Transcript: US foreign policy under Trump 2.0

This is an audio transcript of the Rachman Review podcast episode: ‘US foreign policy under Trump 2.0’

Gideon Rachman
Hello and welcome to the Rachman Review. I’m Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator of the Financial Times. This week’s podcast is about Donald Trump and his potential impact on US foreign policy. My guest is Jeremy Shapiro, director of the US program for the European Council on Foreign Relations and co-author of a recent paper, Imagining Trump 2.0.

With Trump the bookmakers’ favourite to win November’s presidential election, governments all over the world are scrambling to understand the implications for their countries. So what could the world expect from a second Trump presidency?

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Donald Trump voice clip
I think Zelenskyy is maybe the greatest salesman of any politician that’s ever lived. Every time he comes to our country he walks away with $60bn.

Gideon Rachman
That was Donald Trump in a recent campaign appearance, suggesting that America is pouring far too much money into Ukraine. The prospect of a cut-off in American aid to Ukraine if Trump gets back in is very real. But a second Trump administration would have implications for every aspect of US foreign policy, from China to Europe and from trade to migration. Figuring out exactly what would happen is much harder. That’s partly because there are several different ideological camps competing for Trump’s attention. Jeremy Shapiro is a former senior official in the US state department. We met up at a recent conference in Brussels. Afterwards, I asked Jeremy to describe the three schools of foreign policy thought in Trump world.

Jeremy Shapiro
The intellectual divisions, I would preface by saying, are quite important because nobody really knows what a Trump administration will be like, because Trump himself is pretty erratic and inconsistent. And I think in the interim period, in the period since he’s been president, a sort of ecosystem has arisen amongst the Republican foreign policy establishment or the Republican foreign policy thinkers, which has been quite an intellectual ferment, actually. And what all of these people are trying to do is win what I call the war for Trump’s mind. They’re trying to come up with a foreign policy concept that definitely works with all of the strong through lines that Trump has, and there are a few, but also fills in a lot of the details and tries to create a bridge from what they want to accomplish to where he is. And there are three main efforts to do that, three main tribes that are doing it. The first are the “restrainers”. These are people who think that US foreign policy has been much too active abroad, and want US foreign policy to focus at home. The second school of thought are the “prioritisers”. These are the people who see the China threat as overriding, and really want US foreign policy to focus almost exclusively on China and Asia, and to reduce commitments in Europe and the Middle East, particularly. And then the third school are the more traditional “primacists”, who want US foreign policy to focus on everything, and the US to be the traditional leader in all of the main strategic regions of the world, as it has been for the last several decades.

Gideon Rachman
So give me a few names, because people attach ideas to names, and obviously who Trump appoints might give us a signal to which of these schools he’s going with. Let’s start then with the primacists. Who would be in that school?

Jeremy Shapiro
I think a classic primacist is his final secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, who is very much vying for a new job. He might be secretary of defence. He has been very careful to be quite loyal to Trump and to never contradict Trump. But you can see in his approach, particularly to Iran, but to most problems in the world, that he is very much a believer in American power, and he wants American foreign policy to be present everywhere. So to me, he’s one of the likely to be more influential primacists. But the primacists, they still dominate, I would say, the Republican establishment. Probably something on the order of 70, 75 per cent of the Republican congressional delegation are still primacists. There are fewer and fewer of them every year. But as we’ve noticed, Congress turns over quite slowly. So, in fact, they are still the dominant school when it comes to the Republican elite.

Gideon Rachman
And so the others, the prioritisers. The name, I think maybe because he’s very active on Twitter, but you hear a lot is Elbridge Colby, who’s written this book and lots of articles saying we really don’t have the resources to be primacists. There’s one overriding threat, that’s China. Let’s go all in on there. And it looks like this article that everybody at this conference we’ve just been out was talking about, by Mr O’Brien, where he talks about switching the entire Marine Corps to Asia. Does that make him a prioritiser as well? And how powerful is that group?

