Francis P. Sempa
Where is President Donald Trump’s foreign policy taking us? Two prominent observers of the international scene look at the same facts yet come to very different conclusions. Hal Brands, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, penned a piece in Bloomberg that contends that Trump’s focus on the Western Hemisphere risks stripping American resources from Europe and the Middle East. Walter Russell Mead in the Wall Street Journal argues that far from being a hemispheric isolationist, Trump is reshaping the globe. Who is right?
Brands has a history of demeaning Trump’s approach to the world. He is an Atlanticist and a Eurasianist who believes that the United States must continue to take the lead in defending Europe, our allies in the Middle East and in Asia. Brands is fond of invoking Sir Halford Mackinder’s geopolitical concepts, but he does so selectively by omitting Mackinder’s last iteration of those concepts made during the Second World War. Brands seems to believe that America’s interests in the geopolitical pluralism of Eurasia means that we must be equally strong and equally committed to Europe, the Middle East, and the Indo-Pacific. But that is a recipe for imperial overstretch, as Walter Lippmann warned in his small but important book The Cold War in 1947.
Brands surprisingly praises Trump’s reinvigoration of the Monroe Doctrine, though he criticizes Trump’s “meddling” in Brazilian politics, his threatening messages to Greenland and Panama, his mass deportations of illegal aliens to Latin American nations, his attacks on narco-terrorists in the Caribbean, and his aggressiveness toward Venezuela. Apparently, Brands wants Trump to be kindler and gentler in his approach to our hemispheric neighbors. But Brands mainly worries that Trump’s America First policies are weakening our position in Eurasia.
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