Trump and “Deviationism” from the US Foreign Policy Consensus

I’ve gotten some pushback on Twitter for the following tweet:

Fair enough; Twitter is by nature a limited medium and this particular tweet could benefit from some clarification.

First of all, the tweet is not necessarily a normative one. That is to say: it’s not a statement that because of Trump’s deviations, it’s therefore a good idea to support him. I’ve proclaimed over and over again, ad nauseam, that I don’t advocate anyone vote for Trump. And that I personally oppose Trump. That still won’t be good enough for some people, but it’s the truth.

Second: Because the tweet is not normative, it’s not a suggestion that Trump’s deviations are necessarily in of themselves “good” simply by virtue of being deviations. Put another way: a deviation from the foreign policy status quo might reap good consequences, or it might reap bad ones. Either way, it’s a deviation.

One potentially bad deviation with respect to Trump is his apparent predilection to seize natural resources of nations that have come under United States military bombardment. That’s a deviation, for the worse.

But one deviation for the better is his apparent aversion to getting involved in such conflicts in the first place. Yes, there’s debate over whether he literally “opposed the Iraq War.” See my NY Daily News item for more on that. Regardless of the precise timing of when he announced his opposition to the Iraq War — and recall that he was a celebrity pundit at the time rather than a politician entering formal positions in the public record — Trump has evinced a skepticism toward American misadventures over the years, both prior to his 2016 candidacy and during. Often it is couched in nationalistic bombast. But it’s a strain of “anti-interventionism” nevertheless. There’s always been a strain of anti-interventionism in American politics that is fundamentally nationalistic at base, and therefore comes dressed up in all the typical patriotic jargon.

This isn’t to say that Trump is any kind of pure anti-interventionist, it’s that he adheres to one imperfect, sometimes nasty strand of it.

In other areas, he does deviate sharply from the prevailing American foreign policy consensus, in ways which — taken at face value at least — could be interpreted as “good.” The first is his consistent calls for cooperation, or detente, with Russia. It really needs to be emphasized that this is virtually the exact same posture taken by the Obama administration up until about two weeks ago. Obama and Kerry feverishly worked to broker some kind of cooperative “military partnership” with the Russians. (In my view, this task was complicated both by domestic US political concerns, namely Hillary’s relentless anti-Russia antagonism, as well as developments on the ground in Syria, such as the Russian military’s attacks on civilians.)

In working toward cooperation with Russia, Obama and Kerry are themselves outside the foreign policy consensus to some degree. That might seem counter-intuitive: how can the sitting president and secretary of state be anything but the foreign policy consensus personified? The answer is that notwithstanding Obama/Kerry, the bipartisan drift in Washington militates against cooperation with Russia. And it’s only gotten much worse given recent developments, in the presidential campaign and elsewhere.

So if Trump adopts Obama’s posture, he too will be outside the foreign policy consensus. That doesn’t mean it’d be “Good” if Trump abets every Putin bombing campaign in Syria, it’s just to say that his instinct to forge cooperation rather than antagonism is a deviation, and possibly a deviation with positive upsides.

Then you have Trump’s longstanding opposition to arming “rebels,” which he again articulated at the debate Sunday night. Hillary Clinton expounds the foreign policy consensus view of continuing to arm such rebels, even where they are terroristic fanatics like Al Qaeda. Trump’s not been consistent on many things throughout the 2016 campaign, but he’s been relatively consistent on blanching at the notion of arming these mysterious moderate “rebels,” whom he frequently notes could be “worse than the people before.”

Hillary also continues to claim that the Libya intervention (which she directly spearheaded) was a good idea, while Trump has cast doubt on that notion.

Even with regard to the Iran Deal, which Trump has opposed from the outset, the reasons he cites for the opposition are somewhat deviational. Mostly his problem is that it wasn’t a good “deal” in the Trumpian sense, meaning that the United States didn’t get back enough money/prestige or whatnot for the deal to have been worth it. His problem is not so much that the deal empowers Iran and jeopardizes Israel (although he’ll occasionally mouth stuff along these lines when his advisors feed him the proper phraseology.) Again, this isn’t an endorsement of Trump’s deviationism with regard to Iran, it’s just an acknowledgement that it exists. The GOP almost universally opposed the Iran Deal, but it generally was not for the reasons Trump cites.

So in brief, that’s why I characterize Trump as a “deviation” with respect to the American foreign policy consensus.