Jeremy Shapiro
Yeah. So it’s interesting. I think Elbridge Colby has been almost a sort of evangelist for prioritisation, and he’s definitely become the name that people most associate with that school. I do think it’s important to understand that he’s following to a degree in the wake of a couple of Republican politicians, particularly Senator Josh Hawley, who is, interestingly, the only senator to vote against Swedish and Finnish adhesion to Nato, and particularly saying because we need to be concentrating in Asia. Senator JD Vance, who a lot of people are tipping to be a possible vice-presidential candidate, is a restrainer. Robert O’Brien, I think, is a little bit difficult. From that article, he certainly advocates doing a lot more about China, but if you read the article, he also advocates doing quite a bit more about Iran and actually quite a bit more about Russia. So to my assessment, he would probably still be a primacist, but I think he’s quite flexible.

Gideon Rachman
Yeah. And just to be clear, O’Brien and Colby are both names people are talking about as possible national security advisers.

Jeremy Shapiro
Yeah, I think that all of the names that we’ve mentioned are being talked about for various jobs. I think it’s important to understand that anybody who tells you that they know who’s gonna be in any of these jobs is a liar. And that includes if that person’s name is Donald Trump. These are decisions that clearly will be made as packages and will be very much done — if the first term is any indication — if Trump is re-elected, from his gut and from, you know, how they look and, you know, what they said on Fox News the day before they met him.

So I think what’s maybe more important to understand is that all three of these schools will almost inevitably have representation in the administration. And I think we can learn a lot from understanding these schools and who’s in them about what the balance of power will look like in the administration once those people are picked, because Trump probably won’t be picking these people on this criteria. And so he will pick people almost inevitably from all three schools.

Gideon Rachman
Yeah. So let’s get to the third school — restrainers. Is there any difference between restrainers and what is more commonly called isolationists? Basically people saying we’ve had enough wars, let the Europeans look after themselves. We’re a continent. We can look after ourselves.

Jeremy Shapiro
Yeah. I think that there’s an important difference, frankly, between isolationists and restrainers. In the first instance, it’s because isolationist is kind of a pejorative term. So it’s a term that people use to create an association with the 1930s and to discredit the entire school of thought. So I’ve never met anybody who has defined themselves as an isolationist. And I have to say, when we were writing this paper, we were quite determined not to name the schools something that people wouldn’t accept for themselves. But I would say, you know, more conceptually, the difference is that restrainers are not interested in isolating the United States from the world in any way. They are interested in making sure that the US has an outward policy, that it is participating in international trade, that it is participating in international politics. What they are interested, I think, in slowing down and reversing is this concept of the US as the global leader, which has a responsibility and a métier to solve all of the regional problems of the world. So just because a war arises in Ukraine doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the US’s responsibility to fight it or win it.

Gideon Rachman
I get the impression you might be a Democratic restrainer.

Jeremy Shapiro
I’ve been called such a thing. Yeah, I think let’s put it this way. Restraint is a policy which has a lot more adherents in the academy than it does in the government. And when I was in the government, which I was in the Obama administration, I found that, you know, it’s not very popular among policymakers of any type because it sort of reduces their influence, and it’s not what they’re used to doing. So restraint, I think, has to come from the outside. And I think it makes sense for an outsider like me not just to be cheering on the government in its sort of natural path towards ever greater American involvement in every problem in the world, but to be questioning whether that makes sense in any given circumstance.

Gideon Rachman
So since we’re talking about Trump, who are the Republican restrainers? The names we need to look out for, and how influential do you think they are within the school?

Jeremy Shapiro
Well, it’s interesting. I think that the main restrainer is Trump himself, whose instincts are restrained, and we saw this in the first term from his approach to the, for example, the Aramco attack, an attack by Iran on Saudi Arabia, which United States had always promised to help the Saudis retaliate for. And in fact, Trump refused to do so. It’s interesting that in Robert O’Brien’s foreign affairs piece recently, talking about all of the sort of weaknesses of the Biden administration, he never mentioned that very consequential decision of the Trump administration, which totally alienated the Saudis from the United States. So Trump is the sort of leading progenitor.

It is also the case that pretty much all of the primary candidates, the people who are vying against Trump for the Republican presidential nomination, with the exception of Nikki Haley, ended up as restrainers. So that includes DeSantis, notably Vivek Ramaswamy. And I would say that the reason is because if the primacists dominate the Republican elite, the restrainers really dominate the base of the party. And that the political message that’s coming through from the Republican base is very much a restrainer one. And that is affecting most prominently, the people who are running for new offices. It doesn’t affect incumbents too much, but it’s affecting Trump. It affected Ramaswamy, it affected DeSantis. And so I think we can expect that a lot of the new senators or congressmen will end up as restrainers.

