JD Vanceis an Iraq war veteran and the US vice-president. On Friday, he declared the doctrine that underpinned Washington’s approach to international relations for a generation is now dead.
“We had a long experiment in our foreign policy that traded national defence and the maintenance of our alliances for nation building and meddling in foreign countries’ affairs, even when those foreign countries had very little to do with core American interests,” Vancetold Naval Academy graduatesin Annapolis, Maryland.
His boss Donald Trump’s recent trip to the Middle East signified an end to all that, Vance said: “What we’re seeing from President Trump is a generational shift in policy with profound implications for the job that each and every one of you will be asked to do.”
US foreign policy has previously zigged and zagged from isolation to imperialism. Woodrow Wilson enteredthe first world warwith the the goal of “making the world safe for democracy”. Washington retreated from the world again during the 1920s and 1930s only to fight the second world war and emerge as a military and economic superpower.
Foreign policy during the cold war centered on countering the Soviet Union through alliances, military interventions and proxy wars. The 11 September 2001 attacks shifted focus to counterterrorism, leading to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq under George W Bush with justifications that included spreading democracy.
Barack Obama emphasized diplomacy and reducing troop commitments, though drone strikes and counterterrorism operations persisted. Trump’s first term pushed economic nationalism, pressuring allies to pay their way. Joe Biden restored multilateralism, focusing on climate, alliances and countering China’s influence.
As in many other political arenas, Trump’s second term is bolder and louder on the world stage.
Trump and Vance have sought to portray the “America first” policy as a clean break from the recent past.Human rights, democracy, foreign aid and military intervention are out. Economic deals, regional stability and pragmatic self-interest are in.
But former government officials interviewed by the Guardian paint a more nuanced picture, suggesting that Trump’s quid pro quo approach has more in common with his predecessors than it first appears. Where he does differ, they argue, is in his shameless abandonment of moral leadership anduse of the US presidency for personal gain.
On a recent four-day swing throughSaudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, Trump was feted by autocratic rulers with a trio of lavish state visits where there was heavy emphasis on economic and security partnerships.
Saudi Arabia pledged $600bn in investments in the US across industries such as energy, defence, technology and infrastructure, although how much of that will actually be new investment – or come to fruition – remains to be seen. A $142bn defence cooperation agreement was described by the White House as the biggest in US history.
Qatar and the US inked agreements worth $1.2tn, including a $96bn purchase of Boeing jets. The UAE secured more than $200bn in commercial agreements and a deal to establish the biggest artificial intelligence campus outside the US.
Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of the Atlantic magazine,said Trump had shown“the outlines of America’s newest foreign policy doctrine: extreme transactionalism”. He had prioritized quick deals over long-term stability, ideological principles or established alliances. But, Goldberg noted, the president had also advanced the cause of his family’s businesses.
The president said he will accept a$400m luxury plane from Qatarand use it as Air Force One. Abu Dhabi is using a Trump family-aligned stablecoin for a $2bn investment in the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange. And the Trump Organization, run by the president’s two oldest sons, is developing major property projects including a high-rise tower in Jeddah, a luxury hotel in Dubai, and a golf course and villa complex in Qatar.
Analysts say no US president has received overseas gifts on such a scale.Aaron David Miller, who served for two decades as a state department analyst, negotiator and adviser on Middle East issues for both Democratic and Republican administrations, said: “He gives transactionalism a bad name.
“The level of self-dealing in this administration means the notion that the national interest is now seamlessly blended with Donald Trump’s personal interests and financial interests. The concept of an American national interest that transcends party politics and partisanship has gone the way of the dodo.”
Ned Price, a former US state department spokesperson during the Biden administration, said: “I actually think calling this ‘transactional’ is far too charitable, because so much of this is predicated not on the national interest but on the president’s own personal interest, including his economic interests and the economic interests of his family and those around him.”
Presidential trips to the Middle East usually feature at least some public calls for authoritarian governments to improve their human rights efforts. But not from Trump as he toured the marble and gilded palaces of Gulf rulers and deemed them “perfecto” and “very hard to buy” while barely mentioning the war in Gaza.
