UNDERSTANDING THE TRUMP DOCTRINE

Author: Zalmay Khalilzad Counselor at the Center for International and Strategic Studies, Former US Ambassador in Afghanistan, Iraq and the UN.

"Slow growth and economic dislocation is producing a backlash against globalization. And against the backdrop of economic stagnation, isolationist sentiments in America are hitting levels unseen since the immediate post-Vietnam era.

President-elect Donald Trump takes issue with many of the tenets that have guided U.S. foreign policy across both Republican and Democratic administrations since the end of the Cold War. What we are witnessing is nothing less than the birth of a Trump Doctrine, one that calls for a break from the status quo on at least five main issues: U.S. goals, countering the terrorist group ISIS and Islamist extremism, democracy promotion, immigration and great-power relations.

Trump’s slogan America First harkens back to the isolationists of the pre-World War II era. President-elect Trump, however, is not an isolationist. Quite the contrary. He favors a large defense budget and wants to ensure that America remains the world’s sole military and economic superpower. Rather, “America First” is Trump’s way of attacking “globalism.” The term "globalism" encapsulates, for Trump, the myriad policies that he believes are expending American resources on behalf of goals incidental to core U.S. interests.

It is in the realm of international economics in particular that President-elect Trump is sounding the alarm of globalism. U.S. Presidents since the end of World War II have taken the view that economic integration and free trade are win-win propositions that both further global security and benefit American interests, foreign and domestic. President-elect Trump’s America First view is more zero-sum and nationalistic. He believes that the United States naively practices free trade while other countries gain undue advantage through mercantilist practices. He believes many trade agreements have damaged America-negatively affecting U.S. workers and the middle class by facilitating movement of manufacturing jobs from the United States to other countries such as China and Mexico. He believes that these and related policies are producing slow economic growth, huge debt and undermining the underpinnings of U.S economic power.

President-elect Trump is intent on prioritizing U.S. economic interests. He, for example, will renegotiate NAFTA and abandon the current text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership in order to reassert U.S. sovereignty and protect and expand U.S. manufacturing and employment.

President-elect Trump is envisioning a new era of great-power relations. While other Presidents have pursued common understandings with Moscow, President-elect Trump envisions perhaps a more sweeping paradigm shift and perhaps a new grand bargain: acceptance of some kind of a sphere of influence for Moscow in parts of its immediate neighborhood in exchange for Russian cooperation on issues important to the United States with regards to war on terror, Syria, and the Asian balance of power. In his view of Russia, he may be closer to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s attitude toward the Soviet Union than the approach of any subsequent American President.

With China, the Trump Doctrine would pursue a much harder line. He has promised to place China’s economic practices-its alleged currency manipulation, lack of intellectual-property protections, and economic espionage-at the center of the bilateral relationship. President-elect  Trump's approach would not only address U.S. domestic concerns-such as the loss of manufacturing jobs-it would also provide a means by which Washington could elicit Chinese cooperation on security concerns such as the North Korean nuclear program.

Great-power relations may also shift in the context of U.S. relations with its traditional allies. President-elect Trump is hardly the first American political figure to gripe about U.S. allies' free-riding'. What distinguishes President-elect  Trump, however, is the degree to which he is consumed with the issue. While U.S. Presidents have tended to accept freeloading as a price worth paying for a network of alliances that underwrites international security and preserves U.S. global leadership, President-elect Trump is prepared to wield U.S. leverage to ensure that U.S. alliances pay their “fair share.” NATO’s official guidelines say that Member States should spend at least 2% of their GDP on defense. Of the 28 countries in the alliance, only five: the U.S., Greece, Poland, Estonia and the UK meet the target. Germany spends 1.19% of its GDP, France 1.78%. Nine other countries spend less than 1%: Canada, Czech Republic, Italy, Slovenia, Belgium, Spain, Hungary, Luxembourg and Iceland.

President-elect Trump pledges unequivocally to “abandon the failed policy of nation building and regime change.”

President-elect Trump’s critique of free trade has its merits. It takes inordinate time and expense for American firms to document and litigate unfair trade practices such as dumping under the current process. The risk is that by the time they secure a judgment, their mercantilist competitors have harmed them irreparably. And there has been no response to the problem of currency manipulation. President-elect Trump needs to articulate how he would design a more effective enforcement process for trade agreements and how he would avoid rounds of tit-for-tat retaliation leading to trade wars. As many have said, America has 5 percent of the world’s population, and its prosperity depends on selling to the other 95 percent.