[Trump’s World] - U.S. : "I don't think Donald Trump just landed on Earth from the Moon"

Institut Montaigne - INSTITUT MONTAIGNE - What would be your definition/conception of trumpism in Foreign policy?

WALTER RUSSEL MEAD - My conception of what Trumpism means in foreign policy inevitably comes out of history because I don't think Donald Trump just landed on Earth from the Moon, without any kind of context or roots in what's happened before in the United States. Clearly, his approach to foreign policy combines some elements of the foreign policy traditions that I describe in Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World.

Trump has always been known, and I think correctly, as someone who comes primarily out of the Jacksonian school of American foreign policy. This is a school that is suspicious of big business and feels that the purpose of the government is to support and subsidize, if necessary, the middle class. Jacksonians tend to be skeptical of upper class, affluent people. They are also sceptical of people on welfare.

In foreign affairs, Jacksonianism is not ideological and neither is Trump. He's not trying to spread democracy or trying to turn the world into something new and different. Jacksonianism is actually much more congruent with what some international relations theorists would call realism in foreign affairs. It discounts the value of things like soft power and ideals. Instead, it is much more focused on maximizing power and then using that power to achieve further interests.

What Israel wants Trump to do is, at most, give a diplomatic cover and provide advanced weapons. If Trump does that, Israel will do the rest. That's the kind of ally a Jacksonian president likes to see.

IM - What are the balance of powers and conflicts/divergences within the MAGA/Trump circle (Wall Street, Silicon Valley, economic sphere, Supreme Court, Conservative vs Libertarian etc.)?

WRM - Outsiders looking at the Trump phenomenon often forget that President Trump, like every other politician, is at the head of a coalition. MAGA is not a unitary force where everybody agrees with the same ideas and has the same sense of priorities and ambitions. There are multiple strains inside of MAGA.

We see that Trump's coalition, which brought him to power in 2024, combines populists with Silicon Valley billionaires and entrepreneurs. Without the money of Silicon Valley and the enthusiasm of the populists, Donald Trump would not have been able to win that election.

We might ask: Well, what do these groups have in common? Silicon Valley people don't seem similar to your ordinary MAGA Americans. You have figures like Steve Bannon on the populist wing, who are deeply opposed to the presence of people like Elon Musk inside the Trump coalition. Nevertheless, it's in Donald Trump's interest to hold them together. President Trump’s political goal is to remain dominant in this coalition, letting neither side take control over the MAGA agenda.

In a way, the key element of what holds these two factions together is economics. One might think that there is a huge gap on this issue, as anti-corporate populists support tariffs, which many business leadersconsider to be wrong-sided and dangerous to economic growth and even to the national interest, but somehow they manage. The reason they can tolerate each other is because the economic interests of Silicon Valley companies are closer to MAGA than some might think. Silicon Valley, for example, doesn’t care as much about protectionism as conventional businesses do. If your business is making Chat-GPT, you don't depend a lot on imports and exports, the way you do if you're a car company.

At the same time, the tech world has gone from being post-nationalistic, in the cosmopolitan 1990s, to now being intensely concerned about questions of national allegiance and power. The competition between China and the United States is taking place to a very large extent in the tech industry. American tech firms see Chinese tech firms as subsidized by a state rival who is systemically stealing their intellectual property, undermining their business models and trying to replace them as the leading firms. For Silicon Valley, it looks as if a Chinese victory in a competition with the United States would end the Valley's economic prowess and would weaken the state-the American state with which it's aligned.

It’s not just trade. Immigration matters much less to Silicon Valley than to much of the business world. The Valley wants its H-1B visas (for foreign workers in specialty occupation), but it doesn’t really care about mass immigration like construction and fast food companies do. Tech companies don’t rely on those eager, hungry, low-wage workers coming in. Therefore, Silicon Valley is more closely aligned with MAGA populism on economic interests than many of Trump’s opponents understand.

Jeffersonians are another strain in the Trump coalition and they are much closer to libertarians. Whether on the left or the right, they're very much in favor of civil liberties and want to limit the power of the state. They also want to avoid too many entanglements with foreign countries. In particular, they often see the American alliance with Israel as something that exposes the United States to dangers and costs that are unnecessary. Jeffersonians like to pull back from almost everything the US is doing overseas.

They are also part of Trump's coalition, but right now they're very unhappy. This is because at home, President Trump is clearly in favor of very strong executive power that they find abhorrent, and internationally, the President is doing his best to project American power. Trump is not interested in war, but he's interested in dominating the international scene. So that's leading him into a very un-Jeffersonian approach to foreign policy.

IM - Can we say that Americans do not need Europeans any more? Europeans have always been "Free Riders," why is it now intolerable?

WRM - Trump’s summits with Putin and Zelensky showed the limits of European influence on the American President. No European leaders were present when Putin and Trump discussed the future of Ukraine in Alaska. Later in Washington, Trump called European leaders by their first names. They responded by calling him "Mr. President."

This was an astonishing spectacle. Clearly, at least in President Trump’s mind, the European countries which dominated the 20th century have lost the global influence they once had. This underscores the degree to which the Trump administration seems much less focused on its European allies than any of Trump's predecessors, really since the start of the Cold War.

Nowadays, we see that Europe just doesn't matter as much there anymore. We can see the same thing if we look in West Africa, where Russia has essentially kicked the French out of the former French Empire. In the rest of the continent, we can see Chinese, Russian, and to some degree even Indian influence, replacing the Europeans in a part of the world where they were once dominant.

