Two G.O.P. Foreign Policy Experts on What a Second Term Would Mean for the World
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‘They Would Never Be Doing This Under Trump’: Two G.O.P. Foreign Policy Experts on What a Second Term Would Mean for the WorldOpinion
Ross Douthat‘They Would Never Be Doing This Under Trump’: Two G.O.P. Foreign Policy Experts on What a Second Term Would Mean for the World
Oct. 24, 2024, 5:04 a.m. ETIn 2016 foreign policy was the arena where a Donald Trump presidency seemed likely to be the most destabilizing. Eight years later, he is campaigning on a promise to restore peace to a world that’s grown much more violent and chaotic on President Biden’s watch.
Many Trump critics assume that any successes during his administration were achieved by his advisers and diplomats in spite of his own reckless impulses and that a Trump restoration would give those impulses freer rein — spelling disaster for U.S. alliances and the peace of the world.
More than a few Republican foreign policy professionals, however, believe that Trump 2.0 would be a continuation of his first term, showcasing a grand strategy forged with both Trumpian and traditional Republican elements.
This is a conversation with two of those professionals: Robert C. O’Brien, who served as Trump’s national security adviser in 2019 and 2020, and Elbridge Colby, who served as a deputy assistant secretary of defense in 2017 and 2018 and was an architect of the 2018 national defense strategy. (I have known Colby — who goes by Bridge among friends and colleagues — since college; I had not spoken with O’Brien before this conversation.)
Our interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Let’s start big picture. Give me your assessment of Donald Trump’s foreign policy, President Biden’s foreign policy and the differences between the two.
Robert C. O’Brien: I think if you look back at the Trump administration, the real theme was peace through strength. The idea is that a strong America will deter its foes and a weak America is provocative. And I think we maintained a very strong position — which was, frankly, an antiwar position.
So our adversaries knew we wanted to withdraw our troops from places like Afghanistan and Iraq — and not just for the sake of those wars, but also to be able to pivot those forces to Asia and the Indo-Pacific, where we need them to deter the existential threat to America, which is China.
But at the same time, we weren’t going to get pushed around. When Iran got out of line, we eliminated an Iranian general of some note. We heard, “ISIS is an idea. It can’t be defeated,” but we sure as hell defeated them.
So we weren’t averse to using force, but we wanted to stop using force for nation building and for things that weren’t in American interest. We drew a red line in Ukraine, and Putin didn’t dare cross it. We gave the Ukrainians Javelin missiles, which are the only reason today that Ukraine is free.
We were tough on the Chinese. We let them know that it would be entirely unacceptable to invade Taiwan.
And it worked. Just four short years ago, the world was in peace. And now we’ve got a world that’s literally barreling toward World War III.
So what went wrong?
Elbridge Colby: What I see from the Biden-Harris administration is a yawning gap between John F. Kennedy-style rhetoric about autocracy versus democracy, and a situation with our military, our fiscal situation, with the political willpower of the country, that’s in a totally different place — that’s much more like Jimmy Carter. The administration is not adequately increasing defense spending, and yet it’s escalating commitments or refusing to rationalize them.
President Trump is running, I would say, not against the foreign policy of the post-World War II era but rather against post-Cold War foreign policy hubris. We need a willingness to grapple with the difference between what the American people are realistically willing and able to do and what we’re trying to do on the international stage. How do you reconcile those things? Not by just running away but by prioritizing your military capability, getting your allies to do more and, let’s be honest, reckoning with your rivals and being prepared to speak to them.
We’re in this bizarre situation where a Republican presidential candidate is being criticized from the left for his openness to negotiate with people like Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un. If you go back to the Cold War, it was considered de rigueur for U.S. presidents to be negotiating with Soviet leaders. And by the way, not just Democrats. There was President Nixon, Henry Kissinger, President Eisenhower.
I can more into specifics, but that’s the fundamentals of the debate.
Let’s get into those specifics. I want a sense of what you both think could have been done differently in the last few years. Start with Afghanistan. Bridge talks about rationalizing means and ends. Wasn’t that what the Biden administration was doing when it pulled out of Afghanistan? Wasn’t it following through on an agreement negotiated by the Trump administration?
