Does Trump Have a Foreign Policy?

Daniel R. DePetris

Security,

The Republican front-runner has questioned America’s role in both Europe and Asia.

The 2016 Republican primary elections in the United States has not only defied all expectations, but has also made mince-meat out of the business of making political predictions. The political pundits that Americans so often recognize on television, whether Democratic or Republican, liberal or conservative, have either been exposed as fools toting the conventional line or partisans hoping that a bombastic self-marketer will crater and lose his chances at winning the Republican nomination.

To date, those hopes have been dashed repeatedly. Of the states that have thus far held Republican primaries or caucus, Donald Trump has won eighteen of them and close to nearly forty-eight percent of the delegates. His accomplishments to date would be impressive for an ordinary politician. But for someone like Trump who has said so many controversial things on the campaign trail, his political strategy has turned the entire political world on its head. His foreign policy strategy also appears to be novel for the modern GOP, as he made plain in a meeting with the Washington Post editorial board on Monday.

Trump questioned America’s role in both Europe and Asia. “We certainly can’t afford to do this anymore,” Trump said about NATO. “NATO is costing us a fortune, and, yes, we’re protecting Europe with NATO, but we’re spending a lot of money.” When it came to Asia, he said that America is not profiting from its military posture: “I think we were a very powerful, very wealthy country, and we are a poor country now. We’re a debtor nation.”

Trump appears to be focused, in foreign policy, on the economic benefit to Washington above all. In the past, Trump has argued that the United States should swipe Iraq’s oil to compensate for the trillions of dollars Washington spent in the region over the past decade—never mind that actually implementing this plan would alienate every U.S. ally in the region and reinforce the beliefs of those in the region that the United States just wants the Arab world’s oil resources for itself.