 President Trump with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia in Riyadh on May 13, 2025. |
IN A major address in Saudi Arabia this month, President Trump made it clear that he has no use for what is often called the "idealist" approach to US foreign policy. He began by heaping praise on the Saudi royal family and their economic growth, and then denounced — indirectly but scathingly — past American efforts to advance democracy and freedom in the region.
"This great transformation [of the Middle East] has not come from Western interventionists ... giving you lectures on how to live or how to govern your own affairs," Trump declared. "The gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called nation-builders, neocons, or ... those who spent trillions failing to develop Kabul and Baghdad, so many other cities."
There was more. "In the end," said Trump, "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." Rather than urge his hosts to expand liberty and tolerate dissent, the president encouraged them to keep "charting your own destinies in your own way."
A Wall Street Journal editorial summed up Trump's doctrine: "He doesn't much care what kind of government countries run as long as they want good relations with the U.S. He's looking for deals, even with enemies ... and he has no interest in promoting American values."
That was certainly not the approach of John F. Kennedy, whose inaugural address memorably proclaimed that Americans would "pay any price, bear any burden" in their ongoing defense of liberty and human rights "at home and around the world." Nor was it the approach of Ronald Reagan, who insisted in 1984 that "the great struggle in the world today is not over oil or grain or territory, but over freedom." Nor of George W. Bush, who often expressed solidarity with pro-democracy dissidents and used his second inaugural address to outline a Freedom Agenda with "the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in the world."
For Trump, these have never been priorities. Spreading freedom, bolstering democratic institutions abroad, "ending tyranny in the world" — they form no part of the MAGA agenda. That helps explain why an early priority of the administration was to shut down the National Endowment for Democracy and why Vice President JD Vance has been so contemptuous of Ukraine's struggle to defend itself from Russian aggression. Trump has long rejected the idea that America ought to put pressure on despots who violate human rights. "I don't know that we have a right to lecture," he said in 2016. "We have to fix our own mess."
As one whose foreign policy views strongly align with those of Kennedy, Reagan, and Bush 43, I regard Trump's disdain for advancing American values as tragic and disgraceful. But I acknowledge that it has considerable support across the political spectrum. The left-wing journal The Nation, usually so hostile to Trump, praised his denunciation of American foreign-policy internationalism as the "one aspect of Trump's foreign policy vision that is genuinely attractive." From its very different perspective, the libertarian journal Reason often scorns the impulse to use American treasure, diplomacy, and power to strengthen democratic freedoms elsewhere. Its report on Trump's speech was approvingly headlined: "Trump Declares the 'Neocon' Era Over."
Trump's style is crude and often offensive. But there's no denying that his foreign policy approach fits within the so-called realist school of thought — or that he is far from the first political leader to embrace it.
Before Reagan came along to support anticommunist freedom fighters and exhort Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down this wall," Richard Nixon was promoting "détente" with Moscow and cozying up to Mao Zedong, the totalitarian killer who ruled China. Reagan's successor, George H.W. Bush, waged foreign policy in the Nixon manner. In 1989 he refused to protest publicly when the Chinese government massacred pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square. And as the Soviet empire was collapsing in 1991, he delivered his notorious "Chicken Kiev" speech warning Ukrainians not to pursue independence.
Similarly, Barack Obama spurned the "freedom agenda" of his predecessor. Like Bush 41 during Tiananmen, Obama was unwilling to voice support for the throngs of pro-democracy protesters who filled the streets of Tehran in June 2009. Later he was equally unmoved when Vladimir Putin sent troops into Ukraine and annexed Crimea. He practiced "realism with a capital R," as Politico once put it. Like Trump, Obama wasn't interested in spreading American values. He was interested in cutting a nuclear deal with Iran and arranging a "reset" with Russia.
As a candidate for president in 2004, John Kerry repeatedly articulated foreign policy views like those Trump espouses. He told The Washington Post that as president he would, in the Post's words, "play down the promotion of democracy as a leading goal" — not because he denied the importance of liberty but because other issues "trumped human rights concerns in those nations." Asked about the military dictator of Pakistan, Kerry replied blithely: "Is he a strongman to a degree? Did he promise elections that have not occurred and all the rest? Yeah." But changing that, he said, would not be a "priority."
John Quincy Adams avowed more than 200 years ago that the United States "goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy" — a sound policy for a nation that was then small, weak, and poor. But the attitude he expressed has persisted through most of US history. The "America First" mindset did not begin with Trump. Nazi Germany had conquered half of Europe and Japan was brutalizing much of Asia by the time America finally entered World War II, so strong was the public's aversion to involving itself in an overseas war.
Foreign policy "realists" maintain that while more freedom and democracy in the world might be nice, America has a more pressing interest in assuring global stability, even at the cost of engaging diplomatically with dictators and other rogue actors. The problem is that the stability they prize is often beneficial only in the short term, and sometimes not even then. American backing for Middle Eastern dictatorships helped turn the region into an incubator of Islamist terrorism. The "reset" that let Putin get away with seizing Crimea emboldened him to launch even bloodier attacks.
Of course the people Trump sneeringly calls "interventionists" and "so-called nation-builders" can and have made awful blunders. All the same, it remains the case that American foreign policy is most truly realistic when it is rooted in the ideals that have made America such a land of hope and inspiration. Trump isn't the first president who doesn't get that.
Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.
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