In hisremarks at a VIP business conferencein Riyadh, the president went out of his way to distance himself from the actions of past administrations, the days when he said US officials would fly in “in beautiful planes, giving you lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affairs”.
Trump said: “The gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called nation-builders, neocons or liberal non-profits like those who spent trillions and trillions of dollars failing to develop Kabul, Baghdad, so many other cities. Instead, the birth of a modern Middle East has been brought by the people of the region themselves, the people that are right here.”
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But Price challenges the notion that Trump’s aversion to interventionism represents revolution rather than evolution. “It is fair to say that presidents have successively been moving in that direction,” he said.
“The sort of military adventurism that characterised the George W Bush presidency is not something that President Obama had an appetite for. It’s not something that President Biden had an appetite for. President Obama’s version of ‘Don’t do stupid shit’ has echoes of what President Trump said. Of course, as he often does, President Trump took it one step further.”
Price added: “Most people who worked under President Biden or President Obama would tell you it doesn’t have to be either/or: you don’t have to be a nation builder or an isolationist. You can engage on the basis of interest and values at the same time and it’s about calibrating the mix rather than declaring the age of nation building is entirely over and from now on we’re not going to lecture, we’re just going to come in and be feted with your goods.”
In his address in Riyadh, Trump made no reference to the 2018 killing of journalistJamal Khashoggiat the Saudi consulate in Istanbul which, the CIA found, had been sanctioned by the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. The president’s willingness to turn a blind eye to human rights violations was condemned by Democrats.
Ro Khanna, who serves on the House of Representatives’ armed services committee, said:“I was opposed to the Iraq war and I’m opposed to this idea that we can just go in and build nations. But I’m not opposed to the idea of human rights and international law.
“To see an American president basically embrace cultural relativism was a rejection of any notion that American values about freedom and rule of law are not just our cultural constructs but are universal values.”
Khanna added: “The past century of development in global governance structures has pointed us towards human rights and dignity. He wants to go back to a a world where we just have nation-states and that was the world that had wars and colonialism and conflict.”
Trump is hardly the first president to court oil-rich nations in the Middle East and tread lightly on human rights issues. Nor is he the first to be accused of putting interests before values. The public was deceived to justify wars in Vietnam and Iraq. Democratically elected leaders have been ousted and brutal dictators propped up when it suited US policy goals.
John Bolton, a former national security adviser to Trump, said: “Different presidencies say they have different priorities but I would be willing to go down the list and all of their record is mixed and somewhat hypocritical in terms of exactly what they do on the values side of things. Just take Biden as the most recent example. He started off by calling Saudi Arabia a pariah but by the end of it he was going to visit the crown prince as well.”
In that sense, Trump’s lack of pretension to an ethical foreign policy might strike some as refreshingly honest. His supporters have long praised him for “telling it like it is” and refusing to indulge the moral platitudes of career politicians.
Miller, the former state department official who is now a senior fellow at theCarnegie Endowment for International Peacethinktank in Washington, said: “He’s made explicit what is implicit in Republican and Democratic administrations. I’m not saying presidents don’t care about values; Joe Biden cared a lot about American values. But the reality is, when it comes time to make choices, where or what do we choose?”
Miller added: “No administration I ever worked for made human rights or the promotion of democracy the centerpiece of our foreign policy. There are any number of reasons for that. But Donald Trump, it seems to me, is not even pretending there are values. He’s emptied the ethical and moral frame of American foreign policy.”
Trump’s lifelong aversion to war is seen by many as a positive, including bysome on the left. But it comes with an apparent desire to achieve significant and flashy diplomatic breakthroughs that might win him the Nobel peace prize. The president also displays an obvious comfort and preference for dealing with strongmen who flatter him, often siding with Russia’s Vladimir Putin against Ukraine.
Miller commented: “Trump has no clear conception of the national interest. It’s subordinated to his grievances, his pet projects – tariffs – his political interests, his vanity, his financial interests. I worked for half a dozen secretaries of state of both political parties. That he is so far out of the norm with respect to foreign policy frankly is less of a concern to me than what’s happening here at home.”