O’Brien: I was involved in that throughout the entire process. At the end of the Trump administration, there was a move by some officials who wanted to see us quickly withdraw from Afghanistan the way Biden did.
I said: We’re looking at a Saigon-style withdrawal. We’re going to have Chinooks and Black Hawks at the embassy, ferrying people to Bagram Air Base. In my worst-case scenario, I could have never imagined that they would have closed Bagram and we would have done an evacuation from Hamid Karzai International Airport, near downtown Kabul.
I asked: Do we want that sort of image for America, that kind of withdrawal? President Trump agreed 100 percent. He said the military will stay and be strong. We’re going to bring all the American equipment home. We’ll bring home those who helped us on the ground. And we’re not leaving unless the Taliban comes to a good-faith agreement with the Afghan government on a government of national unity that will keep up the fight against ISIS-K.
None of that took place. We had a chaotic withdrawal that humiliated Americans. We lost 13 kids, great troops, at Abbey Gate, trying to defend the undefendable airport there. We left behind equipment. We left behind American citizens. We left behind our allies. We got no government of national unity, and ISIS is running rampant in Afghanistan.
So there’s a very big difference between ending a forever war the right way, which President Trump was doing, and a chaotic race for the exit, Saigon-style, that did, in fact, give Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping the idea that America is not going to stand by its allies and partners. And I believe there’s a direct link between what happened in Kabul and the march on Kyiv just a few months later.
Let’s talk about the march on Kyiv. Bridge, do you think that if Trump had been in the White House, Putin wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine?
Colby: In the case of Ukraine, it’s obviously impossible to litigate exactly what would have happened. What I would say is, if one bad thing had happened under the Biden administration, you could argue that this was bad luck. But instead, you had Afghanistan. You had the invasion of Ukraine. You’ve had the attacks from the Houthis. You’ve had the largest attack on the Jewish people since the Holocaust and what appears to be a metastasizing war in the Middle East. And China is preparing for war, according to the Biden administration’s own Pentagon officials. Iran is two weeks from a nuclear weapon, according to Tony Blinken. The North Koreans are now potentially deploying forces into Ukraine.
So there’s way too much. And a lot of this is, I think, a failure to have the mix of flexibility and pragmatism that President Trump brings.
My own view is, Ukraine should not be in NATO. But my understanding of the Trump administration’s point of view on Russia-Ukraine was to show the kind of strength that Robert was talking about — coupled with a certain flexibility and plasticity about what a plausible arrangement would be that would avoid war.
Whereas with the Biden administration, you had total inflexibility. You have Tony Blinken and Joe Biden giving perorations and moralistic lectures — but from a position of military weakness.
Robert, do you think that there was a strategy of negotiation available to the Biden administration that would have prevented Putin from invading? Or do you think it was just a matter of insufficient strength and deterrence?
O’Brien: I think it was both. I remember calling President Trump. We were out of office. It was about two weeks before the invasion. And he said: Look, they would never be doing this under Trump, because they didn’t know what I’d do. Was there a 5 percent chance I’d send the Marines in? Maybe that was too high. But there was a chance that we would intervene decisively and defeat the Russians.
That level of unpredictability — with Nixon, they called it the madman theory — not knowing what we would do but at the same time talking to the Russians and being cordial with them. This is something that people don’t understand. President Trump was very cordial with Vladimir Putin. He was cordial with Xi Jinping. But he used that cordiality to tell them very tough, difficult things. It was much easier to hear when you had somebody speaking calmly, somebody speaking as a friend, someone not lecturing you, just saying: Don’t do this, because there will be war if you do.
You’re always trying to complicate the lives of the planners. They’ve got planners. We’ve got planners. If their planners are coming in and telling Putin, “We don’t think Trump is going to support the Ukrainians with troops, but he might, and if he does, we lose” — that affects the calculation.
