applies to Trump, who has been reiterating the same points about America getting screwed by friends and foes alike since he first flirted with running for president four decades ago. It’s as much a part of his public image as the hand gestures and red tie. To abandon these talking points now would be a not-so-subtle acknowledgment from the man himself that the Trump worldview is flawed.
Therefore, if Trump were to sit in the big chair again, none of us should be surprised if he puts this tough-on-allies theme squarely at the front of his foreign policy. Just as he removed the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, the climate accord and the Iran nuclear deal, Trump will walk away or at the very least try to reopen whatever foreign deals the Biden administration negotiates. NATO bureaucrats who have grown comfortable with President Biden’s traditional internationalist outlook will yet again find themselves at the table with a US president demanding Europeans start taking responsibility for their own affairs. One can’t rule out Trump’s pontificating in public about removing the US from NATO altogether, although such a scheme would likely be blocked by Congress — even more so if the war in Ukraine is still ongoing.
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