Gideon Rachman
So it’s all, I think, very interesting from a kind of conceptual level, but let’s now translate it into what it’ll actually mean for what America does in the world. Let’s say Trump wins. As you say, all three schools are likely to have their representatives in the administration, but go through a couple of issues. Ukraine is obviously first and foremost. People have jumped on the fact that Trump has said he’d make peace in a day, to say, well, he’s gonna pull the rug out from under Ukraine. Do you think that’s right? And is there anything more kind of nuanced or subtle than one can say about how he’s likely to approach it?

Jeremy Shapiro
Yeah, slightly more nuanced. I would say that Trump’s approach, because he will have a fair number of primacists in his administration and particularly in the Congress, he’s not simply gonna be able to pull the rug out from under them. And he’s not really even gonna want to in the first instance. It seems to me that what the prioritisers and restrainers will be saying to him who will want to get out of this war is what you need to be doing, and this is part of the sort of bridge from their policy to his, is that this is an opportunity for a deal, which always appeals to Trump. And the prototype for this might be what he tried to do with North Korea in the first term. And so what that means is that Trump will probably put forward a new aid package of some size. We’ve just written a paper which goes through a bunch of different scenarios and rehearses exactly what you’re talking about, how the different camps will interact to determine policy. They’re just guesses, but we think they’re all plausible, and they all use ideas that come from all three camps.

And so in the Ukraine situation, they’ll convince him that a deal is reachable. And when Trump sees a deal, he becomes a sort of deal-seeking missile and nothing else matters. And then I think what will happen is that he’ll use the aid as a lever against both Ukraine and Russia, actually. So he’ll go to Ukrainian President Zelenskyy and say, I’m gonna have a peace summit and if you don’t show up, I’ll cut off the aid and he’ll go to President Putin and he’ll say, I’m gonna have a peace summit and if you don’t show up, I’ll double the aid. And that will be something that will allow him to satisfy all of his camps and give him the stage that he wants for that deal. I don’t know how that summit will come out. I would be very sceptical that it would get very far at all, but I think he would be able to hold it, and just holding it would probably shatter the western coalition that is supporting Ukraine, because essentially what the Europeans would be confronted with just by the prospect of such a summit is that the Trump administration would come to the European allies and say, you have to support us in this summit. If you don’t, we’re gonna put our support to European security in question. And then the European allies would be confronted with some very difficult decisions about whether to go along, whether to support the Trump administration, whether to oppose them. And I think, in fact, European allies would make very different decisions on that question.

Gideon Rachman
So they would split.

Jeremy Shapiro
They would split.

Gideon Rachman
Which actually then brings us to another of the topics that you discuss, which is Trump playing a kind of almost ideological role and seeking not necessarily to unite the alliance, but to forge new alliances with ideological soulmates.

Jeremy Shapiro
Yeah. Another one of the scenarios in our paper, I think, which is particularly problematic for Europe, is this idea of the Trump administration not having much, let’s say, nostalgia about the types of value-based alliances around the world that have animated US policy since World War II, and particularly being more focused on like-minded ideological leaders in various European and extra European countries.

The prototype of this for sure is Viktor Orbán in Hungary, who has cultivated, particularly since Trump left office but certainly even before, very strong relationships with key factions in the Republican party and including with Trump himself. And what’s interesting about this relationship is that ideas are flowing in both directions, which is unusual for a US-European ideological movement. And in fact, the Trump ecosystem is picking up quite a lot from Viktor Orbán. You can see it, I think, in, for example, the Heritage’s Project 2025 idea of how to deal with the deep state.

So I think that there’s really ample room there for an alliance which is really focused on how they can help each other and the ways that they can help each other is, you know, we used to say before Brexit that the UK was the sort of Trojan horse for the US in the EU. I think countries like Hungary and possibly Italy or Slovakia could be Trojan horses for a Trump-led US in the EU, and they could be very effective at helping the Trump administration get its way in US-EU disputes on trade or whatever. And in return, a Trump administration could be very helpful in the multiple fights that Hungary and other countries, led by populist governments in the EU, are likely to have with Brussels.