The Biden-Harris folks said: You can’t go in. You’re terrible people. And we’re not going to talk to you about it. And by the way, we’re not going to put any U.S. troops on the ground. We’re not going to give the Ukrainians some things they want.
So the Russians hear all the things we’re not going to do for the Ukrainians, and all they get is moral lecturing from us. Vladimir Putin saw the door wide open.
So what do you imagine happening in Year 1 of a second Trump administration, vis-à-vis Ukraine? Trump has obviously promised to make a deal to end the war. What does that deal look like?
O’Brien: Look, I don’t know if this is the president’s strategy. I’m not speaking for him. But what I would do is put massive sanctions — not symbolic sanctions — put full sanctions on the Russian Federation Central Bank, put secondary sanctions on the Chinese companies that do business with Russia, cut into the profits that Putin and the oligarchs are making. That might bring them to the table to negotiate in good faith with the Ukrainians. That’s one approach.
So you’re imagining a scenario where we escalate to de-escalate, where the Trump administration tries to bring Russia to the negotiating table by making it too costly for them to stay away?
O’Brien: We can’t negotiate with ourselves. And right now, what incentive is there for Putin to come to the table? He’s getting drones from Iran. He’s getting economic support from China. And he’s willing to fight to the last Dagestani. He’s not drafting many middle-class white kids from St. Petersburg and Moscow to fight this war. So if we’re going to have a negotiation, which is how every war ends, we’ve got to do something to bring them to the table. But rather than escalate militarily and potentially get into a situation that spins out of control, I think we can escalate economically and incentivize them to reach a resolution.
Bridge, what do you think that solution looks like?
Colby: I want to be very clear that we are not living in an optimal world. We are living in a world of hard choices and difficulties. And any foreign policy discussion that does not proceed on that basis is not credible.
Right now you have the public version of the Biden-Harris foreign policy, and then you have the leaked version to The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal — and the leaked version is more the reality, which is that the Ukrainians are facing very significant manpower issues, munitions shortages that have nothing to do just with willpower but have to do with the production capacity of the Western world.
And I think the administration knows that. We have gone through huge amounts of stocks of Stingers, Javelins, interceptors, Patriots. And now our military is heavily fixed in Europe and the Middle East, whereas the most significant challenge is China. So the Biden-Harris administration is rejecting the loosening of restrictions and transfer of additional weapons to the Ukrainians not just because they don’t think it will work but because they’ve so depleted our stockpiles that they fear it would compromise our own readiness even further.
In any situation the Ukrainians need to be sufficiently armed, and I would support an intensification of sanctions in certain ways. But Europeans need to be the ones to step up.
And in the end, you’re probably going to have an armistice somewhere along the line of contact, the military front line, because that’s how wars like this end.
O’Brien: Let me just jump in and put an exclamation point on something Bridge talked about: our readiness, our stockpiles. We spent four years in the Trump administration trying to rebuild the military. Most of that went to replenishing stockpiles of missiles and ammunition that had been depleted during the Obama years.
And right now we’re not just depleting out stockpiles in Ukraine. We’re using SM-6s — it’s a very advanced missile that’s developed to shoot down anything from a Chinese satellite to a Chinese bomber to a Chinese warship — we’re using those million-plus missiles to shoot down Houthi missiles being fired at merchant ships in the Red Sea.
So who’s winning there? China is winning, because the very capabilities that we need to to deter a cross-strait invasion of Taiwan are being used right now to shoot down homemade weapons in the Red Sea.
You’ve pivoted us to the Middle East, where I think it’s fair to say that the Republican Party is more hawkish than on the Russia-Ukraine conflict — more likely to say we need to stand fully behind Israel than to say the same thing about the government in Kyiv.
So I’m curious: Is there any point at which the United States has a stronger interest in a cease-fire in the Middle East than it does in Israel continuing its campaign against Iran and its proxies?
Colby: A couple of things. First, Israel is one of our very closest allies in the world. And I think it’s very important for us to stand by them. Ukraine, I sympathize and support their self-defense, but an attack on one of our key allies in the Middle East is a different situation.
