The Grand Strategy Behind Trump’s Foreign Policy

The Trump administration’s release of a new U.S. National Security Strategy (NSS) last month has provoked two basic lines of criticism. Some critics say the document lacks a unifying strategic vision and amounts to a transactional wish-list aimed at satisfying competing camps inside the administration; others say that it signifies a retreat from competition that implicitly accepts—and even encourages—rival powers to seek dominance in their regions.

These two criticisms roughly correspond to the prevailing tribes of U.S. foreign policy of the past 30 years. For the first group, which mainly consists of voices from the establishment left, the significance of the NSS lies in what they see as a tacit abandonment of U.S. support for the so-called rules-based international order. For the second camp, which is made up mainly of voices from the establishment right, its significance lies in a perceived abandonment of U.S. military preeminence in Europe and Asia, and a concomitant willingness to countenance accommodating stances vis-à-vis Russia and China.

Both camps see the U.S. strike in Venezuela as validating their arguments. The common root in both criticisms is the perception that Trump’s foreign policy is not just a departure from the United States’ accustomed way of doing things abroad but also an abnegation of the discipline of grand strategy itself—whether in its institutional or military incarnation—in exchange for something else entirely: ideology, transactionalism, and short-term tactics.

But both critiques miss the mark. Trump’s strategic actions, and by extension the NSS, are in fact rooted in a clear and compelling logic firmly grounded in the discipline of grand strategy. Historically, that logic has been called consolidation: an attempt by a great power to proactively shore up its position in order to increase its disposable power over time. Consolidation means accepting near-term tradeoffs while working to renovate underlying structural factors so that the great power can transcend or mitigate those tradeoffs in the future. In other words, consolidation trades near-term risk for long-term gain.

Consolidation is an age-old strategy used by many of history’s most successful great powers to stabilize their positions at dangerous moments. It responds to a universal reality in life, business, and strategy: Overstretched systems tend to break. In the case of the United States, consolidation is a reasonable response to two paramount strategic problems—first, that the country presently lacks the military power to fight all of its opponents simultaneously, should it need to do so. And second, that its overall economic and technological power is slowly eroding vis-à-vis China, the most formidable adversary in U.S. history.

Both problems have their roots in past policies that expanded overseas U.S. military commitments while neglecting the sources of strength on which U.S. power ultimately depends. The result has been a widening gap between the means at Washington’s disposal and the ends to which it might apply those means. This gap is very real and isn’t going to narrow on its own. Finding ways to bridge or cope with the gap between ends and means is the very definition of grand strategy.

The NSS can be viewed a framework for proactively managing that gap, both by increasing the means at the United States’ disposal (through rewired trade relationships, rebalanced alliances, and mobilization of U.S. and hemispheric resources) and by reducing the immediate ends or threats to which those means would need to be applied (through strategic diplomacy, détente, and deterrence). In policy terms, this translates into five broad planks: shoring up the Western Hemisphere, maintaining a favorable balance of power in Asia, delegating European defense to the Europeans, delegating Middle East stability to regional coalitions, and using U.S. energy and deregulation to super-charge U.S. competitive technologies.

All of these components have a competitive logic of consolidation.

The first plank has attracted the most criticism. By signaling a muscular reassertion of the Monroe Doctrine, detractors claim that the administration is tacitly abandoning a logic of competition because it diverts U.S. resources away from the top threat, China. But refocusing on one’s home region does not inherently contradict the competitive principle. In my recent book examining geopolitical episodes drawn from 1,400 years of grand strategy, I found that when threatened with the danger of a multi-front war beyond their immediate ability to win, the vast majority of great powers responded by first securing their home area. Securing one’s borders, expelling rivals from nearby lands, and ensuring the ability to dominate adjacent resource zones are all sound prerequisites to sustained competition in further-off places.

