[Foreign Affairs] The Trump Doctrine

a fair article discussing the Trump administration's foreign policy.

a few excerpts:

Two years into U.S. President Donald Trump’s tenure, there is still endemic confusion about what, exactly, his foreign policy is. Many critics blame this confusion on the president’s purported inarticulateness. Whatever one thinks of his tweets, however, the fact is that he has also delivered a number of speeches that lay bare the roots, contours, and details of his approach to the world.

A simpler—and more accurate—explanation for the confusion is that Trump’s foreign policy does not yet have a widely accepted name. Names can be useful in sorting and cataloguing ideas and in avoiding the unnecessary elaboration of things everyone already knows. But to dredge up an old philosophic argument: The name is not the thing. The underlying phenomenon is what matters; the name is just shorthand. Yet too often the U.S. foreign-policy establishment—current and former officials, international relations professors, think tankers, and columnists—uses names as a crutch. People treat names as sacrosanct categories and can’t process things not yet named.

So the fact that Trump is not a neoconservative or a paleoconservative, neither a traditional realist nor a liberal internationalist, has caused endless confusion. The same goes for the fact that he has no inborn inclination to isolationism or interventionism, and he is not simply a dove or a hawk. His foreign policy doesn’t easily fit into any of these categories, though it draws from all of them.

Yet Trump does have a consistent foreign policy: a Trump Doctrine. The administration calls it “principled realism,” which isn’t bad—although the term hasn’t caught on. The problem is that the Trump Doctrine, like most presidential doctrines, cannot be summed up in two words. (To see for yourself, try describing the Monroe, Truman, or Reagan Doctrine with just a couple of words.) Yet Trump himself has explained it, on multiple occasions. In perhaps his most overlooked, understudied speech—delivered at the APEC CEO Summit in Da Nang, Vietnam, in November 2017—he encapsulated his approach to foreign policy with a quote from The Wizard of Oz: “There’s no place like home.” Two months earlier, speaking to the U.N. General Assembly, he made the same point by referring to a “great reawakening of nations.”
​

a decent summary quote:

There is also a more positive formulation of the president’s approach, which begins with an observation about human nature and attempts to make a virtue of necessity. It can be stated like this: Let’s all put our own countries first, and be candid about it, and recognize that it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Putting our interests first will make us all safer and more prosperous.

If there is a Trump Doctrine, that’s it.

Perhaps the key point—at a time when many view self-interest (at least when practiced by democracies) as evil and see international self-abnegation as the height of justice—is Trump’s recognition that there’s nothing wrong with looking out for No. 1.
​

and why it matters:

Today’s establishment, by contrast, takes the eternal benefits of continued globalization for granted. Unable to convince the public of these benefits, however, many U.S. leaders and pundits have resorted instead to clichés—for instance, appeals to “collective security” to describe an alliance that rarely acts collectively and that can’t or won’t secure its southern and eastern borders—that are more catechism than argument.

From this follows a subtler point that is no less integral to the Trump Doctrine: Times change, and policy must change with it. U.S. pundits and policymakers remain besotted with the post-World War II “Present at the Creation” era—perhaps because setting the table for victory in the Cold War was the last time they got something really big right across the board.

It’s true that during the postwar era, Washington achieved many things of great benefit to the United States and other countries. But that was decades ago, and it doesn’t offer a realistic way forward today. We can’t just copy what Harry Truman, Dean Acheson, and George Kennan did. Nor can we go on trying to extend their efforts, as if they offer the solution to every contemporary problem.

Hence the second pillar of the Trump Doctrine is that liberal internationalism—despite its very real achievements in the postwar era—is now well past the point of diminishing returns. Globalism and transnationalism impose their highest costs on established powers (namely the United States) and award the greatest benefits to rising powers seeking to contest U.S. influence and leadership. Washington’s failure to understand this truth has incurred immense costs: dumb wars to spread the liberal internationalist gospel to soil where it won’t grow or at least hasn’t yet; military campaigns that the United States can’t even end, much less win; the loss of prestige and influence; and closed factories and declining wages.

Trump is trying to correct course, not tear everything down, as his critics allege. He sees that the current path no longer works for the American people and hasn’t for a while. So he insists that NATO pay its fair share and be relevant and that allies actually behave like allies or risk losing that status. He’s determined to end free rides, on security guarantees and trade deals alike, and to challenge the blatant hypocrisy of those, such as China, that join the liberal international order only to undermine it from within.

​

https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/04/20/the-trump-doctrine-big-think-america-first-nationalism/