No more US interventions

VAGUE outlines of a Donald Trump foreign policy are becoming discernible. In a remarkably clear-headed statement of priorities the President-elect has declared that he will pursue “a new foreign policy” and that he wants  “stability, not chaos” because “we want to rebuild our own country. It is time.” In other words, as American President he would not be investing the United States’ vast resources in elusive transformation in foreign lands. “We will stop looking to topple regimes and overthrow governments,” he declares. This suggests a definite departure from the interventionist tradition and record of the United States, under both the Republican and the Democratic Presidents. President Bill Clinton’s place in history was defined by intervention in Kosova; President George Bush sent the world topsy-turvy with his post-9/11 crusade; and President Obama encouraged and abetted “democratic” revolutions in the whole of Levant, which resulted in the departure or destabilisation of established regimes and brought in its wake the ISIS. 

Donald Trump promises not to scratch this interventionist itch. This is a welcome change, that too from a man who had all these months portrayed himself as a bully and a busy-body. Not being from the “establishment” Trump has the political clout and sanction to junk the intellectual theology that informed American interventions oversees. All these decades the foreign policy elites in the United States arrogated to themselves a burden and an obligation to make “the world safe for democracy.” Each country was to be induced and, if necessary, coerced, to become a replica of Jeffersonian democracy — irrespective of its cultural and historical contexts. This arrogance contributed to turmoil, intrigue and instability in country after country.

Trump’s rhetoric suggests that he is not exactly enamored of the “my way or the highway” syndrome. Yet rather incongruently he has surrounded himself with a number of former military men. He has announced that he will be putting a retired General, James Mattis —known by a charming sobriquet of  ‘Mad Dog’ — in charge of the Pentagon. He is yet to name a Secretary of State. The Trump Presidency carries with it the threat of a muscular foreign policy without being woolly or idealistic. This return of realpolitik is to be welcomed.