Thanks to the unique geography of the Western Hemisphere, the United States has a special ability to consolidate without taking the focus off of its main competitors. Where Russia and China both exist in regions bristling with antagonistic and well-armed industrial powers, the United States exists in a neighborhood with much starker power asymmetries in its favor. Unlike Russia vis-à-vis Eastern Europe and China vis-à-vis East Asia, the United States does not have territorial claims in Latin America. Washington can accomplish its aims there through periodic demonstrations of strength without requiring large permanent deployments in the vicinity. The U.S. Navy can be in the Eastern Pacific today and the Western Pacific 10 days later.

So a pivot to the Western Hemisphere does not in itself necessarily constitute a diversion from China, which will clearly continue to be the pacing external threat from the perspective of military posture and weapons acquisitions. Provided that the administration does not allow itself to be drawn into a protracted and costly nation-building venture in Venezuela—and there are clear signs that it intends to avoid that—the current focus on Latin America should tend to strengthen rather than weaken U.S. power and credibility in Asia. Access to Venezuelan oil, including as a means to reimburse U.S. firms whose assets were expropriated there in the past, further buttresses U.S. power while depriving China of those resources. U.S. access to or control of resources in Greenland, if that eventually materializes, follows a similar consolidationist logic.

The second plank of the NSS, concerning China itself, has also provoked alarm. By framing the relationship with Beijing in primarily economic terms, critics allege that the administration is signaling a retreat from the competitive emphasis of the first Trump administration’s NSS. But here, too, there is nothing inherently uncompetitive about what appears to be a move toward geoeconomic détente with China. Some of the most intriguing cases I examined in my book involved great powers that needed to cohabitate with an economic rival while also preparing for possible war against that same state.

In the U.S. case, two further facts should be kept in mind. First, when the NSS was released, the administration was in the middle of comprehensive trade talks with China. And second, due to years of neglect of the defense-industrial base, the United States needs time to secure its supply chains and ensure it is better prepared to deter and, if necessary, fight a potential war with China. The administration’s efforts to spur targeted reindustrialization through reciprocal trade policies and tariffs, deregulation, and increased domestic energy production are likely to improve the picture over time. And the Defense Department’s recently unveiled acquisition reforms, which center on giving smaller and nimbler companies access to military contracts, have the potential to accelerate U.S. defense production.

But right now, the United States needs breathing space. A strategy that emphasizes diplomacy to find a near-term modus vivendi with China while cultivating longer-term factors of strength is a logical response to this state of affairs. It can’t have escaped Beijing’s notice that every other plank of the NSS is aimed at freeing up U.S. bandwidth to focus on deterring Chinese aggression.

The Europe plank of the NSS is perhaps the most controversial. The main thrust here—delegating greater responsibility for the continent’s security to its own inhabitants—is a long overdue response to the fact that the United States currently lacks sufficient conventional forces to fight concurrent wars in Europe and Asia. Less commented upon, but equally important for the success of strategic consolidation, is the administration’s focus on resisting punitive European regulatory frameworks that, if not altered, have the potential to sap and undermine U.S. innovation in the technological fields that will most define long-term competition with China.

Critics argue that the document’s blunt criticism of prevailing European politics is driven by ideology, not strategy. But the state of affairs in Europe that the NSS decries—a dangerous mix of self-imposed economic stagnation, growing populations of unassimilated migrants, and suppression of speech—indeed represents a threat of civilizational proportions to Europe and, by extension, the West. A U.S. attempt to, as the NSS puts it, “help Europe correct its current trajectory” is inherently strategic in that it represents an effort to avert the gradual hollowing-out of half of the Western world. There are plenty of historical examples of great powers behaving in a similar way toward civilizationally adjacent allies. To cite just one prominent example, consider how Otto von Bismarck, the ultimate practitioner of realpolitik, intervened frequently and energetically to influence the internal politics of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in a pro-German direction.

