In foreign policy terms, the Trump administration was billed as a welcome departure from the Biden administration’s timidity and general aversion to coherent strategic action. But it’s too early to be certain. Trump’s initial personnel choices and opening policy moves, and the broader theory of foreign policy behind them, imply not robust American assertiveness — or even Reaganesque peace through strength — but rather a 21st-century version of détente. This is strategically problematic, particularly as a revisionist Eurasian axis is primed for a major war. Recovering from a potential détente would be far more difficult than rebuilding American power and credibility today.
The idea behind détente is that adversaries can coexist, limiting confrontation through dialogue and careful diplomatic management. By forestalling large-scale conflict or an extensive military buildup, they can focus on other priorities. The United States pursued such a policy in the 1960s and 1970s. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger sought a further relaxation of tensions from 1969 onward, given stress on the American economy, social divisions, and a military badly traumatized by an open-ended Indo-Chinese adventure. The hope was that, by toggling between Beijing and Moscow while building cooperation with both, the United States could gradually demarcate Cold War competition. Détente did generate some benefits — the direct U.S.–USSR–China balance became noticeably less inflamed. But in secondary theaters, Soviet aggression, what we might today term hybrid warfare, never stopped. The result of détente, particularly after a decade of limited U.S. investment in military modernization, was an emboldened Soviet Union that invaded Afghanistan in 1979.
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