Reprinted from The Realist Review.
Over the course of his three presidential campaigns (2016, 2020, 2024), President Donald J. Trump promised an America First foreign policy – one that would see America pull back from postwar European security commitments, end the war in Ukraine, and keep the country out of the Middle East “forever wars” that so beguiled (and then bedeviled) every US president for the past quarter of a century. Instead, as we head into the 2026 midterms, his record is, to a surprising degree, primarily one of continuity with the national security policies of his predecessors. In the context of foreign policy, Trump II might properly be seen as Bush-Cheney’s third term, such has been the influence of neoconservative personnel and ideas within his two non-contiguous administrations.
Trump is often seen, and for good reason, as a man set on overturning long-established “norms” of governing. And yet, for someone with such an outsized reputation for disruption and chaos, during both of his terms in office, Mr. Trump placed foreign policy under the purview of the Establishment figures like former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, former Congressman Mike Pompeo, Lt. General HR McMaster, former UN Ambassador under George W. Bush, John Bolton, the real estate magnates Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, the neoconservative US Senator Marco Rubio, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, and Raytheon vice president Mark Esper. Far from being kept out of the fold, neoconservative ideologues whom Mr. Trump attacked with ferocity during his first run for the presidency in 2016 were welcomed in at the highest levels. No one had any right to be surprised, after all, those who have had the disagreeable experience of dealing with Mr. Trump in his former life as a New York real estate magnate understand that with him, a promise made is as good as a promise broken – it is a pattern of mendacity that defines his career in business and politics.
Trump announced his candidacy at Trump Tower on June 16, 2015. Within the span of a single month, he was leading in the Republican primary polls. As summer turned to fall, panic began to set in among his Republican opponents, who–with the exception of Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) – dared not deviate from the strictures of Washington‘s foreign policy establishment. Each was as unremarkable and as in thrall to the Bush-Cheney era neoconservative orthodoxy as the next. In September 2015, only weeks before an urgently needed back surgery, I flew from Washington, D.C., to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, to report on the GOP primary debate for The Nation. After viewing the sorry spectacle, one thing above all others was clear: that despite recent setbacks, such as the failure of the Bush-Cheney Global War on Terror and the recently agreed-upon Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action for Iran’s nuclear program, the idea that neoconservatives were a spent force within the GOP was premature, at best. It was clear to me, anyway, that the neocon outlook continued to have a stranglehold on the Grand Old Party.[1] The joint attempt by Trump’s 14 opponents (10 faced off against Trump directly, 4 were relegated to a sort of undercard bout, including the noted chicken-hawk Lindsey Graham) to derail his candidacy came to naught. Yet few remember that at that early stage of the primary contest, Trump had yet to give full vent to his anti-interventionist, America First, message. At the Reagan Library debate, Trump’s message was a marriage of jingoism and militarism, reminding the assembled audience of GOP dignitaries, operatives, and hangers-on that he “is a very militaristic person.”[2]
Only gradually did Trump take on the role of neocon-slayer that many had assumed Paul would play that year, including TIME Magazine, which placed Paul on its October 2014 cover and declared him “the most interesting man in politics.”[3] Trump, at the urging of his close adviser, the publicist and former Goldman Sachs banker and Epstein associate Steven K. Bannon (now, somehow, a tribune of the common man), continued to play up his entirely fabricated record as an early opponent of the Iraq War. During a heated exchange between Trump and George W. Bush’s young brother, the hapless former governor of Florida, Jeb Bush, at the Republican primary debate in Greenville, South Carolina, on February 13, 2016, Trump condemned the Iraq war as “a big fat mistake.” Later on, when the neoconservative Cuban-American Senator from Florida, Marco Rubio, said “on behalf of me and my family [sic], I thank God, all the time, that it was George W. Bush in the White House on 9/11 and not Al Gore,” Trump shot back: “How did he keep us safe when the World Trade Center… the World-excuse me, I lost hundreds of friends. The World Trade Center came down during the reign of George W. Bush. He kept us safe? That is not safe, Marco.”
