Motus Mentis

Michael Anton, a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute who is currently a lecturer and researcher at Hillsdale College, wrote what became the most influential political essay of the 2016 presidential campaign: The Flight 93 Election. (If you haven’t read it, I’m surprised — but you can do so here. Readers may also recall our brief conversation with Mr. Anton in these pages last year, in a series of posts beginning here.)

Mr. Anton has now published another essay of comparable importance, in which he clarifies and outlines the set of foreign-policy principles that history will call the Trump Doctrine. In his essay, Mr. Anton breaks it down into four core principles, but reminds us that Mr. Trump has summed it up in two pithy phrases: “There’s no place like home“, and “Don’t be a chump.”

Mr. Anton’s theme (and, presumably, Mr. Trump’s, even if he does not make it explicit) covers essential truths the suppression of which is an essential part of both Leftism and globalism: that human nature is real; that it cannot be switched off; that we ignore it at our peril; and that we must understand and accommodate it if we wish to flourish. The recognition of this truth manifests itself in the four pillars of the Trump Doctrine.

The first is that both imperialism and globalism (which are the same wine in slightly different bottles) impose an unnatural suppression and leveling of the distinctive characteristics of local populations and cultures. Because it is human nature to resent such coercion, sullen obedience gradually and inevitably gives way to resistance in the form of a populist backlash.

Next is the realization that we have now reached this point in history:

[T]he second pillar of the Trump Doctrine is that liberal internationalism — despite its very real achievements in the postwar era — is now well past the point of diminishing returns. Globalism and transnationalism impose their highest costs on established powers (namely the United States) and award the greatest benefits to rising powers seeking to contest U.S. influence and leadership. Washington’s failure to understand this truth has incurred immense costs: dumb wars to spread the liberal internationalist gospel to soil where it won’t grow or at least hasn’t yet; military campaigns that the United States can’t even end, much less win; the loss of prestige and influence; and closed factories and declining wages.

Trump is trying to correct course, not tear everything down, as his critics allege. He sees that the current path no longer works for the American people and hasn’t for a while. So he insists that NATO pay its fair share and be relevant and that allies actually behave like allies or risk losing that status. He’s determined to end free rides, on security guarantees and trade deals alike, and to challenge the blatant hypocrisy of those, such as China, that join the liberal international order only to undermine it from within.

The third pillar, according to Mr. Anton, is the understanding that the nations of the world are as culturally and politically diverse and heterogenous as the ethnies who create and sustain them, and that this profusion of natural diversity — in polar contrast to the stifling, coercive, and ultimately suicidal dogma of multiculturalism within the nations of the modern West — is indeed a many-splendored blessing that enriches the life of the world. It is worth preserving, and indeed, cherishing — and nothing will destroy it more effectively than the flattening, entropic force of globalism. Therefore:

The third pillar of the Trump Doctrine is consistency — not for its own sake but for the sake of the U.S. national interest. Unlike several of the world’s other leading powers — China, for example, but also Germany, which treats the EU as a front organization and the euro as a super-mark — Trump does not seek to practice “globalism for thee but not for me.” On the contrary, his foreign policy can be characterized as nationalism for all. Standing up for one’s own, Trump insists, is the surest way to secure it.

For too long, U.S. foreign policy has aimed to do the opposite. Washington has encouraged its friends and allies to cede their sovereign decision-making authority, often to anti-American transnational bodies such as the EU and, increasingly, the World Trade Organization. This is another carryover from the Present at the Creation era. Back in the late 1940s, it made sense to push Europe — especially Germany and France — to reconcile, especially in the face of a common Soviet threat. But that push stopped paying dividends a long time ago. Yet Washington keeps pushing.

Look at how the U.S. foreign-policy establishment lambasts Poland and Hungary for standing up for themselves at the same time that it warns that Russia today has become as great a threat as it was during the Cold War. Supposing that claim is true (a dubious proposition)*, wouldn’t it then make sense for the United States to encourage a strong Eastern Europe, with strong countries — including Poland and Hungary — to act as a bulwark against Russian revisionism? It’s not clear how browbeating these countries to submit to Brussels accomplishes that aim.

Some Trump critics insist that “nationalism for all” is a bad principle because it encourages or excuses selfishness by U.S. adversaries. But those countries are going to act that way regardless. By declining to stand up for the United States, all Washington does is weaken itself and its friends at the expense of its adversaries, when it should be seeking to strengthen the power and independence of America and its allies instead.

Fortunately, Asia as yet has no supranational superbureaucracies on the scale of the EU. In Asia, therefore, the Trump administration has a freer rein to pursue its nationalist interests, precisely by working in concert with other countries pursuing theirs. To return briefly to Trump’s Vietnam speech, his invocation of that nation’s heroic past was not simple pandering. It served as a reminder that a strong Vietnam is the surest protection, for the Vietnamese and for the United States, against a revanchist China.

It follows, then, that:

This idea points to the final pillar of the Trump Doctrine: that it is not in U.S. interests to homogenize the world. Doing so weakens states whose strength is needed to defend our common interests.

Globalism, Mr. Anton writes, “makes the world less rich, less interesting, and more boring.” He quotes Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:

In recent times, it has been fashionable to talk of the leveling of countries, of the disappearance of different races in the melting pot of contemporary civilization. I do not agree with this opinion… Nations are the wealth of mankind, its collective personalities; the very least of them wears its own special colors and bears within itself a special facet of divine intention.

In short, then, the author concludes:

Trump is simply putting U.S. foreign policy back on a path that accords with nature.

Amen to that. Now how’s that wall going?

Read Mr. Anton’s essay here.
 

* I don’t think that’s a dubious claim at all. As Stephen F. Cohen has argued for years, the present Cold War is in many ways more perilous than the first.