But first and foremost must come the U.S. ability to defeat Chinese aggression. That is the priority interest of the United States and should be the priority of the defense establishment.
Support to Israel in its self-defense should also be a priority for the United States. But why are we taking such a leading role in the case of the Houthis, when we use an enormous amount of munitions for very little effect? Why aren’t we empowering countries like Poland and also putting a lot of pressure on countries like Germany to take a much greater degree of responsibility for their own self-defense?
OK, but Germany and Poland are not going to police the Red Sea and the Middle East —
Colby: This is the whole point. We are not going to be the world’s policeman. We have to understand that, because for the first time in more than a century, we are not clearly the world’s largest economy. And we’re definitely not the world’s largest industrial power.
During the Cold War, when we were most successful, our military was not for policing. It was for containing the Soviet Union. That was our No. 1 priority. And by the way, we had a robust defense industrial base that could provide weapons at scale, very quickly, to our allies, like Israel today, but also like South Korea, like Poland, like India.
There’s this canard that the Trump administration was not pro-ally. It was; it was just a different approach — more of a partnership than a dependency model. Israel is an exemplar. And Germany and Poland can do a lot more. Germany alone is a larger economy than Russia. Germany could, essentially, by itself, solve the Russian conventional threat.In 1988, West Germany could put 12 active divisions in the field.
You said the Germans couldn’t police the Red Sea. Well, the Italians and the Spanish and the Greeks and the Turks and the Brits and the French, with their naval forces, they could actually take a much more significant role. Why aren’t they?
This is the problem. Our alliance system is much larger economically than the foes we face. But these foes are able to produce at much higher capacity. So this is a matter of will for our allies. Japan is spending way below 2 percent on defense. Taiwan is spending too little. Most of the Europeans are spending too little. Meantime, the Chinese are full speed ahead getting ready for confrontation. Nobody knows what they could do. But Xi Jinping has personally instructed the Chinese military to be ready for war by 2027.
Robert, is the Middle East a secondary theater, relative to Taiwan and the Pacific?
O’Brien: Well, it depends who you talk to. If you’re a Jewish person —
I’m asking you. From your strategic perspective, is there a limit to how invested we can be in an Israeli-Iranian conflict, given the threats we face in the Pacific?
O’Brien: Let me answer it this way, Ross. The existential threats to America, to our existence, to our kids, how they live, to our grandkids, come from one place. It’s the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing. It’s Xi Jinping and his ambitions.
Because of the scale of the Chinese economy, the scale of the Chinese military, if you’re the president of the United States, you’ve got to be thinking about them constantly. And we have to put most of our energy into thwarting that threat.
Having said that, the entire West owes a debt of gratitude to Israel. They’re fighting much bigger powers. And they’re winning. And we need to help them win their war.
They’ve showed exquisite capability in Lebanon and Gaza. At every turn, we’ve tried to put the brakes on Israel. Look, let Israel do what we did to the caliphate of ISIS — destroy it, win it, liberate the hostages if they can be liberated and be done with Hamas, be done with Hezbollah. The Israelis are willing to do that. So that’s, No. 1, victory.
No. 2, we can’t have this defense-only posture. If the Houthis understood that every one of their cellphones was going to explode in their hand or that every one of their leaders would be killed within three or four days of an attack on the U.S., guess what? The attacks would stop.
The last point I’ll make is, we may not be 10 feet tall, but we’re not pygmies. We’ve got a lot of resources. We’ve got 50,000 troops in Germany. What are they doing there? They’re not on the front lines against Russia. What President Trump wanted to do was move half the troops out of Germany. The plan was to move half of them to Poland, to deter the Russians, and take the other half and move them to the Aleutian Islands, Guam, Hawaii, California. Move them into the Pacific to deter the Chinese.
And you know who opposed it? The Germans. Angela Merkel called up like she was a mayor, complaining that car dealerships and pubs were going to have to close if we pulled that many troops out of Germany.
But American troops need to be where the front is. And the front is in the East, against Russia. The front is in the Pacific, to deter the Chinese. So even though we’re somewhat resource limited, we can be smarter with the resources that we have.
