John Schuessler, Ph.D., and Jasen Castillo, Ph.D., along with RAND colleague Miranda Priebe, Ph.D., draw on recent findings to conclude the incoming administration will probably hew closer to the longstanding U.S. foreign-policy consensus than is commonly believed
How much will President-elect Donald Trump’s administration pull back from involvement in Ukraine, the Middle East, East Asia and the rest of the world during his second term? The question is on the minds of people around the world. But a Trump-era international retrenchment is less likely commonly believed, according to recent analysis by two professors at The Bush School of Government and Public Service.
The “isolationist characterization” of Trump “is off the mark,” according to a pair of recent publications from Jasen Castillo, Ph.D., and John Schuessler, Ph.D., co-directors of the Bush School’s Albritton Center for Grand Strategy. Likewise, calling Trump an isolationist “overstates the likely influence of those who call for a more restrained U.S. approach to the world within a second Trump administration,” according to Castillo, Schuessler and co-author Miranda Priebe, Ph.D., of the RAND policy institute.
The conclusion is based on a review of the first Trump administration’s policies, his political nominees and potential nominees; it builds on groundbreaking research into the rising tension between those who support the United States’s traditionally robust involvement in world events and those advocating various strains of foreign-policy restraint.
Trump may often speak skeptically of policies rooted in what’s often called the post-World War II consensus, but his rhetoric did not result in a “significantly reduce(d) … U.S. role in security affairs around the world” during his first term, Castillo, Schuessler and Priebe write in an op-ed for MSNBC.com. They state that the pattern seems likely to repeat given Trump’s pool of political nominees.
“Sure, there will be groups calling for a less militarized approach to Europe and the Middle East — including from within the Republican Party — but they face an uphill battle in convincing the administration to adopt such proposals,” according to the op-ed.
Trump, engagement and restraint
The political science underpinning the op-ed is explored more fully in a RAND policy brief, published Jan. 9, examining the role of “deep engagement” in world events and how “restrainers” would like to influence the Trump administration. (RAND political scientist Bryan Rooney, Ph.D., was not an author on the op-ed but co-authored the other publications.)
According to the RAND brief: “Deep engagers call for the United States to remain a security leader in three key regions — East Asia, Europe, and the Middle East — through commitments to a vast network of allies and partners, a large forward military presence, and the use of force to enforce international norms and uphold U.S. interests, broadly defined. … However, the Iraq War and the Global War on Terror gave rise to critiques of deep engagement from policymakers and experts on both the political left and right, as well as from strategists in academia. These groups highlighted damaged relations with other major powers, unhealthy alliance dynamics, failed military interventions, and dysfunction at home.
“Despite their political and intellectual differences, these unlikely allies converged on a grand strategic alternative, restraint, which calls for reducing or resolving conflicts of interest with U.S. rivals; rebalancing, downgrading, or ending U.S. alliances and security partnerships; reducing the U.S. forward military presence; and raising the bar for the use of force.”
“Restraint, it turns out, is a big tent that crosses the partisan divide,” according to the MSNBC op-ed.
Across the divide … but not united
Restraint, however, remains a minority opinion among Washington policymakers, according to the brief. The brief concludes that, partly because those advocating restraint come from various political persuasions, and have sometimes-conflicting motivations, they could have difficulty reaching the political critical mass sufficient to alter the Trump administration’s trajectory.
Restrainers did coalesce around opposition to the Global War on Terror. But, though they generally oppose U.S. military intervention in Ukraine, one subset (“progressive pragmatists”) “supports the Biden administration’s policy of providing military and economic support to Ukraine with few conditions.” Consensus among restrainers further frays on the question of how the United States could best handle a Chinese attack on Taiwan, should one occur.
Meanwhile the first Trump administration, while rejecting “multilateralism and the liberal aspects of some prior administrations’ strategies … maintained the core elements of deep engagement.”
For more on the authors’ research into how deep engagement and restraint could play out in the incoming Trump administration; their categorization of the different strains of restrainers; and how those various views mesh or clash on various international issues, read the RAND brief. To explore the topic more broadly, read the underlying research published late last year in International Security, the pre-eminent journal in the field.
