Trump’s expansionist visions may appear to contradict the anti-interventionist promises he made on the campaign trail, as he argued the United States should limit spending to defend Ukraine and bashedthe North Atlantic Treaty Organization. But his positions echo the early foreign policy of Woodrow Wilson, one of the first politicians to run on the catchphrase “America First.”
Wilson is largely remembered for his efforts to advance international order through the creation of the League of Nations. But he ran for office on the slogan, “He kept us out of war,” as he vowed to keep the United States out of World War I. Katz noted that the people of Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Mexico would have disagreed with that motto, given U.S. intervention in those countries during Wilson’s first term.
“When we’re talking about what is retrospectively looked at as isolationism, we’re really talking about staying out of European wars while then doing war and effectively annexation everywhere else,” Katz said. “In a lot of ways it’s not that different.”
Although many of Trump’s allies brush off Trump’s threats as part of his normal negotiating playbook, some in his orbit have real concerns about whether he will cross the line from harsh rhetoric and economic warfare to military intervention. Trump has threatened a 25 percent tariff on Mexican imports to stop the flow of illegal drugs, and privately discussed the idea of firing missiles into Mexico to try to take out cartels. Instead of ruling out the idea, which Mexican officials have warned would destroy all security cooperation between the two countries, several Republican presidential candidates during the 2024 GOP primary indicated support for using military force to stop fentanyl trafficking.
A conservative foreign policy adviser with insight into the president-elect’s transition process said that while he believed that Trump’s position was “mostly posturing,” that the unanimous agreement during the Republican primary to make war on the cartels was troubling and a “hazardous approach.”
“Given the fact that this has already been through the ideas machine and spit out the other end, articulated by everybody from [Vivek] Ramaswamy and [Ron] DeSantis, as something they are all willing to do Day 1, it makes me a little more concerned,” said the foreign policy adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be more candid.
Trump’s early appointments of Latin American experts to high-ranking positions could signal his intent to focus on the Western Hemisphere. Trump tapped Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida), a foreign policy hawk, for secretary of state; Christopher Landau, his first-term ambassador to Mexico, for deputy secretary of state; and Mauricio Claver-Carone, who served as deputy assistant to the president and senior director for Western Hemisphere affairs at the National Security Council under Trump and is known for his hard-line policy preferences, as special envoy to Latin America.
Some of Trump’s picks, such as Rubio and Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Florida), who has been tapped to serve as Trump’s national security adviser, would not be out of place in any Republican presidential administration. But other Trump choices, such as Claver-Carone and Richard Grenell, whom Trump named as presidential envoy for special missions, are more controversial figures, even within conservative circles, the conservative foreign policy adviser said.
“You have a cast of characters that runs the gamut on what sort of advice they’ll be proffering,” the conservative foreign policy adviser added. “Trump goes beyond ‘Team of Rivals,’ to welcoming the thunder dome in some ways. … A lot of this seems paradoxical by design.”
1 comment:
Yeah a "broader plan" to get attention by saying stupid stuff. The broader plan to appeal to the lowest common intellectual denominator... which is how people like him gain and maintain power. In actuality, he has no plans and he's just shooting his mouth off and shooting from the hip.
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