Let me pick up on that question of resources. You’re both being collegial, but even when you’re agreeing, Bridge seems more concerned about resource constraints and more cautious about military escalation.
I think that reflects a real divide, even among people who praise the Trump administration’s foreign policy, about the limits on American power right now. And my expectation is that that division will shape the internal arguments of a second Trump administration. Do you agree?
Colby: Speaking for myself, I think you’re absolutely right. And I don’t think I’m shy about this point.
The core question in the foreign policy debate today is, what is the proper and viable role for the United States in the international system? And if you map Republican debates along that line, it’s not internationalist versus isolationist; it’s primacists — people supporting the broadest possible American hegemony — on one end and isolationists on the other.
I think most serious voices in the Republican Party are somewhere in the middle, between those two poles. True primacy is just not a credible strategy. We’re at over 100 percent debt-to-G.D.P. ratio. Our military is in historically bad shape. The defense industrial base is atrophied dramatically.
So if we’re going to live in the real world — where there’s a very real possibility of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan — we have to be prepared.
The reality is, we do not have a military that can fight multiple adversaries on our own at the same time. So we need to be clear. We need to prioritize. And whoever is in office, we do not want to be in a situation where you are vulnerable to being defeated by China. That is the catastrophic outcome that must be avoided.
O’Brien: Look, I think everyone agrees with that, anyone who’s serious, whether it’s Mitt Romney or Rand Paul. Everyone understands that China is the threat. The question is: How do we address it?
No. 1, our allies need to step up. I got so sick of hearing that we didn’t support our allies. President Trump would make some pretty unorthodox diplomatic statements — along the lines of, if you don’t pay your dues, you get kicked out of the club or you can’t get a tee time if you’re a delinquent on your dues. But that allowed us to get additional NATO spending from the Europeans, which helped prepare them and helped make stockpiles available to Ukraine today. So we were helping our allies.
And I’ve had Germans, at international conferences, come and tell me: Thank you for putting the pressure on us. Sometimes in a family, you have to have some tough love.
No. 2, our defense spending should be whatever it takes to defend us. Now, that means hard political choices. But we should increase our defense spending. Whether we will or not, I don’t know.
No. 3, we’ve got to be much smarter about how we procure our weapons. We’ve got to be more like the tech companies and have iterative manufacturing and get something that’s good enough out now. The Chinese have learned that. The Chinese will send out a destroyer and figure out what works, what doesn’t, and they’ll upgrade it. And we need to do the same.
Bridge, you were talking about rebuilding our industrial base. Robert, you’re talking about changing the way we do procurement. But if China decides to attack Taiwan as early as 2027, neither is going to make a big difference to the outcome. What will?
Colby: I think, by far, the overwhelming thing that matters is the military capability of the United States, Taiwan and, to some extent, Japan and Australia to deny a successful Chinese attack.
Some forms of reassurance and negotiation along the lines of what President Trump has been indicating — sticking with the policy of strategic ambiguity, not personalizing things excessively with President Xi — these may help on the margin. But by far, the most significant thing is the military forces needed to block Chinese designs on Taiwan.
The problem is we have not been following our defense strategy, which has said: Prioritize the first island chain. Taiwan has been grossly laggardly. And Japan has been moving far too slowly.
Reindustrialization is the solution over time. But that is not a quick fix. So we must husband our most critical military resources. Because we see, in the Ukraine context, how little effect sanctions really have, let alone moral norms and so forth. And if they don’t work against Russia, they’re definitely not going to work against China, which is 10 times the G.D.P. of Russia.
Robert, does that just mean more ships, more matériel and more men in the Pacific than we have right now?
O’Brien: That’s the first answer, absolutely. In my recent Foreign Affairs article, I said: Let’s move the entire Marine Corps to the Pacific. I’m not saying move Camp Lejeune and Camp Pendleton, but the forward fighting elements of the Marine Corps, the tip of the spear, should be in the Philippines, and it should be in Japan. It should be in Guam. It should be in Hawaii.
