Remarks at the Yerevan Dialogue on November 23. Reprinted with permission from the American Committee for US-Russia Accord (ACURA).
About a quarter of a century ago around this very time, a newly elected Republican president who campaigned on a promise of a more humble, less arrogant foreign policy was assembling his foreign policy and national security team. By the time he was finished, even the new president’s critics had to agree that the team he had assembled was an impressive one.
The new Secretary of State – Colin Powell – had previously served as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and was so popular among the American people that he had been often urged to run for president himself.
The incoming Secretary of Defense – Donald Rumsfeld – had previously served as a congressman, Ambassador to NATO, White House Chief of Staff and secretary of defense.
The young and brilliant national security adviser – Condi Rice – had previously been the principal Soviet expert on the National Security Council, and was a renowned political scientist who at the young age of 39, was named provost of Stanford University.
And yet.
In a matter of three years this most experienced and accomplished of national security teams steered the United States into a needless and disastrous series of wars that ended up killing hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of people and gave rise to terrorist groups such as ISIS.
All of which is to say, experience isn’t always a predictor of success for presidential administrations.
Journalists and foreign affairs analysts who today are quick to criticize Trump’s incoming team for its inexperience might do well to keep that in mind.
On the other hand, from the standpoint of those of us who care about global peace and stability, who worry about whether the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East might spin out of control, Trump’s proposed team gives plenty of reasons for concern – but for reasons other than their lack of experience.
In order to explain why, I need to set the discussion in the context of the debate in Washington around US foreign policy generally and then within the context of the Trump team specifically.
For those of you who are not overly familiar with the parameters of the foreign policy debate in Washington, I want to quickly review the three principal schools of foreign policy in the United States: neoconservatism, liberal interventionism and realism.
Neoconservatives view military force and the threat of military force as the solution to nearly every problem. The conservative thinker Russell Kirk once noted that neocons “mistook Tel Aviv for the capital of the United States” – which is about as pithy and accurate a description of neoconservatives as can be imagined.
Liberal interventionists, by and large, are the people who staff the Biden administration. The policies they favor have become hard to distinguish from those that the neocons want – the big difference is that they pay lip service to multilateral institutions such as the UN and couch their militarism in the vocabulary of humanitarianism.
Both neocons and liberal interventionists share what the greatest statesman of the 20th century, Charles de Gaulle, once described as “the American Messianic impulse which swelled the American spirit and oriented it toward vast undertakings.”
America, said de Gaulle, had developed, “a taste for interventions in which the instinct for domination cloaked itself.”
Yet such impulses are anathema to the 3rd school of American foreign policy, realism. The primary difference between realism and the first two schools is that realists are able to distinguish between core and peripheral interests.
Generally speaking, we realists are critical of wars of choice which we see as too often counterproductive and indeed immoral. We also understand the imperative of achieving a stable balance of power and recognize dangers of unipolarity.
There is a widely held assumption that Donald Trump’s America First has some relationship in connection with the realist school. It is also often and wrongly assumed that “America First” is simply an updated brand of isolationism that was popular in the US in the 1930s.
I dispute these assumptions: Given the makeup of his incoming national security team, Trump’s American First seems more and more like a marketing ploy – employing the rhetoric of realists for the purpose of disguising, laundering, camouflaging what are essentially neoconservative policies. In other words, America First is just neoconservatism in realist drag.
If this is so, we should expect a good amount of continuity with the policies of the Biden administration.
On the war in Ukraine, Trump’s “plan” or, more accurately, his expectation that he and he alone will be able to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine smacks of unreality. Despite his oft-stated intention to end the war, it seems to me there is a real risk that he and his team might try to escalate it in an attempt to end it.
And there is a troubling precedent to such an approach: Recall that in 1968 Richard Nixon campaigned on promise to end the war in Vietnam – Nixon said he had a secret plan to end the war. Yet once he and his secretary of state Henry Kissinger were in office they escalated in the mistaken assumption that that would bring the North Vietnamese to the negotiating table.
So it is very easy for me to envision Trump attempting such a gambit, after all it was he, in his first term, who sent Javelin anti-tank missiles to Ukraine, repeatedly sanctioned Russia, expelled Russian diplomats and appointed a hardline neocon as his Ukraine Envoy. Now a few from team Trump have criticized Biden’s recent decision to sent ATACM long range missiles to Ukraine, but honestly, given their past comments, the criticism smacks of partisan opportunism.
Now I fully admit it would hard to imagine Trump doing a worse job than Biden did in the Middle East. But ask yourself: Where will the blank check Trump will no doubt hand over to Bibi Netanyahu lead?
It could very well lead to a direct war with Iran.
And Israel’s neighbors seem to be readying for some kind of confrontation.
Consider: In the year and a half since China brokered the historic rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia has accused Israel of genocide and forcefully condemned Netanyahu’s bombing of Lebanon. Only recently, the chief of the Egyptian armed forces met with his Turkish counterpart for talks on deepening military cooperation between the two nations. Turkey has also just announced it has severed all diplomatic ties with Israel.
All the while, Trump’s soon to be national security adviser has been publicly calling for Israel to escalate its war on Iran. In October he suggested that Israel bomb Kharg Island, from where Iran ships 90 percent of its oil exports.
Meanwhile, neoconservatives in Washington have been busy spreading pernicious propaganda — similar to the kind they spread in the run up to the 2003 Iraq War.
A neoconservative operative at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, recently published a report that accused Iran of developing a new kind of chemical weapon. “Iran,” says the report, “now appears to have produced fentanyl-based” chemical weapon which they have allegedly provided to partners and proxy groups in Iraq and Syria.
De Gaulle once wrote that “Deliberation is the function of many; action is the function of one.”
Ultimately, it is up to Donald Trump to decide whether to allow the neoconservatives to drag us into a war with Iran – a war which has the very real potential – to ignite a world war. I wish I had a happier scenario to present – but having come all this way, there is no point in not being honest with you.
James W. Carden is a columnist and former adviser to the US-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission at the U.S. Department of State. His articles and essays have appeared in a wide variety of publications including The Nation, The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, The Spectator, UnHerd, The National Interest, Quartz, The Los Angeles Times, and American Affairs.
