Phillip Cable LLM
1 Oct 2024
Ambassador Partnership - strategic co operation
1 Minutes read.
President-elect Trump won the recent election as the change candidate, and nowhere is this change more eagerly speculated on than in the area of foreign policy. And while it is unclear what he will do, a speech by his Vice-President elect, JD Vance gave a clear guide as to what the US will not do during Trump’s presidency.
On 6 Nov, JD Vance gave a speech indicating what could be at least one cohering through-line for Trump’s foreign policy, and one that promises to end decades of US colonial military activities overseas. “We have built a foreign policy of hectoring, moralising and lecturing countries that don’t want anything to do with it.” He contrasted this with the Chinese who built their foreign policy on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), building bridges, ports, infrastructure that countries actually wanted.
Two messages flow from this. First, US foreign policy will no longer be based on morality; second, it will be based on transactions. And as the Chinese BRI is showing, there is no generosity in this but rather hard-nosed business deals.
A decline in morality as a guide to foreign policy is consistent with a decline in the cultural globalisation which gained ascendancy after the 1989 triumph of liberal democratic capitalism in the Cold War. The post 9/11 wars were conducted on the premise that liberal democracy was the natural state for mankind so it was imposed on Iraq and Afghanistan; objectors who suggested their residents were not culturally suited to individual freedom of choice being imposed on them as expected in the Western democracies were accused of racism.
Those of us who served in these countries post their elections will have observed how the votes were not expressions of individual choice (the Adam Smith “rational actor” premise of western democracy) but were more akin to a national census of tribes, clans, religion. If Vance’s plea is for US foreign policy to be based on respect not morality, it should prevent further disastrous attempts by the US to enforce cultural change on countries at the point of a gun, a policy shift of particular relevance to attitudes towards Iran where talk is yet again of imposed regime change.
The irony of this attempt to export our cultural norms has been that the US, the great anti-colonial force post WWII (and don’t we Brits know it), has since 9/11 been attempting, albeit unintentionally, colonial expansion by imposing its solutions onto other countries’ problems. A respectful foreign policy should begin with deep anthropological study to understand other countries’ value systems and cultures; that would be a positive consequence of Vance’s remark.
If Trump is set to finally end the neocon influence on US foreign policy, the question remains of what his motivation will be.
The end of cultural Globalisation also represents an end to the export of the Enlightenment values that have been in the ascendancy for centuries – rationality, secularity, separation of church and state. And it is not just that these values are less likely to be exported, it is also that they are less adhered to domestically. As the late Jonathan Sacks has written in Not in God’s Name, “while the 17th century was the dawn of the age of secularisation, the 21st century will be the start of an age of desecularisation.” Religion as a political force is back, and rising.
Bill Clinton justifies Israeli actions in the Middle East by referring to the Bible as a vindicating text. Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House of Representatives (and therefore third in line to the Presidency after the President and VP) is committed to ending the separation of church and state. And Trump’s core base vote comes from the Christian evangelicals who see him as endorsed by God. So we should expect more support for the religious Right.
The fear is that Trump’s foreign policy will be amoral and based on commercial and electoral transactionalism – or worse. Nikolay Patrushev, Presidential aide to Putin, puts it succinctly; “To achieve success in the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations… As a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfil them”. The early spats between Trump and Putin are not encouraging.
The day after Trump announced he had spoken to and warned off Putin against further escalation in Ukraine, Putin not only denied this call had taken place but also published photos in Russian papers of a scantily clad, sometimes naked, Melania Trump. This fuelled the suspicions of those who believe that Putin has significant kompromat on Trump.
While many may applaud the ending of the neocon motivation for US foreign policy, the hope that it will be replaced by a robust national interest may be misplaced. More likely is that US foreign policy under Trump 2.0 will be based on the deeply personal transactional motivations of Trump himself.
Published in the Daily Telegraph 4th December 2024
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