The original article

 

This article has been edited for length and content. A [...] indicates an edit, usually a removal of text. Note that this article is written by a right-of-center supporter of Trump's foreign policy, and he uses the term "globalism" as a negative way to combine the policies and effects of globalization as well as a cosmopolitan orientation towards the world.



From the Wikipedia entry for the author, Michael Anton: Michael Anton (born 1970) is an American former senior national security official in the Trump administration. He is best known for his right wing views, his conspiracy-theory orientation and his pseudonymous essays written during the 2016 presidential campaign in which he supported Donald Trump and collaborated on the pro-Trump Journal of American Greatness blog. Anton was named Deputy Assistant to the President for Strategic Communications on the United States National Security Council. He is a former speechwriter for Rupert Murdoch, Rudy Giuliani, and George W. Bush's National Security Council, and has worked as director of communications at investment bank Citigroup and as managing director of investing firm BlackRock.

On April 8, 2018, the White House confirmed that Anton would be leaving his position in the Trump administration.[7][8] News reports state that Anton resigned on April 8, 2018, the evening before new National Security Advisor John R. Bolton began his new position in the Trump administration.

The Big Think

The Trump Doctrine

An insider explains the president's foreign policy.

By Michael Anton, April 20th, 2019 (Foreign Policy magazine, Spring 2019 issue)

[...][T]he president was not simply noting what was going on: a resurgence of patriotic or nationalist sentiment in nearly every corner of the world but especially in parts of Europe and the United States. He was also forthrightly saying that this trend was positive. He was encouraging countries already on this path to continue down it and exhorting others not yet there to pursue it.

The other, more familiar phrase for the president’s foreign policy—“America First”—is much maligned, mostly for historical reasons. But the phrase itself is almost tautologically unobjectionable. After all, what else is the purpose of any country’s foreign policy except to put its own interests, the interests of its citizens, first?

Few countries ever act exclusively out of self-interest. Indeed, states sometimes do things that run counter to their immediate interests. For instance, it’s rarely in a country’s direct interest, narrowly construed, to accept refugees. Yet many countries do so because their leaders have concluded that welcoming the dispossessed serves some higher good.

That said, one never sees nations sacrificing themselves for other nations, the way individuals sometimes do—by fighting for their country, for example. In this sense, Thomas Hobbes is instructive: All countries live in the state of nature vis-à-vis one another. Not only is there no superseding authority, no world government, above the nation-state to enforce transnational morality; there is also no higher law for nations than the law of nature and no higher object than self-preservation and perpetuation.

For all its bluntness and simplicity, America First is, at its root, just a restatement of this truth. Countries putting their own interests first is the way of the world, an inexpugnable part of human nature. Like other aspects of human nature, it can be sublimated or driven underground for a time—but only for a time. You may drive out nature with a pitchfork, Horace said, but it keeps on coming back.

The practical effect of suppressing nature, moreover, is likely to have damaging long-term effects. At a minimum, it will produce a backlash, as we’re already seeing in the United States, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere in Europe. Another, underappreciated danger is that, in declining to act in their interests, Western and democratic countries create opportunities for unfriendly powers, unashamed to act in their interests, to exploit what they see as Western naiveté. This observation forms the core of what one might call the negative formulation of Trump’s foreign policy. The president himself has an inelegant, but not inaccurate, way of putting it: “Don’t be a chump.”

Let’s be clear: A private citizen who did what we now know Trump did would definitely be in big legal trouble. For example, think of the lawsuits likely brought against a corporate C.E.O. who knew that his company’s workplace was dangerous, but lied about it, refused to take any precautions and threatened workers with dismissal if they failed to come in.

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.

This notion is very hard for some to accept. And to be clear, by “some” I mean the foreign-policy establishment, the academic and intellectual elite, and the opinion-making classes—in short, the traditional readers of Foreign Policy. [...]

