A farewell to Oz: Trump’s strategy for a multipolar world

The end of the Cold War ushered in a long period of make-believe in American foreign policy. We saw ourselves, in the words of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, as “the indispensable power. We stand tall. We see farther into the future.” And we could use our unmatched abilities to transform the world in unprecedented ways.

Globalized flows of capital and labor would liberalize China and usher in a new age of largely frictionless international relations. Russia would be transformed quickly into a friendly, free market democracy. NATO would shift its focus from protecting Western Europe to reforming and incorporating the states between it and Russia, with little worry that it might ever have to fight to defend new members. The US military would serve as the world’s benevolent policeman, and Americans could re-engineer societies in Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Afghanistan. Americans would be endlessly content to fight endless wars that bore little connection to their own well-being, and foreign creditors would forever finance America’s burgeoning national debt.

Things obviously did not go as planned.

President Trump’s new National Security Strategy says goodbye to such magical thinking. It begins with a clear premise that breaks sharply with past strategies: The United States does not have infinite resources and capabilities, so it must prioritize what it seeks to accomplish in its foreign policy. It asserts that these priorities must flow from an assessment of what is most important to the security, prosperity, and freedom of the American people. And it argues that, while the world has changed in important ways, geography has not: the threats and opportunities in America’s immediate neighborhood matter more to our national security than events in far-flung locales.

This reasoning is little more than common sense, but it has been entirely uncommon in past American strategies.

Trump’s approach is much more than a simple effort to reconnect American objectives in the world to its capabilities and interests, however, as commendable as that is. Equally important, it recognizes that the distribution of power in the world has become more polycentric, and that technologies are changing the components of national power in ways that have big implications for geopolitics.

In an emerging multipolar world, it makes no sense for the United States to do things that encourage Russia and China to cooperate against us, as we have inadvertently done for many years. The strategy implicitly recognizes that having a more normal relationship with the West will make Moscow less beholden to Beijing and better able to operate as an independent pole in the emerging order, rather than as a force-multiplier of Chinese power. The strategy also understands that it makes no sense for the United States to encourage continued European dependence on US security protection. We need Europe to have the military strength and internal cohesion to serve as a stabilizing counterweight to Russia, and we need it to have the societal and cultural health to manage perceived threats on the basis of confidence and resilience rather than fear.

Of course, rational strategic thinking does not necessarily make for a successful foreign policy. It makes abundant sense to elevate the principle of non-intervention, pursue peace settlements that advance American interests and influence, recognize the importance of the Western hemisphere, rebalance the transatlantic alliance, and pursue a mix of deterring, engaging, counter-balancing, and out-competing China. The attempt to translate those concepts into practice is likely to be messy, however, as Trump’s efforts to end the war in Ukraine have demonstrated. Much can go wrong, and often does, when plans encounter unforeseen crises, opposition from friends and foes, and the stubborn complexities that underlie so many problems abroad. Striking the delicate balances that the strategy envisions and achieving the broad goals it outlines will require a high degree of nuanced statesmanship.

In this regard, questions remain about implementation. The strategy’s proclamation of a “Trump Corollary” to America’s longstanding but recently dormant Monroe Doctrine raises the question of whether the administration will learn from the mistakes Russia has made in trying to drive foreign actors out of its own neighborhood, where Moscow’s bullying and coercion only encouraged neighbors to seek closer ties to the West.

The strategy’s call to “cultivate resistance” to European continent’s self-destructive trajectory has caused some to question just how intrusive the administration plans to be in the region’s domestic affairs – and whether too heavy a hand might hurt rather than help Europe’s populist parties, a stated goal in the NSS.

Moreover, Trump’s foreign affairs team remains far from complete, with key positions unfilled. Its ability to marshal the expertise necessary for the strategy’s success while managing an often resistant and sometimes defiant bureaucracy is far from clear.

Policy implementation concerns are inevitable in any administration, but they grow more acute when a strategy is such an abrupt departure from the ways past administrations have approached their foreign policies.

That departure is to be welcomed, not lamented, however. The most renowned American foreign affairs columnist of the twentieth century, Walter Lippmann, coined a term to describe a wide gap between America’s objectives in the world and its capabilities to attain them: foreign policy “insolvency.” By this measure, US foreign policy has been insolvent for more than three decades. If nothing else, the new Trump National Security Strategy provides hope that our approach to the world may become solvent again.

All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the US Government. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying US Government authentication of information or endorsement of the author’s views.