Trump faced two options. He could take the criticism in stride and steer the conversation at the G7 toward issues that could unite the allies. Or he could play the role of sore loser and sow deeper division. None of us were surprised when he veered toward the latter. Advisors braced for the summit to be a failure before Air Force One ever left Washington.
The prediction that the event was going to be “bad” became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The hosts were upset when the president arrived late. Trump berated other leaders about “unfair trade practices.” He grew irritated with Japanese prime minister Shinzō Abe, at one point apparently telling him in a meeting: “Shinzō, you don’t have this problem [of illegal immigration], but I can send you twenty-five million Mexicans and you’ll be out of office very soon.” He tossed Starburst candy at German chancellor Angela Merkel, remarking, “Here, Angela. Don’t say I never give you anything.” And then he left the summit early, rounding off the visit with a tweetstorm blasting Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau as “so meek and mild… very dishonest & weak,” and announcing that the United States was backing out of the joint statement signed only hours earlier with the other leaders.
What a horrible mess, I thought. This isn’t how we’d act toward our enemies at an international summit, and these were our close friends. Not only that, we’d wasted an opportunity to show solidarity with them on important issues where we had common interests. Perhaps worst of all, the president alarmed everyone at the summit by publicly calling for a nation-state rival, Russia, to be readmitted into the G7 meetings. Russia had been cast out of the group over its invasion of Crimea. Since then, Vladimir Putin had done little to demonstrate he was a responsible world partner, but the president questioned why the allies should meet at all if Moscow wasn’t invited. It was as if Putin himself had written Trump’s talking points.
In any event, Trump didn’t care about the tiny trail of destruction he left on the way out of Canada. His mind was elsewhere. He was flying to make new friends, on the other side of the world. The G7 was merely a distraction standing in the way of the month’s main event: his meeting with Kim Jong Un, the brutal dictator of North Korea. Trump would later reveal it was the meeting where he and Kim “fell in love.”
National security is the most important responsibility of the commander in chief. He must protect the American people against external threats and provide for the safety and security of the nation. Everything else is secondary to this charge. The primary domain for achieving lasting security is in foreign policy. That’s where the president must have clear-cut plans to keep our extended neighborhood safe by working closely with like-minded allies and keeping dangerous adversaries at arm’s length.
President Trump doesn’t see the world this way. It’s never been fully clear to me why, but he’s flipped the script, distancing himself from America’s friends and courting its foes. He regularly discards the advice of seasoned foreign policy professionals in the administration. He has struggled to develop a coherent security strategy, leaving “America First” open to interpretation and changing his mind on consequential decisions without warning. Worst of all, he has seemingly abandoned a century-long consensus about America’s role as leader of the free world.
Empire of Liberty
To put President Trump’s foreign policy into context, it’s important to understand history. Prior to the twentieth century, we are taught, the United States was an isolationist country. In his farewell address, George Washington said it was America’s policy to “steer clear” of foreign entanglements. John Quincy Adams declared twenty-five years later that the United States was not a nation that went “abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” America didn’t become an assertive country, the story goes, until it boldly intervened in the First World War and turned the tide against fascism. This is an oversimplistic rendering.
Since its earliest days, the United States has been an expansionist nation, focused on shaping international developments. The Founding Fathers predicted their young republic would become a strong country, if not the world’s strongest. In the same speech quoted above, President Washington outlined a vision for America to be mighty enough “to bid defiance to any power on earth.” The other Founders shared his aim and believed the United States was a “Hercules in a cradle,” destined one day to flex its muscles globally and create an “empire of liberty.” In the short term, those ambitions were tempered by the need to build the country’s institutions to a competitive level, but once it gained the requisite strength, the United States began spreading its ideals in far-off places.
The continuous effort to shape a more democratic world became a unifying theme, even as the White House changed hands. Historians note that nearly every president in the last hundred years embraced this foreign-policy consensus. Democrat Woodrow Wilson vowed that America would stand for “the principles of a liberated mankind… whether in war or in peace.” Republican Dwight Eisenhower said the country would strive to strengthen the “special bonds” between free people “the world over.” While some presidents were more hawkish than others about reinforcing democracies overseas, variations of the same theme were carried forward from Kennedy to Obama.
Donald Trump is the clear outlier. After getting sworn in, he took shots at his predecessors’ foreign adventurism. “For many decades,” he said, “we’ve… subsidized the armies of other countries while allowing for the very sad depletion of our military; we’ve defended other nations’ borders while refusing to defend our own; and spent trillions of dollars overseas while America’s infrastructure has fallen into disrepair and decay. We’ve made other countries rich while the wealth, strength, and confidence of our country has disappeared over the horizon.” It was a call to pull back and look inward.
Each of Trump’s claims are false and his attempted point is based on a short-sighted view of history. We would be far worse off today if the United States hadn’t invested in the success of our friends. America would be poorer and less secure, struggling to fend off hostile countries in a more menacing global neighborhood. Instead, we played an active role in the world, which went from being composed almost entirely of dictatorships and monarchies to being majority democratic thanks to our efforts. This opened markets for our goods, facilitated the spread of knowledge, and gave us new partners who would have our backs in times of trouble.
America’s dominant role on the international stage is at risk today. Rising nations are trying to compete against the United States. Henry Kissinger forecast this development a quarter century ago, predicting that in our time America would “be the greatest and most powerful nation, but a nation with peers.” Kissinger argued that the emergence of rivals should not be seen as a “symptom of national decline.” It’s not proof that we overextended ourselves, as Trump says. Competition is a fact of life. Kissinger noted that for most of its existence the United States was not the sole superpower, so “the rise of other power centers” shouldn’t surprise us. We should be concerned, however, if those rivals do not share our values and try to deconstruct the world America built.