Trump’s seeming turn against Bush-era neoconservatism caught the attention of a small group of foreign policy realists centered around the Washington-based think tank, the Center for the National Interest (CTNI), many of whom had been critics of the 2003 war in Iraq and generally drew their inspiration from what was thought to be the “realist” line of thinking embodied by President Richard Nixon, Secretary of State Kissinger, and to a somewhat lesser extent, George HW Bush, and his national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, began to warm to Trump’s candidacy and offered to assist with shaping and sharpening the novice candidate’s foreign policy positions.[4]
Russia Hoax
On April 27, 2016 Trump, with the assistance of CTNI’s Richard Burt, a respected arms control expert who had served as Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to West Germany, delivered what was billed as a major foreign policy address the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. Given CTNI’s involvement, it was expected that Trump would unveil a new, perhaps even coherent, foreign policy strategy that would seek to move the GOP away from the neoconservatism that had dominated since 9/11. Yet mixed messages prevailed. The candidate who had so stridently condemned the Bush-Cheney record in South Carolina was introduced by Bush’s ambassador to the United Nations, Zalmay Khalilzad, a neocon intellectual of longstanding. While Trump made some nods in the direction of the realist camp, including criticism of President Obama’s disastrous intervention in Libya, Trump’s critique was much in line with the Republican foreign policy establishment, including accusations of abandoning our European allies, such as Poland and our “friend” Benjamin Netanyahu. Where he did depart from the foreign policy establishment was with his view that the US was “not bound to be adversaries” with Russia and China. Indeed, Trump, to the certain consternation of both the Obama administration and the Republican leadership alike, said that regarding the recent downturn in relations between Washington and Moscow, “common sense says this cycle of hostility must end.”[5]
The speech was a flop. Realists found it to be, as the CATO Institute’s Doug Bandow put it, “a very odd mishmash.” Establishment figures such as the Brookings Institution’s Thomas Wright (a future member of the Biden administration’s National Security Council (NSC)) called it “completely contradictory.” Yet despite Trump’s concessions to the status quo, the Mayflower speech won Trump the enduring ire of the establishment. After the speech, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who is today one of Trump’s most obsequious cheerleaders, said: “Ronald Reagan must be rolling over in his grave.”[6] Trump’s promise, soon to be cast aside along with so many others, that he would staff his administration “with those who have perfect resumes but very little to brag about except responsibility for a long history of failed policies and continued losses at war,” ensured, as two CFTNI executives wryly noted, that the “foreign policy community would race to the barricades.”[7] The decision by the CTNI to invite (and provide a front row seat to) the Russian Ambassador to the United States, Sergei Kislyak. Kislyak’s appearance (who was something of a mainstay at CTNI events in those years) set off a series of hysterical and ultimately unfounded attacks against the Trump campaign.[8] These were the opening salvos of the national embarrassment that became known as Russiagate, which were fired shortly thereafter. Among its first targets was Burt, whom the media invariably portrayed as a Russian agent of influence.[9]
After Trump secured the Republican nomination, his Democratic opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, lost little time in tying Trump to Russia. Indeed, Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, then all of 36 years old and armed with an entirely unearned sense of entitlement, took on a role as a kind of millennial reincarnation of Roy Cohn. But the Russia ruse didn’t take. And as time went on, it became clear to the Trump campaign that Clinton’s record in the Senate (she had voted, among other things, to authorize the use of military force in Iraq) and as the nation’s top diplomat, handed Trump a potent message to an electorate that was increasingly fed up with the series of post 9/11 ‘forever wars.’
A poll published by the Pew Center in July 2016 found that 43 percent of Americans believed that the US should “mind its own business internationally.” A further 69 percent said that the US should focus more on domestic problems, while 70 percent said the next president should focus on domestic policy, compared to only 17 percent who said the focus should be on foreign policy.[10] Trump, as he had done throughout his career in business and entertainment, had read the mood of the public and acted accordingly, and adopted the rhetoric of foreign policy realists to achieve his own ends. A month after the election, Trump promised a crowd at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, that his administration “will stop racing to topple foreign regimes that we know nothing about, that we shouldn’t be involved with.”[11]
The extent and depth of the foreign policy establishment’s anger in the wake of Trump’s surprise victory can be seen in the maneuvers it, via its proxies in the outgoing Obama administration and legacy media outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post, deployed to keep Trump from completing (or, perhaps even from starting) his first term. There was what now appears to have been a deeply misplaced fear on the part of Official Washington that Trump would be as good as his word, at least as far as foreign policy was concerned.
Continuity Not Change
The only US president with no prior military or political experience, Trump was forced to rely on “experts” with long ties to the foreign policy establishment. And the ceaseless and baseless campaign to paint him as a Manchurian candidate hobbled any serious effort to revive US-Russia relations. In this, it undoubtedly succeeded. In the opinion of Ambassador jack Matlock, “The effect of the “Russiagate,” hoax… meant that any attempt to make a deal with Russia would have been condemned in the US by those claiming falsely that Russia had embarrassing evidence about him and thus he was subject to blackmail.” In fact, far from being a “dupe” of the Kremlin Trump’s first term record rivaled the hawkishness of the preceding Obama administration.
As is by now clear, from 2017-2021, Trump’s foreign policy was largely circumscribed by Russiagate – but not only. As I have touched on in other contexts, U.S. presidents, despite the power for which their office is renowned, often become, willfully or not, captive to the national security bureaucracy, which often has an agenda that is at odds with the agenda an incoming president campaigned (and won) on. This is hardly a new phenomenon. Decades ago, the philosopher Hannah Arendt observed that the President is “the only person in this country whose range of choices can be predetermined.”
To take one example: Former CIA Director John Brennan, in a newly released Oral History of the Obama Administration taken by the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, registers his amazement at the unexpected continuity between the policies he enacted under Obama and those pursued by his successor, the neocon ideologue Mike Pompeo in the first Trump administration:
I thought that Obama was going to be succeeded by Hillary Clinton, [laughs] and I was comfortable with whoever Clinton was going to appoint as CIA director, who would continue along that path. I was concerned, then, when [Michael] Mike Pompeo was tapped by [Donald] Trump. Pompeo came in and was telling people that he was going to reverse everything I had done. But then some of the key seniors he brought in with him, once they understood what I did, saw the benefit of it, and it wasn’t then reversed at all. [Emphasis added].
Trump may have won the presidency twice, but the foreign policy establishment remains undefeated.
