When Donald Trump returns to the Oval Office, he will be handed a globe that is in crisis.
The former and future president was elected on the strength of his America First domestic agenda and he largely ignored talking about foreign policy— other than making broad fanciful statements.
But now the world is waiting to see if Trump will accept America’s traditional responsibility as global leader or continue with his loose isolationist foreign policy.
Under America First, Trump has pushed a populist “Fortress America” political theory that emphasizes the fundamental notion of "putting America first," which generally involves disregarding global affairs and focusing solely on domestic policy in the United States. This view was evident this weekend as news broke about the then developing fall of the Assad dictatorship in Syria. Trump went on social media to declare his position. "THIS IS NOT OUR FIGHT," he wrote.
The end of a brutal 13-year civil war that was a proxy war for many nations including the United States and Russia has everyone wondering about what this means for the Arab nation of nearly 25 million.
The rebels were led by Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, military leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham who is designated a terrorist by the United States. Al-Jolani has said he will create an Islamic state, but he has no ambitions outside of Syria.
Trump’s narrow view about the stakes of the Syrian conflict seems to ignore the critical role that Syria plays in the Middle East which borders with Turkey to the north, Iraq to the east and southeast, Jordan to the south, and Israel and Lebanon to the southwest. Ignoring what happens next in Syria may not be in America’s best national security interests.
And then there’s Ukraine. Trump promised during a CNN town hall in May 2023 that he could end the war between Russia and Ukraine in 24 hours. And Trump repeated this assertion on the campaign trail.
This weekend while in Paris to attend the reopening of Notre Dame the soon-to-be American president met briefly with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Trump urged Zelenskyy to make a deal with Russia for peace. The following day Trump called for an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine.
Closer to home Trump is stirring up new foreign policy troubles with neighboring Canada and Mexico. Trump is threatening both longtime free trading partners with 25% tariffs. Trump seems to be engaged in saber-rattling against Canada and Mexico.
When Trump dined with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at Mar-a-Lago, the president-elect reportedly joked that if Canada didn’t like the tariffs, they could become part of the United States as the “51st state.”
And Trump has promised that on his first day in office he will send American troops to the U.S.-Mexico border while also threatening to invade Mexico to exterminate the powerful drug cartels. The United States has a long bloody history of invading Mexico for territorial expansion.
Trump’s actions on the international stage disrupt a valued American tradition that the United States has just one president at a time. The norm has been for the president-elect to avoid high stakes diplomacy until taking the oath of office.
But once in office it’s clear that Trump will reduce American foreign military deployments and tear down America’s structure of global deterrence based on military might and alliance partnerships.
It was this framework, while expensive and cumbersome, that previously managed to prevent a world war for the last 75 years.
Guests:
Martin Smith is a FRONTLINE correspondent and producer. He investigated al-Jolani’s origins and his philosophy in its 2021 documentary The Jihadist. Smith was the first western journalist to interview the former Al Qaeda commander.
Peter Bergen is CNN's national security analyst, a vice president at New America and professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is one of the world’s foremost authorities on foreign policy, terrorism, and national security. Bergen has authored/edited ten books, including “The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and the World” and “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden,” with three titles becoming New York Times bestsellers. He is the host of the podcast “In the Room with Peter Bergen.”
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*This interview will be recorded on Tuesday, December 10, 2024.