So even if we look at Ukraine, we can see that the Europeans have been unable to impose any kind of a settlement or limit on Putin-even though from a conventional standpoint, Putin's economy is tiny, compared to that of the European countries, and technologically Russia is not on a par with countries like France, Germany, and Britain. Nevertheless, because of a mix of poor strategic thought, weak culture, and divisions among the European countries, the EU is continually losing influence, whether it's over Moscow, Ankara, Beijing, or now increasingly, over Washington.

We should note that Trump doesn't just see Europe as a free rider. From President Trump's point of view, the US-Europe relationship was like a bad marriage in which a henpecked husband was getting abused by a cheating wife.

Supposedly, the core of the transatlantic relationship is the defense of Europe against Russia. However, if you look back at the last 25 years, you see American presidents, one after another begging the Europeans: Please do something more for your defense. Please don't get closer to Russia through the Nord Stream pipeline, so that all of your energy is dependent on Russia. Please build up your military forces. For 25 years the Europeans ignored all of these requests.

In fact, what the Europeans have tried to do is use the American security umbrella, not just so they can take a peaceful nap and a holiday from history, but so they can trade more with Russia than they would otherwise. So, Germany says: We don't have to worry about Russia as an attacker, as a danger, so we can simply make all the money possible out of the relationship.

Now from Trump's point of view, Russia is much, much, much less of a danger to the United States than it is to Europe. In fact, you could make an argument that no matter what Russia does alone, it is not in a position to be a threat to the security of the United States. However, it is a threat to Europe, clearly. 

For Donald Trump, Russia is basically Europe’s problem. He wants to flip the script, so that America gets to do what Angela Merkel did, which is to have a very profitable trade relationship with the Russians, while largely putting security issues in the background.

From Trump’s perspective, Germany, France, and England have to do what America was doing during all those years-deal with Russia first from a security paradigm rather than an economic one. That's not the same thing as to say that Trump would be happy to see Russian troops march into Berlin and Paris. I don't think that's true. But he doesn't think that's going to happen and he also doesn't want the Europeans to be able to use the threat of their collapse as a diplomatic tool against the United States. I think that’s what we are looking at there.

IM - What about Japan, Korea, Australia, India? Can we say that Asians are the new Europeans? Does Trump consider these countries differently than Europe?

WRM - In the conventional view, President Trump is pivoting to Asia, America is ignoring its old European allies, because they aren't as important to American foreign policy today. America, they say, does more with Asia, because China is where the action is. Japan matters more because Japan is closer to China. Again, that's the conventional view.

But of course if you look at the policies, Trump's policies in Asia haven't been all that different from his policies in Europe. That is to say, he's openly speculating if he can reduce troops and additionally, he's putting tariffs on his Asian partners.

Once again, I think Trump feels that what has happened with both Japan and Taiwan, is that their confidence in the American security umbrella has had two consequences. Number one, they don't need to think very much about their own defense, because they can always count on America to rescue them. Two, this security relationship allows them to invest and trade heavily in China-using the American security shield to gain commercial advantage. President Trump does not want this to happen anymore and has acted to take this possibility for Asian allies away. So he is pushing the Japanese, the Koreans, and the Taiwanese to do more on defense. He's also demanding a rectification of the economic dimensions of the coalition.

Now, I am not saying that this is an approach to foreign policy that's going to work, could work, or is more intelligent than what we were doing before. What I'm trying to do is help us all understand how the world looks from Donald Trump's perspective and what kind of thinking seems to be going into the decisions that he makes.

IM - What about the resilience and solidity of the United States? Can we say that US dynamism dwells unspoiled?

WRM - We can see two very different things in America today. On one hand, we see a kind of social and institutional sickness and dysfunction. So many of our political institutions are stretched and there's a lot of polarization throughout the society. A lot of people have lost faith in capitalism solving their problems. So, you see a rise of political figures on the far left and far right who question the basic consensus on ideas about capitalism, democracy, and the American system.

At the same time, if you look at the economy, what you see is an economy that is as inventive as ever and as world transformational as ever. You look at the world's largest companies by stock market valuation and the United States overwhelmingly leads there. Look at which are the firms that are shaping the technology of the future, that are transforming society-with the exception of Tiktok, a Chinese company-by and large, they are all American companies.

So the dynamism is still here and I would actually argue that the social problems are not a sign of it slowing down. The dynamism is, if anything, greater than before. Look at the pace of change and the way the information revolution is changing jobs. Just a few years ago, when someone got a computer science degree, people thought: Oh, well, that's a guaranteed ticket toward a great job and prosperity. Now, with the rise of AI, it looks like all those poor coders are going to be unemployed.

We're seeing these rapid changes in how the economy works. This also means rapid changes in how society works and how people feel. Therefore, the intensity of the dynamism is helping to drive social dysfunction. In American history, generally speaking, our political system and our culture have had the flexibility needed to manage the shocks brought upon by rapid change. Back when we had the industrial revolution or even the Civil War, our society was able to manage and reorganize itself in the new context brought upon by these big historical developments.

Obviously, it's impossible to know today whether that will be true this time around. A lot of people claim that they have a knowledge of the future, but frankly, I can't make that claim. I don't know whether the resilience of American society will manage to harness the dynamism and overcome the dysfunction. However, I would say that the historical evidence strongly suggests that the odds favor a positive outcome-but we'll see.

IM - How do you see the Post Trump World? What will remain of the changes that he triggered?

WRM -The one thing we can be sure of is that we're not going back to the world of 2015. That is, the world before Donald Trump descended the golden escalator into American politics. You can't unsee a phenomenon like Donald Trump. You might as well ask: When Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo, did Europe go back to the old way, to the Ancien Régime? No, it didn't. Time had moved on. And Trump's appearance, I think, was as much as anything, a sign of just how rapidly society was changing, and we're going to see a generation of politicians who learn from Donald Trump.

Copyright image : AlanDucarre