Trump is working within the bounds of public opinion.
Trump is working within the bounds of public opinion.
M ay 2024 is the month in which Trump clarified his foreign policy for the world. In the middle of the month, Donald Trump traveled to Riyadh and made a stunning declaration:
In recent years, far too many American presidents have been afflicted with the notion that it’s our job to look into the souls of foreign leaders and use U.S. policy to dispense justice for their sins. . . . I believe it is God’s job to sit in judgement — my job [is] to defend America and to promote the fundamental interests of stability, prosperity, and peace.
He underlined, “My preference will always be for peace and partnership.”
By the end of the month, Trump’s team was trying to end three conflicts, pushing for a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, seeking to make a deal with Iran to stop its proxy wars with the U.S. and our allies, and cajoling Russia and Ukraine into peace talks. This is a president looking for a legacy, and that legacy includes expanding prosperity at home.
In all cases where Trump is seeking an end to conflict, he has held out the idea of development, deals, and restored commercial relations as part of the spoils of peace. Gaza should be a beautiful beach development, Iran could escape sanctions, Ukraine can partner with the U.S., and Russia, too, can see restored commercial relations.
As Rich Lowry pointed out, it was a direct repudiation of George W. Bush’s second inaugural, which sought to impose justice everywhere, promising to pursue “the great objective of ending tyranny” and securing the rights of all man to self-government.
Bush was operating under the theory that America could not be safe without a political and social transformation of the Middle East. Not just democracy, but liberal democracy. His then–Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld had outlined things nearly right after September 11: “We have a choice, either to change the way we live, which is unacceptable, or to change the way that they live, and we choose the latter.”
In the end, we ended up changing the way we live — from getting felt up at airport security, to allowing the government to spy on not just our library cards, but basically all the personal data in our cellphones, pioneering forms of warfare-like debanking that could be repurposed from fighting terrorism to managing domestic politics. Where we knocked over and weakened government authority in the Middle East (Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Syria), extremists flourished.
Looking at the wealth of places such as Riyadh and the Emirates, Trump said, “This great transformation has not come from Western interventionists . . . giving you lectures on how to live or how to govern your own affairs.” He might have also pointed out that it was precisely this wealth-building that seems to have enticed governments to invest in regional stability, which is why many Sunni states have tilted toward Israel in the Abraham Accords and further away from the terrorist proxies funded by Iran.
While hawks will castigate Trump as being naïve about the nature of certain regimes — arguing that Russia is inherently hostile to the flourishing of democracies, and that Iran is suicidally committed to Islamic revolution — the fact is that the United States has never treated all despotisms as hostile and has always operated under hard limits about how much we can “change how they live.”
The excesses of the Bush era have exhausted American patience and resources in the same way that the Spanish American War and World War I remade so many patriots into peace-seekers. Trump is working within the bounds of public opinion. You could even say that this abnormal president is making American into a normal country in normal times with no global mission but to protect America and its Constitution.