Let’s get a carrier out of Norfolk and move it to the Pacific and have one more carrier in the Pacific.
And then between now and 2027, we can buy a heck of a lot of L.R.A.S.M.s, long-range anti-ship missiles. We can buy a lot of Ghost Sharks and Ghost Bats. Ghost Shark is an underwater unmanned vehicle, Ghost Bats an aerial unmanned vehicle. We can repair our submarines. We don’t have enough of an industrial base to fix everything, so we’ve got to prioritize. And what scares the Chinese is our sub fleet. Let’s get our subs fixed, even if that means delaying maintenance on some other platforms, and surge the subs to the Pacific.
And just like we can’t afford to lose, Xi Jinping can’t lose, because he goes out the office in a side door in a box with a bullet in his head if he loses the invasion of Taiwan. So we need to do everything we can to put doubt in the minds of Chinese leadership that if they invade Taiwan, they lose.
Let’s finish by talking about Donald Trump’s character and personality.
Someone might listen to you, Bridge, and say that when you talk about the virtues of realism and hardheaded negotiation, you’re glossing over the reality that Trump has no moral vision of America’s place in the world. Even the great realists — Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon — could talk a good game about the value of democracy and human rights. But none of that is ever going to be part of Trump’s true worldview — is it?
Colby: I think it would be hard to find a time in which the moral case for what President Trump is offering is more compelling. Because you have, in President Biden and Vice President Harris and Secretary of State Blinken, moralism at its fever pitch, completely unmatched by any kind of military buildup, correlated with a situation in the Ukraine war that is deteriorating and looks unlikely to be reversed. And I think we need somebody who is going to bring us back from the precipice, where we now find ourselves talking about the possibility of escalation against Russia, which has 6,000 nuclear warheads.
As somebody who’s worked on the nuclear issue for 20 years, I can’t believe the blithe cavalierness with which many people are talking about that escalation. President Trump is talking about avoiding World War III. And what happened to the left — the Times readers of 1975 who worried about a national security state that got us enmeshed in peripheral wars without knowing where it was going — that said we need to have a more modest conception of foreign policy? I’d love to see that left again, because it seems to have disappeared.
A similar question for you, Robert. You worked closely with Trump. You have sustained personal experience with him. What do you say to the argument that if there was a grand strategy in the Trump White House, it was something created by people who worked for him, often over and against the fundamental views of the man himself, whose fundamental preference is just to glad-hand with dictators?
O’Brien: I didn’t know President Trump before I joined the administration. I knew him first as his hostage envoy. And what I realized about President Trump very, very early on is that he loves America. But he doesn’t love the concept, the idea of America; he loves the American people. He loved the hostages and their families. He never cared if they were G.O.P. or Democratic or Black or white or Muslim or Jewish or Christian. If they had a blue passport, he wanted them back.
He loved our soldiers. I spent a lot of time with President Trump going to Walter Reed Hospital as the national security adviser and pinning on Purple Hearts and going up to Dover, which were the toughest days on the job.
And again, not knowing him before — I wasn’t a Trump MAGA fan — but I got to know the president. He never raised his voice to me, never was the caricature of him in the media. He was willing to learn. He listened to the briefings. I mean, every time you hear someone say he didn’t listen to his intelligence briefings, it’s absurd.
He asked questions. He changed his mind. But what didn’t change was his North Star, which is always “America First.” It was a trade deal — was the trade deal good for America? It was a military engagement — was that military engagement good for America?
So, look, I’m flattered when people give me credit. But Donald Trump is responsible for the success of the Trump foreign policy. Anyone who wants to tell you differently, they are rewriting history. Because I was there. I saw it firsthand. It was Donald Trump’s success.
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DON’T let them eat cake.
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Always remember, Operation Valkyrie was an act of sedition.
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@Jolly said in Two G.O.P. Foreign Policy Experts on What a Second Term Would Mean for the World:
Yeah but one disgruntled former employee is the gold standard objective truth teller about Trump. No other opinion matters, now that Trump has been definitely called Hitlerian by Kelly.
