To Govern in Mankind’s Foreign Policy Interest or in Trump’s America First Interest? – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

While Elon Musk and his DOGE reformers dominate media attention, a fundamental change in the American government is taking place in foreign policy. The prime director is the president himself, Donald Trump, with no other voice a close second to his own.

Trump has assessed the so-called “experts” on foreign policy and decided that they do not know what they are talking about. Pacifists simply encourage other nations to take advantage of the U.S., so strength is necessary. But today’s dominant progressive internationalists assume that the U.S. can simply reason the rest of the world into supporting the universal democratic principles of the United Nations ideals. Even supported by American arms, Trump finds that such reasoning and goodwill do not work in a hostile world and simply distort actual human nature. (RELATED: The Left’s Hypocrisy About the ‘Imperial Presidency’)

Trump’s real-world experience is from the rough-and-tumble world of New York real estate. In that Art of the Deal world, idealistic sentiment is for losers and self-interest rules. No deal is ever fully dead until it actually is, and there is always another deal somewhere down the road. Trump’s deals as president range from a blow-up with Ukraine in the White House one day, to a Ukrainian deal one week later in Saudi Arabia. Tariffs come and go in days or weeks. Through it all, Trump evaluates weaknesses and strengths and how to make them work towards his ends. (RELATED: Is US Support for Ukraine Over?)

For foreign policy, Trump starts with the basics. Certain nations have atomic weapons, and current defenses cannot stop them. These powerful nations need to be handled very carefully and not be unnecessarily provoked. There are reasons to continue alliances with nations that are less provocative and more in accord with American ideals but not at the threat of nuclear war or against fundamental interests. (RELATED: American Nuclear Weapons in Poland? No.)

Ukraine is worth supporting but only up to a point. Wealthy allies such as in Europe have been free riders since the fall of communism and there is no reason why they should not pay for their own protection. And so should most of the rest of the world. America’s own interests should come first for Americans. (RELATED: NATO Firsters vs. Elbridge Colby)

This hardball politics has shocked the world. German and British leaders have been stunned. In the U.S., progressive experts like the Washington Post’s David Ignatius see Trump’s approach as merely “might makes right,” with the strong dominating the weak, violating the self-proclaimed universal world values of “generosity, tolerance, and hope.”

The Wall Street Journal’s William A. Galston is offended that Trump rejects an international order based upon world “binding commitments” and “shared values,” which Galston believes are in everyone’s self-interest. Instead, he complains, Trump’s foreign policy replaces right and wrong with pure power.

The progressive reaction would not have surprised the foreign policy intellectual who prefigured Trump, the modern who rejuvenated the ideal of America First and its enemy the administrative state. Boston University and Claremont Institute professor Angelo Codevilla wrote two especially pertinent books on the subject, Advice To War Presidents and To Make and Keep Peace: Among Ourselves and with All Nations. (RELATED: George Will and Munich)

It was, of course, progressive President Woodrow Wilson who had changed course for the U.S. by introducing the idea of right being more powerful than might in foreign relations to ensure there would be no repeat of the horrors of World War I. His idea was so appealing it induced the world powers to actually outlaw war.

But World War II’s “might” proved more powerful than progressive principles of “right,” so these same principles had to be readopted for the post-war United Nations. World War II ended with 70 million world casualties and 400,000 U.S. military deaths. This was followed by a 45-year Cold War with 100,000 American military deaths in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. And, then came Ukraine. Codevilla asked why this progressive ideal’s record did not provoke some reassessment about the validity of progressive assumptions.

Codevilla took on that project himself, tracing progressive foreign policy to its roots as a purely intellectual project devised by the early 20th century’s top experts to rationalize foreign policy under a set of legal principles rather than the facts of peace through strength. It synthesized Elihu Root’s utopian faith in rational treaty-making, Nicholas Murray Butler’s belief in the obsolescence of war, and David Starr Jordan’s conviction that just leaders can reform the world. Wilson and the others changed America’s mission from supporting its own national interests to supporting peace and unity for all mankind, as expressed in his Fourteen Points program. (RELATED: Wilsonian Foreign Policy Is Dead — For Now)

From the beginning, George Washington had urged the new American nation to “cultivate peace and harmony with all” nations as its “only” foreign policy goal, to avoid entangling foreign alliances. John Quincy Adams officially set “the first and paramount duty” as “to maintain peace amidst all the convulsions of foreign wars, and to enter the lists as parties to no cause other than our own.”

If war was required, the goal was to return to peace as soon as possible without continued alliances. This was U.S. foreign policy beyond the American continent until the 20th century and the adoption of philosophical progressivism by the leaders of both political parties.

The problem with permanent alliances and war is that they need a permanent elite to run it. Codevilla considered the U.S. motto “all men are created equal” as the “heart and soul” of America’s fundamental beliefs. It is what makes America different from the rest of the world. Preserving that exceptional nature should be the U.S.’s “paramount objective.” The power of the Soviet Union justified long-term alliances, but peace is always preferable for free people.

With the fall of the Iron Curtain, Codevilla’s first step back to historic America First is to reject progressivism’s impossible goal of trying to do what is in mankind’s interest and return to doing what is in America’s interest, to separate what is “our business” and what is the “world’s business.’’

What is our business? Codevilla starts “with militarily defending the nation with the best possible missile defense and “behind that shield to wield diplomacy and military power to guard our peace and win our wars.” America’s job is “to give no offense to others and suffer none from them. When others trouble our peace, we impose it upon them by war — war as terribly decisive as we can make it. Discernment of what does and does not impinge on our peace is essential because there is no such thing as a small war.”

President Trump has clearly rejected the unrealistic universalist progressive ideal and seems to be traveling in a more realistic Codevillian direction. Maybe the president even read him and in his last days Codevilla was certainly trying to influence him. Whether President Trump will be successful is impossible to predict but as American Enterprise Institute Fellow Marc Thiessen demonstrates, Trump is much more sophisticated than general opinion assumes about the Ukraine situation and his approach is much more realistic than the experts think. (RELATED: Is Trump Making Robert Kaplan Abandon Realism?)

It is true that Trump’s fallback is more likely to end in continued Russian intransigence, although agreeing to a ceasefire deal already. Ukraine will likely continue receiving U.S. and other military support, but European taxpayers and Ukrainian minerals will pay for most of it.

Codevilla might consider even the fallback a pretty good deal.

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