LSE: The Ballpark | American foreign policy in the age of Trump with Professor Walter Russell Mead

My name is Walter Mead, and I write a weekly column on international relations for The Wall Street Journal. I teach at the University of Florida, and I'm a senior fellow at a Washington think tank. So, I kind of keep myself busy doing a lot of different things.

That would be hard to do. It's one of the most consequential years, I think, that any of us can remember. And it is much too early to know what all the impacts will be, or how far he's going to go in certain directions. But, we really can see it is people who were worried, or who perhaps hoped or believed that Trump was an isolationist, got that wrong. That Trump has been one of the most activist presidents we've had internationally, for good or for ill.

Some have thought that, well, maybe he was trying to carve out an American sphere of influence in the Western Hemisphere, which would leave other parts of the world for other powers. But, it really doesn't look like Trump believes that anybody but him should have a sphere of influence. And he doesn't seem to see any boundaries to this sphere where he would like to have that influence. So, it's an extremely ambitious agenda. How far successful he will be, who can tell. I think the current crisis in Iran will have a lot to do with how history views his success or lack of it in foreign relations. But, it is definitely one of the most interesting presidencies I think any of us have seen.

It looks to me as if Trump is conducting his own vision of a global foreign policy because you think about the tariffs, the international economic diplomacy that Trump has pursued. Clearly, he's fought with his allies in Asia, he's fought with his allies in Europe. So, he's not confining his attention to the Western Hemisphere. He has, however, been much more forceful. You can look at Venezuela and Cuba.

Those are two countries that for some time the US has had difficult relations with. But, where Trump has been able to kind of make his foreign policy look desirable to some of the people who voted for him. Then he said, 'Look, what are Venezuela and Cuba doing? Both of them are conducting such terrible economic policies that they're literally driving millions of their own citizens out as refugees, which creates big problems for the rest of the hemisphere. Venezuela especially, but to some degree Cuba is in league with drug cartels. And in that way, if you have a relative who's died of a fentanyl overdose, they've played some part in that.' And people would say, 'Well, the fentanyl and so on.' But, he still makes that point that they are contributing to the drug problem.

Then he would argue too that they're creating opportunities for Iran, for Russia, and China in the Western Hemisphere that undermine security. So, from the Trump point of view, that's three strikes. And unlike past presidents who I think shared a lot of that analysis as to what was wrong, Trump believes he found a way to do something about it with the abduction or the arrest of the president of Venezuela and holding their sort of oil sales up and saying, 'You can sell as much oil as I allow you to sell.' Which means in his mind, he thinks he can control events or shape events in Venezuela without having to have boots on the ground in Venezuela, which is a very interesting concept.

We don't know the end game here. So far I would say it is probably going a little better than some of his critics expected, but we've seen just the first act of a very long play. But it is a very, very dramatic set of events. Many observers looked at this and said, 'Wow, he's just going to do the Western Hemisphere. That's all he's going to care about.' I think what the Trump people would say in answer to that is the Western Hemisphere is a foundation of American foreign policy. Past administrations neglected the erosion of American power in the Western Hemisphere. So you have to correct that if you're serious about American power. But having corrected it, having strengthened your foundation, well then you go on to act in other places as well. I think that's how they are selling it. Again, we will all see how it comes out in the wash.

I think it's very important with Trump to realize that the source of his power in domestic politics and indeed internationally is he's found a way to turn eyeballs into political power. That is to say by capturing the world's imagination, for good or for bad. There are people who can't stop thinking about him because they hate him so much. And then there are others who just admire the spectacle and then he's got real fans. But that uncanny ability to dominate the media, to dominate the mental space of the human race. No living person in the history of humanity has occupied as large a share of our species bandwidth as Donald Trump has done. And this gives him a kind of a dominance, which we see him using very effectively in pursuit of more dominance for him, which again gives some people pause in the United States and in other places, but that's what's happening.

