Since his first term in office, President Donald Trump has been pushing his “America First” agenda, pledging to undo what he has described as U.S. allies taking advantage of the U.S.
“We’ve been ripped off for decades by nearly every country on Earth, and we will not let that happen any longer,” Trump said before a joint session of Congress last week.
Trump’s embrace of this ideology is nothing new.
Back in September 1987, when he was a real estate developer in New York City, he reportedly spent about $100,000 to buy full-page ads in three major newspapers, featuring an open letter he penned headlined: “There’s nothing wrong with America’s Foreign Defense Policy that a little backbone can’t cure.”
In that letter, Trump claimed Japan and other countries had been taking advantage of the U.S. for years.
“Why are these nations not paying the United States for the human lives and billions of dollars we are losing to protect their interests?” he asked.
Now, nearly 38 years later, Trump seems to espouse those exact same views, rejecting the rules-based international order the U.S. has painstakingly built over decades.
Matthew Schmidt, an associate professor of national security and political science at the University of New Haven, told HuffPost Trump is, in essence, “destroying the idea and practice of collective security.”
Trump, Schmidt explained, is not just pursuing an “America First” agenda, but operating under the flawed mindset that the U.S. does not need institutions like the UN and NATO because it can secure itself unilaterally.
“The problem is that you’re facing a world with those same [weapons of mass destruction] threats, only now instead of nukes, it’s nukes and bio weapons and artificial intelligence,” Schmidt said. “And the only way to rein in the proliferation and to establish norms of behavior with these weapons, potential weapons and accelerators of weapons like AI, is through collective security.”
Since taking office in January, Trump has said the EU “was formed in order to screw the United States;” imposed tariffs on U.S. allies; temporarily froze U.S. aid and intelligence sharing with Kyiv; threatened to annex Greenland and Canada; claimed he wants the U.S. to “take over the Gaza Strip”; oversaw the U.S. voting against a UN resolution condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; cast doubt on the U.S.’s commitment to NATO; and worked to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Schmitt warned that the effects of Trump’s moves to destroy structures that have kept the U.S. safe for 80 years will be felt for generations to come.
“If you don’t have these institutions in place, the threat, the nature of the threat to our kids and grandkids, is going to be enormous, again because we’ve reverted to a 19th-century security model with 20th- and 21st-century threats,” he added.
Besides exposing the U.S. to far greater threats, Trump’s foreign policy is likely to leave America’s adversaries relatively unscathed, according to CNN anchor Fareed Zakaria.
“We have more leverage with Canada than we have with Russia because Canada depends on us for security. Canada trades with us a lot. Its economy is intricately tied to the U.S. economy,” Zakaria told The New York Times’ Ezra Klein.
“So you can bully Canada. But you can’t really bully Russia that much because we don’t do much trade with them. You can’t bully China,” he added.
And yet Trump seems ready to make major concessions to Russia when it comes to its war in Ukraine, which could in turn also benefit Beijing.
While former President Joe Biden pledged to support Ukraine “as long as it takes” following its invasion by Russia on Feb. 24, 2022, Trump has ruled out maintaining his predecessor’s commitment to backing the traditional U.S. ally — a democracy invaded by an authoritarian country — while openly questioning why the U.S. has spent so much to support Ukraine.
Crucially, he does not appear to see Russian President Vladimir Putin as an enemy of the U.S. He regularly sides with Moscow, echoing the Kremlin’s talking points by, among other things, calling for elections in Ukraine, and temporarily cutting off aid and intelligence sharing with Kyiv days after publicly scolding Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office.
Nigel Gould-Davies, a senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, writes that those who argue that inching closer to Russia could work to the U.S.’s advantage by severing Moscow’s ties to China are misguided, adding that it would simply allow Russia to negotiate its cooperation with Beijing on better terms.
“Russia could thus secure a privileged position in a new strategic triangle, enjoying better relations with the U.S. and China than they have with one another,” he said.
Meanwhile, Trump could also end up driving Europe closer to China.
William Matthews, a senior research fellow in the Asia-Pacific program at the London-based think tank Chatham House, has argued that Europe engaging with China on a peace agreement that would give both Ukraine and the continent a seat at the table would be a risk worth taking amid fears that the U.S. could sideline the two from a potential deal with Russia.
“Reaching out to China — which is a greater strategic threat to the U.S. than Europe — would demonstrate to the U.S. that its approach carries risks, and would also show that Europe has the resolve to act in a world of great power politics,” Matthews told HuffPost.
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Matthews added that “broadly a divergence of U.S. and European interests is favorable to China.”
“If Europe is more concerned with Russia and cannot rely on the U.S., then it will be more likely to engage with China,” he added.
If Europe were to choose this route, the U.S. would effectively strike an own goal, expanding Beijing’s sphere of influence at a moment when members of the Trump administration have repeatedlystressed they consider China to be the No. 1 threat.