Foreign policy statements by the Trump administration continue to surprise.
At the end of January Secretary of State Marco Rubio made remarks that strongly diverged from decades of U.S. policy. He did away with ‘unipolarity’ – the assumed leading role of the U.S. in global policy – and acknowledged and endorsed a multi-polar world.
He set a limit to U.S. intervention by acknowledging the legitimate interests of others:
The way the world has always worked is that the Chinese will do what’s in the best interests of China, the Russians will do what’s in the best interest of Russia, the Chileans are going to do what’s in the best interest of Chile, and the United States needs to do what’s in the best interest of the United States. Where our interests align, that’s where you have partnerships and alliances; where our differences are not aligned, that is where the job of diplomacy is to prevent conflict while still furthering our national interests and understanding they’re going to further theirs. And that’s been lost.
Rubio wants to reintroduce that concept:
And I think that was lost at the end of the Cold War, because we were the only power in the world, and so we assumed this responsibility of sort of becoming the global government in many cases, trying to solve every problem. And there are terrible things happening in the world. There are. And then there are things that are terrible that impact our national interest directly, and we need to prioritize those again. So it’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power. That was not – that was an anomaly. It was a product of the end of the Cold War, but eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet. We face that now with China and to some extent Russia, and then you have rogue states like Iran and North Korea you have to deal with.
That was a great (if very late), and astonishing insight from the U.S. secretary responsible for foreign policy. Especially from one who had been previously affiliated with the neo-conservative movement.
President Trump is currently visiting the Arab states along the Persian Gulf. His main effort there is to collect tribute in from of weapon and investment deals given in exchange for ‘security’. In that he is continuing the protection racket that has been a main aspect of U.S. global policy since the end of World War II.
But during a speech (video) at the Saudi-U.S.investment forum, he also entered new territory. He took fifteen minutes to laud his host and to rumble about his own ‘achievements’. He lauded the crown price Mohammad bin Salman and other Gulf rulers to then jump, twenty minutes in, into a critique of previous(?) U.S. ‘regime change’ behavior.
The White House does not provide a transcript of the 50 minute long speech, only short excerpts. But a full transcript is available here.
Here are the excerpts that point to new policies:
Before our eyes, a new generation of leaders is transcending the ancient conflicts of tired divisions of the past and forging a future where the Middle East is defined by commerce, not chaos, where it exports technology, not terrorism, and where people of different nations, religions, and creeds are building cities together, not bombing each other out of existence. We don’t want that.
(Applause)
And it’s crucial for the wider world to note this great transformation has not come from Western interventionists or flying people in beautiful planes giving you lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affairs. No, the gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called nation-builders, neocons, or liberal nonprofits 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, the people that have lived here all their lives, developing your own sovereign countries, pursuing your own unique visions, and charting your own destinies in your own way. It’s really incredible what you’ve done.
In the end, the so-called nation-builders wrecked far more nations than they built, and the interventionists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves. They told you how to do it, but they had no idea how to do it themselves. Peace, prosperity, and progress ultimately came not from a radical rejection of your heritage, but rather from embracing your national traditions and embracing that same heritage that you love so dearly.
(Applause)
And it’s something only you could do. You achieved a modern miracle the Arabian way. That’s a good way.
(Applause)
Trump goes on to touch on other Middle East countries (except mostly Israel). He lambasts Biden and Iran to then over a (undefined) deal with it.
At some point he is returning to the intervention theme:
As President of the United States, my preference will always be for peace and partnership whenever those outcomes can be achieved. Always. It’s always going to be that way. Only a fool would think otherwise. In recent years, far too many American presidents have been afflicted with the notion that it’s our job to look into the souls of foreign leaders and use U.S. policy to dispense justice for their sins. They loved using our very powerful military, …
…
I believe it is God’s job to sit in judgment, my job to defend America, and to promote the fundamental interests of stability, prosperity, and peace. That’s what I really want to do.
The rest of the whole speech is typical Trump. There is a lot of bluster, a lot of self-praise and tons of hypocrisy.
But the parts I have excerpted above are new. They, together with the previous remarks by Rubio, point to very different policy than any other recent president has pursued.
The speech excerpts published by the White House are nearly the same than those I have quoted above. It clearly wants to give them extra importance by promoting them apart from the rest of the speech. Who wrote the speech and who in the White House was in favor of these wording?
Will Trump act along the lines described in the speech? Or will he fall back into for the usual trot of an interventionist U.S. foreign policy seeking regime change left and right?
Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.
