The Trump Foreign Policy Brain Trust

Ross Douthat does the public service of interviewing two people likely to be at the top of a Donald Trump foreign policy team, Robert O’Brien and Elbridge Colby. (gift link) O’Brien was Trump’s national security adviser in 2019 and 2020, and Colby served as a deputy assistant secretary of defense in 2017 and 2018. These short tenures remind us of the chaos that was the Trump administration.

O’Brien and Colby have a lot of lies to offer up along with their baseline distorted view of the international situation. Back in 2016, Thomas Wright analyzed Trump’s long-term inclinations in foreign policy. The article stands up well today and gives a framework within which to understand O’Brien’s and Colby’s statements.

In sum, Trump believes that America gets a raw deal from the liberal international order it helped to create and has led since World War II. He has three key arguments that he returns to time and again over the past 30 years. He is deeply unhappy with America’s military alliances and feels the United States is overcommitted around the world. He feels that America is disadvantaged by the global economy. And he is sympathetic to authoritarian strongmen. Trump seeks nothing less than ending the U.S.-led liberal order and freeing America from its international commitments.

There’s too much in Douthat’s column to pack into one post, so I’ll just give a few examples.

Strength is an important theme for both of them, but they don’t seem to know what it means. It might mean defense spending, it might mean Trumpian posturing, it might mean “eliminat[ing] an Iranian general of some note,” it might mean anything.

We drew a red line in Ukraine, and Putin didn’t dare cross it. 

Uh, really?

They are in favor of more defense spending, more procurement, but they don’t say anything about personnel. Presumably they are Big Thinkers and don’t have to work out the details of Peace through Strength. Much of the rest of their analysis suffers from this lack of anything more detailed than moving markers on a Risk board.

Both men see China as a large and immediate military threat. They would build up US defense capabilities and reposition most of the US’s military might around China.

Let’s move the entire Marine Corps to the Pacific. I’m not saying move Camp Lejeune and Camp Pendleton, but the forward fighting elements of the Marine Corps, the tip of the spear, should be in the Philippines, and it should be in Japan. It should be in Guam. It should be in Hawaii.

Let’s get a carrier out of Norfolk and move it to the Pacific and have one more carrier in the Pacific.

Plus more missiles and submarines. They see China as planning to attack Taiwan in the near future, and they believe that this buildup will deter China from that. And of course China would in no way see this as unfriendly.

O’Brien greatly admires Trump’s unpredictability.

That level of unpredictability — with Nixon, they called it the madman theory — not knowing what we would do but at the same time talking to the Russians and being cordial with them. This is something that people don’t understand. President Trump was very cordial with Vladimir Putin. He was cordial with Xi Jinping. But he used that cordiality to tell them very tough, difficult things. It was much easier to hear when you had somebody speaking calmly, somebody speaking as a friend, someone not lecturing you, just saying: Don’t do this, because there will be war if you do.

We of course still do not know the tough, difficult things Trump told Putin in Helsinki. Trump enjoys being seen as a madman – recently the Wall Street Journal published his claim that Xi thinks he’s a “fucking madman.” According to O’Brien, this is how that madness works out:

If their planners are coming in and telling Putin, “We don’t think Trump is going to support the Ukrainians with troops, but he might, and if he does, we lose” — that affects the calculation.

This is not the way analysts work, but rather just another way of saying what Trump likes to say, that he is so strong that there would be no wars across the globe if he were President. But  both men agree with Trump that US power should be withdrawn and allies do more. Except when the Marines are surrounding China, of course.

That’s not the only internal contradiction. The account of the withdrawal from Afghanistan manages to incorporate a large number of lies. They try to soften Trump’s obvious desire to hand Ukraine to Russia. This is the top talent of Trump’s brain trust.

Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner