No, Really, This Is Normal. Did You Forget Bush-Cheney?
Trump’s foreign policy isn’t a break from the past. It’s the return of Republican unilateralism.
By JACOB HEILBRUNN March 16, 2018
President Donald Trump may have reached a temporary truce with his chief of staff, John Kelly, but Rex Tillerson and, maybe, H.R. McMaster are out. Mike Pompeo and Gina Haspel are in and so, perhaps, is John Bolton. Could there be a clearer sign that after a brief flirtation with the globalists in his administration, Donald Trump is now all-in for America First?
Add his love for tariffs, his fondness for dictators and his contempt for America’s longtime allies in Europe and Asia and you have, we’re told, a recipe for a total break with everything that America has stood for since World War II. As the historian Gabriel Glickman declared in the Washington Post, “There is no chance this Republican administration will share the moral imperative of the last Republican administration, led by George W. Bush, that emphasized the maintenance and expansion of a liberal world order.”
This view is widespread, understandable—and wrong. No matter how much #NeverTrumpers such as Eliot A. Cohen, who served in George W. Bush’s State Department, may decry Trump as representing a radical break with the past, the president’s jingoism has more in common with his Republican predecessors than his detractors are typically prepared to acknowledge. This is why Senator Rand Paul, the very incarnation of America First, announced on Wednesday that he will oppose the appointments of Pompeo and Haspel, deploring the fact that the Trump administration is being overrun by what he calls “crazy neocons” who, among other things, championed the Iraq War and torture. In 2014, Pompeo called for ending talks with Iran and launching the equivalent of fire and fury against it in the form of extensive missile strikes, prompting the Los Angeles Times’ Tracy Wilkinson and Brian Bennett to warn Friday that he may be more hawkish than the president.
Trump appears to be embarking upon a restoration of former Vice President Dick Cheney’s hard-line doctrines, which George W. Bush dutifully mouthed. It is no accident that everyone from William Kristol to the Wall Street Journal editorial page is making approving noises about Trump’s new picks: “Mr. Pompeo has the advantage,” the Journal noted on March 14, “of sharing Mr. Trump’s more hawkish instincts on Iran and North Korea in particular.” Far from representing an aberration, Trump represents the logical culmination of the longstanding Republican tradition of foreign policy unilateralism.
The word unilateralism was first popularized by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. and Richard Rovere in a 1951 book about General Douglas MacArthur and President Harry Truman called The General and the President. Their description of Republican messianism about confronting North Korea and Red China sounds like it could have been written today: “Go it alone; meet force with maximum counterforce; there is no substitute for victory; do not worry about consequences; these are the tenets of the new faith.” The term captured the Republican Party’s peculiar blend of militarism and disdain for alliances and international organizations, an impulse that has never fully gone away.
more
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/03/16/no-really-this-is-normal-did-you-forget-bush-cheney-217647
= new reply since forum marked as read