[...][T]here will always be nations, and trying to suppress nationalist sentiment is like trying to suppress nature: It’s very hard, and dangerous, to do. [...]

[...]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.

The third pillar of the Trump Doctrine is consistency—not for its own sake but for the sake of the U.S. national interest. Unlike several of the world’s other leading powers—China, for example, but also Germany, which treats the EU as a front organization and the euro as a super-mark—Trump does not seek to practice “globalism for thee but not for me.” On the contrary, his foreign policy can be characterized as nationalism for all. Standing up for one’s own, Trump insists, is the surest way to secure it.

For too long, U.S. foreign policy has aimed to do the opposite. Washington has encouraged its friends and allies to cede their sovereign decision-making authority, often to anti-American transnational bodies such as the EU and, increasingly, the World Trade Organization. [...]

[...]Some Trump critics insist that “nationalism for all” is a bad principle because it encourages or excuses selfishness by U.S. adversaries. But those countries are going to act that way regardless. By declining to stand up for the United States, all Washington does is weaken itself and its friends at the expense of its adversaries, when it should be seeking to strengthen the power and independence of America and its allies instead. Fortunately, Asia as yet has no supranational superbureaucracies on the scale of the EU. In Asia, therefore, the Trump administration has a freer rein to pursue its nationalist interests, precisely by working in concert with other countries pursuing theirs.[...]

[...]This idea points to the final pillar of the Trump Doctrine: that it is not in U.S. interests to homogenize the world. Doing so weakens states whose strength is needed to defend our common interests.

[...][W]e’ve all been indoctrinated in the alleged dangers of nationalism. But few people today dare ask about the dangers of a lack of nationalism. Yet those dangers are manifold: Nationalism saved France in 1914, and the lack of it doomed the country in 1940. It’s unclear, moreover, how standing and fighting for one’s own in a just cause is anything but noble.

Beyond all this, globalism makes the world less rich, less interesting, and more boring. In the lecture he wrote after receiving the 1970 Nobel Prize in literature, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn argued: In recent times, it has been fashionable to talk of the leveling of countries, of the disappearance of different races in the melting pot of contemporary civilization. I do not agree with this opinion. … Nations are the wealth of mankind, its collective personalities; the very least of them wears its own special colors and bears within itself a special facet of divine intention. These words, written almost 50 years ago, are more relevant today than ever. Solzhenitsyn was talking about another empire, which had subsumed many nations and was trying to brainwash them out of existence. These captive nations are now free, thanks in part to him, and many of them stand on the front lines, ready and eager to defend not just themselves but all nations and the very principle of the nation itself.

Beyond all this, globalism makes the world less rich, less interesting, and more boring. In the lecture he wrote after receiving the 1970 Nobel Prize in literature, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn argued:
"In recent times, it has been fashionable to talk of the leveling of countries, of the disappearance of different races in the melting pot of contemporary civilization. I do not agree with this opinion. … Nations are the wealth of mankind, its collective personalities; the very least of them wears its own special colors and bears within itself a special facet of divine intention."
These words, written almost 50 years ago, are more relevant today than ever. Solzhenitsyn was talking about another empire, which had subsumed many nations and was trying to brainwash them out of existence. These captive nations are now free, thanks in part to him, and many of them stand on the front lines, ready and eager to defend not just themselves but all nations and the very principle of the nation itself.

As the Solzhenitsyn quote makes clear, Trump’s foreign policy is fundamentally a return to normalcy. What we had before couldn’t go on. It is too generous to say it was going to end in disaster: It had already produced disaster. Getting back to some semblance of normal is necessary, good, and inevitable. Anything that can’t go on forever won’t. The only question is how it ends: with a hard crash or soft landing? For the establishment, Brexit and Trump and all the rest may feel like the former, but they’re really the latter—a normal response by beleaguered peoples who have been pushed too far. Trump is simply putting U.S. foreign policy back on a path that accords with nature.[...]