And so a slogan like America First, we should not think that Trump speaks in order to communicate information. He speaks often in order to elicit a certain response or to influence the audience. And America First is a great slogan for him. On the one hand, a lot of people hear that slogan and go, 'Oh my goodness, that was Charles Lindbergh in 1940. You're an anti-Semite. Oh, this is just horrible, horrible, horrible.' And they get all kind of bent out of shape in American politics, but Trump can then just sort of say, 'Well, what do you want me to say? America second? America third? Where should America be in the priority of an American president?' So he trolls his critics and opponents with that slogan while pleasing his supporters and his base. So for Trump, that's perfect. And he would just as soon have all his enemies focus on denouncing that slogan all day, all night long. He'd be happy with it.

Historically, American foreign policy has seen sort of several key areas for American operation. We've talked about the Western Hemisphere and Trump. There's the transatlantic relationship. And obviously here is one of the places that Trump has been extremely controversial. The talk about annexing Greenland and invading Denmark definitely did not go over well with a lot of people. Talk of conquering Canada also seems to have made, I don't know why, but it seems to have made some Canadians unhappy. So there've been these again extremely dramatic, compelling interventions.

I was at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos where Trump was going to give his speech and you had at that moment this crowd of mostly European business leaders and political leaders and so on were fighting almost like cats and dogs. There's only so many seats in the main room. Everybody wants to be in the room where Trump is speaking because you don't know whether what you're going to hear is that NATO is dead or the liberation of Greenland proceeds as I speak to you or something else. And so Trump had them right where he wants them. Now whether that is good for the United States long-term, good for Europe long-term, whatever, that we certainly can debate. But just in terms of looking at how someone in the 21st century has been able to achieve a mastery over the political and international environment, it's an extraordinary thing.

And I think the issue here is that for Trump and for a lot of people kind of in his base, Europe is a good place but a bad ally. Maybe that's the way to put it. They like European culture, they like European food. A German friend of mine says, 'I've now figured out how you Americans think about Europe.' And I said, 'Really? What is it?' He said, 'Well, you think about Europe the way we in Germany think about Italy. That is great food, wonderful people, great architecture and culture but maybe not necessarily needing to be involved in the most serious discussions.' And I don't know how many people in America that applies to but there is a sense that for Trump and his followers that Europe has been free riding on the transatlantic alliance for years.

That is they say, 'America is more worried about Russia taking over Europe than we are. So we can like not spend anything on defense and America will always be there to protect us.' And then they want to say that protecting us is a moral duty. That for America not to let us free ride on America would be a dereliction of America's moral responsibility. You're immoral, you're a criminal if you don't let me have free defense or almost free defense. Then with the money they're saving, this would be Trump's view, they then have this big large expensive welfare state to make the politicians happy. And they talk about how nasty the Americans are because their welfare state isn't as generous as what the noble Europeans do, unlike those defense-minded backward Americans.

And then finally, because the Europeans have felt safe, and this is also true to some degree the Japanese under the American umbrella, they say fine. And now we're going to trade with Russia and we're not going to worry anything about whether our trade is building up Russia as an enemy. That's been essentially the European position. And Trump has had it. It's a way to put it. From his point of view, Bush, Obama, Biden all asked Europe nicely to do more and Europe responded with indifference. Only Trump has been able to get Europe, in his mind, to do even anything, to take the first steps.

So, to try to understand what's going on, a rational analyst could look at the world and say, 'Problem with the United States is that as China rises, its two main sets of allies, Japan and Korea in the Far East and the Atlantic alliances, they are basically no longer spending on defense. They've become completely kind of addicted to a free ride, which America can no longer afford to give. And they have resisted every polite entreaty ever made to change their ways. So, what are you going to do about it?' And it looks as if Japan is going to be increasing defense spending dramatically. It looks as if Europe is going to be increasing defense spending dramatically. Trump has managed to get the Europeans to pick up much more of the cost of the Ukraine war than certainly initially was being done.

So, all of these things are arguably strengthening the American alliance system even as they create really bad feeling among some American allies. And a lot of Trump's critics will say, you know, why are you creating all this bad feeling? It's because if you don't create the bad feeling, you don't change the underlying situation, which is unsustainable. Again, will history regard this as correct? We will see. But right now, you have to say, Europeans are more aware of the importance of NATO to their own security than they've been certainly since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and they are prepared to do more on defense than they've been able to do than they were looking at again since that time.

I don't think you can quite call it a failure. You can maybe say it's a ruinous success. It cost so much in goodwill that Europe will now organize against the United States. My guess is that's probably not the way things will go, but we will see.