Perhaps most predictably, the NSS plank concerning deprioritization of the Middle East has produced predictions of “power vacuums” that will lead to untold calamity. But to an even greater extent than in Europe, recent U.S. policy has created conditions for a favorable regional balance of power to support a downscaling of the U.S. military presence. Last year’s Israeli and U.S. airstrikes on Iran resulted in a significant diminution of the military strength of the main regional adversary against which U.S. assets were deployed. The Abraham Accords and further U.S. diplomacy to encourage Israeli-Arab rapprochement have brought a degree of stability to the region that would have been unthinkable even a few years ago. While the Middle East is always capable of producing surprises, it makes no sense to treat it as equal to Asia or Europe from the standpoint of U.S. military resources.

The Trump administration’s international objectives are related to its overarching domestic aim of rejuvenating the long-term U.S. power position through a combination of reindustrialization, economic deregulation, energy production, and creation of the factors necessary for sustained dominance in the emerging technologies that will define competition with China. The international and domestic pieces of the strategy tend to work hand-in-hand: greater focus on the Western Hemisphere helps stabilize the U.S. homeland; balances of power by regional actors in Europe and the Middle East free up bandwidth to focus more of the available resources on China; strategic diplomacy with China buys time to rebuild national strength; insistence on allied regulatory alignment with the United States encourages domestic tech innovation; and domestic investment in industry and energy lays the economic groundwork for a more favorable balance of power for the United States in all regions over time.

None of this is to say that the strategy is perfect or won’t face serious challenges. Two issues in particular are likely to define the administration’s strategic legacy. The first, which will likely come in the near-term, has to do with the reaction of adversaries. The core logic of consolidation is to buy time to gain an improved position, which implicitly accepts risk in the near term. U.S. rivals can see this logic and its potential outcome of a strengthened United States—and get a vote on whether it can be accomplished. They may decide to press their own advantages in the near term. Trump’s close diplomatic engagement with Russia and China presents to both a viable prospect of mutual gain—in economic cooperation and strategic stability—that will decrease incentives for immediate and heightened confrontation with the United States.

The second challenge is longer term and has to do with U.S. allies. To a greater extent than any factor except domestic rejuvenation, the success of consolidation rests on the skillful utilization of allies. Allies are essential not just for bearing a greater burden for local defense but for aggregating population, wealth, and innovation for long-term technological and industrial competition. China has a head start due to its size. The offset for the United States will come through a combination of mobilizing allies to carry a greater defense burden and integrating them more deeply into the U.S. industrial and technological base. Trump’s policies give many allies the hard push they needed to alter old security and regulatory approaches that impede Western strength in geopolitical competition. But years of work lie ahead in steering the frenzy of activity created by Trump’s jolts into a viable framework for coalescing combined strength against Russia and China.

These uncertainties over the reaction of rivals and of allies show that a strategy of consolidation comes with its own risks. But contrary to the claims of many critics, consolidation as outlined in the NSS is broadly consistent with the traditional grand strategy that the United States has pursued since its earliest days as a great power. That grand strategy can be summarized as dominating its own region while maintaining a balance of power in the three major outside regions: Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. To the extent that the United States has deviated from that goal, it was for that moment after the Cold War when the country embraced an expansionist logic that envisioned the transformation of the entire world, including even its adversaries, in its image. By pulling back from that now obviously unattainable goal, the new NSS aspires to something more modest but obtainable. To a greater extent than any other large power in the world today, the United States has the ability, due to its unique geography, economy, and population, to attempt this kind of national rejuvenation with a fair likelihood of success.

Ultimately, the merits of a consolidation strategy have to be weighed against the alternatives. An avowedly isolationist strategy—which the NSS is not—could precipitate the world crisis that Washington is trying to avoid. Attempting to transcend great-power competition through the liberal march toward world harmony by means of international law and multilateral institutions is a fool’s dream. Nor is it an option to pretend that tradeoffs are not necessary, and that the United States can simply ignore a $38 trillion national debt and overcome the multi-front dilemma by fiat with a sudden multi-fold increase in the defense budget. We may be at that point soon enough if a global war comes, but it is the responsibility of U.S. leaders to try to avoid that in ways that promote the safety and well-being of Americans as their chief end. Proactively confronting trade-offs and consolidating the U.S. position is what the new NSS is attempting to do. We should all be rooting for its success.