Is Trumpism dead?

When Donald Trump won the 2016 Republican primary, he didn’t just defeat a field of rivals; he toppled a dynasty. 

For nearly three decades, the Bush family and its vassals lorded over red America. This regime’s style of Republicanism reflected the peculiar interests and obsessions of country-club conservatives: tax cuts, free trade, and mass immigration to lower corporations’ costs and regime-change wars to fortify America’s global hegemony (and/or Israel’s interests).

But America’s forgotten men and women had little investment in this globalist agenda. They wanted tariffs to protect their jobs, taxes on the rich to fund their entitlement benefits, sealed borders to secure their culture, and an isolationist foreign policy to prevent their kids from dying in a forever war — and this was precisely what Trump would deliver.

Or, so many right-wing populists once believed.

Alas, the idea that Trump’s policies all emanate from a coherent governing philosophy of any kind (much less a pro-labor one) was falsified long ago. Yet, some pro-Trump populists managed to keep the faith — until the Iran War.

For nearly a month now, Trump has been prioritizing the subjugation (if not overthrow) of a Middle-eastern government over the health of America’s economy, and he has done so in the name of preventing that state from acquiring weapons of mass destruction and liberating its people — the same rationales that Republicans used to sell the 2003 Iraq War. 

For Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, and various populist intellectuals, all of this is painfully familiar. The Claremont Institute’s Christopher Caldwell has declared the Iran War “The end of Trumpism.” Micael Lind, a fellow-traveler of the populist right, goes further, arguing that Trump has proven to be George W. Bush with a more “colorful personality.” 

Right-wing populists aren’t wrong to feel a sense of disappointment and déjà vu, but Lind overstates his case. Trump is not Bush in more garish packaging. 

Even if we ignore the obvious divergence between the two presidents’ immigration agendas and focus exclusively on their respective foreign policies, clear differences emerge. Trump has taken a novel approach to geopolitics; it just isn’t quite the one that right-wing populists were hoping for.

Where Trump and Bush overlap

Before examining the distinctions between Trump and Bush’s foreign policies, it’s worth reviewing the many areas of continuity between them. Like his Republican predecessor, Trump has:

• Launched preemptive wars of choice in defiance of international law against governments who had perpetrated no attack on the United States. 

• Tried to topple the anti-American regime of a Middle Eastern country.

•  Overseen large increases in defense spending.

• Maintained virtually all of America’s globe-spanning military deployments.

• Championed America’s global dominance, even when it upset allies. (Bush invaded Iraq without key NATO allies’ backing. Trump threatened to invade a NATO ally.)

• Authorized the commission of war crimes. (Bush did this tacitly but at epic scale, while Trump explicitly endorsed torture and targeting innocents on the campaign trail and removed military safeguards for civilians in his second term.)

Nevertheless, each president’s militarism was rooted in a distinct conception of geopolitics. 

Neoconservatism, briefly explained

Bush subscribed to a radical version of liberal internationalism, often described as “neoconservatism.” Deeply shaped by the Cold War, this ideology held that America needed to both maintain global military dominance and facilitate the spread of democratic capitalism in order to safeguard its security and interests. 

The basic idea was to remake hostile autocracies in America’s image and then integrate them into our traditional network of alliances and trade.

As Bush articulated the doctrine, “the world has a clear interest in the spread of democratic values because stable and free nations do not breed the ideologies of murder.” At times, Bush’s evangelism for democracy was quite literal, such as when he said in July 2007 that he felt compelled to export America’s political model because “there is an Almighty, and I believe a gift of that Almighty to all is freedom.”

Of course, the Bush administration was less than faithful to such lofty goals. When the imperatives of democracy promotion and crasser national (or special) interests came into conflict, the latter often took precedence. Bush wasn’t going to blow up the US-Saudi alliance over Riyadh’s penchant for executing apostates, nor would it temper its support for Israel in light of that nation’s subjugation of the Palestinians in the West Bank or Gaza.

Nonetheless, the Bush administration directed considerable resources to the promotion of democracy and economic development in many parts of the globe. Beyond the trillions it spent on overseeing democratic transitions in Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush more than doubled US spending on foreign aid — including a $15 billion investment in HIV treatment abroad.

Further, even when hollow, Bush’s rhetoric bespoke a concern for legitimizing American global leadership. The president did not ask foreign peoples to kneel before the United States’s awesome power, but, rather, to believe that its aims were fundamentally beneficent — that America sought to foster freedom and prosperity worldwide, not merely within its own borders.

Trump’s foreign policy “doctrine” 

Trump’s approach to foreign policy is far more unabashedly nationalist, opportunistic, and neocolonial.

In his view, America’s investments in the wellbeing of other nations have not advanced our interests but undermined them. The US squandered resources on foreign aid and nation-building while allowing its allies to grow rich at our expense through bad trade deals. 

Critically, this antagonism towards the interests of other nations — including US allies — is explicit. Trump evidently sees little value in broadcasting beneficent or universalistic intentions, even as a pretense. He frames his tariffs as an attempt to confiscate jobs from foreign countries and casts many of his military adventures as bids to expropriate the resources of conquered lands.

In a total repudiation of concerns for American “soft power,” meanwhile, Trump gutted US spending on foreign aid and global public health. 

All this said, the president is also impulsive and impressionable. His foreign policy decisions aren’t shaped merely by his belligerent and zero-sum worldview, but also by a desire for flattering media coverage, input from advisers and foreign officials, and the pursuit of corruption.

When justifying his martial adventures, meanwhile, Trump sometimes takes a “kitchen sink” approach: In explaining his assault on Venezuela, the president did invoke the autocratic nature of its regime but, also, a desire to seize its oil and thwart its supposed “narco-terrorism.” Likewise, Trump has at times framed his war with Iran as a bid to liberate its people but, also, as a limited operation meant to set back its nuclear weapons program and degrade its navy.

In both cases, the president swiftly abandoned his avowed interest in democracy promotion. With Venezuela, Trump was content to elevate a more pliant member of that nation’s authoritarian government. With Iran, the president has repeatedly expressed interest in backing pragmatists within its Islamist regime, if only he could find some (that he hadn’t already killed).

These differences matter

The distinctions between Bush’s hypocritical universalism and Trump’s haphazard nationalism aren’t merely cosmetic.

Bush’s commitment to transforming Iraq and Afghanistan into democratic societies led to years-long counter-insurgency wars in both countries, which yielded death on a gargantuan scale. By some estimates, Bush’s War on Terror claimed nearly 1 million lives and $8 trillion. To date, none of Trump’s military adventures have been remotely as bloody or exorbitant. Had Bush been content to replace Saddam Hussein with some subordinate Ba’ath Party official willing to cut some deals with US oil companies, the past two decades of world history might look very different.

At the same time, Bush’s investments in foreign aid in general — and HIV treatment, in particular — are credited with saving upwards of 25 million lives. Conversely, Trump’s evisceration of America’s aid programs has already caused hundreds of thousands of deaths from infectious disease and malnutrition, according to one estimate from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Finally, Trump’s singular contempt for the interests of US allies has led them to seek closer ties with China. The long-term consequences of America’s declining global image are likely to be myriad, even as they are difficult to anticipate.

Thus, right-wing populists did succeed in driving Bushism out of the Republican Party. The geopolitical strategy that replaced it, however, is not one that seeks to avoid unnecessary wars at all costs or prioritizes a rational conception of American interests. 

Rather, it is a foreign policy that oscillates with events but centers on a kind of gangsterism — a belief in the pursuit of national advantage (dubiously conceived) through naked coercion and at other countries’ expense. Trumpism may not have put America first, but it has placed the global poor last.