Gideon Rachman
And another thing that you discuss is the way in which Trump will use American commercial policy, particularly strength in energy as a lever.

Jeremy Shapiro
Yeah, this one is a bit of a gimme when you look at the three different schools, because it’s one of the issues on which all three of them agree, and all three of them very much believe that US climate policy under Biden has been a disaster, and that a real American strength is its capacity to be an energy superpower. And all three of them, each for somewhat different reasons, but nonetheless all three of them reach the same conclusion that there should be a freeing of American energy resources.

In the paper, we are building on ideas that are in already the Republican ecosystem, so it’s not original, propound this idea of American policy of total energy dominance, which is basically using this idea of industrial policy that the Biden administration sort of pioneered in the Inflation Reduction Act, but we’re doing it to promote green technologies. The Trump administration will take that idea of industrial policy and base it on fossil fuels, and will promote a fossil fuel-based industrial policy that looks to subsidise both fossil fuel production and fossil fuel-intensive industries like data centres and cement and steel.

And further, I think they have the opportunity, although this is a lot more speculative, to use this as a competitive advantage against competitors like the EU and the UK. And the way that they can do this is by noting that prior to Russia’s war in Ukraine in 2022, there was a massive gap between US energy prices and European energy prices. The US natural gas price at times was a quarter of what the European price was. That gap has closed significantly since the Ukraine war, because the US has been exporting a lot of natural gas to Europe. But at the same time, Europe has become very, very dependent on US liquefied natural gas. So what the Trump administration could do is seek to restore that gap by creating an export tax on US LNG. Europeans would have really no choice but to pay it, because there just aren’t any more excess supply options for getting LNG elsewhere except Russia. And that would mean that the gap would widen and that would create a big competitive advantage for energy-intensive industries in the United States and help US reshoring. But it would be quite a challenge for deindustrialisation in Europe and the UK.

Gideon Rachman
Yes, it would seem like an act of aggression.

Jeremy Shapiro
From a trade perspective, it would be an act of aggression. But I think Europeans probably need to be asking themselves what would they do about it?

Gideon Rachman
Is this idea in circulation? Or is this just something you kind of think . . . 

Jeremy Shapiro
Little bit of both? I’ve put together a bunch of different ideas. They’re all out there. And in the scenario, in fact, you can see we’ve made, probably contrary to his wishes, Marco Rubio, secretary of commerce. But the reason that we did that is because he gave a speech in 2019 and then wrote an op-ed just a few months ago advocating a lot of these ideas. The export tax isn’t quite there, but the rest of it all comes from the Republican embrace of industrial policy, which was always a Democratic policy which the first Trump administration never even considered. But I think the environment for that in the Republican party has changed dramatically since 2020.

Gideon Rachman
Do you think if they pursued policies like that and also cultivated Orban, who is regarded in this town in Brussels as, you know, a threat to democracy in Europe, it might backfire on that Trump-led America in the sense that Europeans would begin to consider China again as an option and say, well, look, if America is going to treat us like that, maybe we will just take Chinese EVs, solar power, you know, do a trade agreement with China. Was that off the table as well?

Jeremy Shapiro
Could be. Honestly, I would think that Europeans would be wise to at least preserve that opportunity just as leverage. I would prefer that they don’t end up there, but it should be a way of preventing some of these things from happening with a putative Trump administration. I would be very dubious that they would be able to do that, in part because China divides Europe quite a bit, in part because the Chinese are, in their own ways, incredibly obnoxious and have not been endearing themselves to Europeans in recent years. So it’s a real question as to which is the fire and which is the frying pan. So if I was in a putative Trump administration, I wouldn’t be super worried about that threat. But if I was going to advise Europeans about how to forestall some of these things, I would say they should try to use that leverage.

Gideon Rachman
Finally, China itself, the most important issue facing the United States. I think there’s almost a bipartisan consensus on this. How do you think these three schools are gonna battle it out over policy, and what do you think the practical implications are?

Jeremy Shapiro
Yeah, I think it’s very interesting that although I agree with your point that there is a bipartisan consensus on China in the United States, I would say that Donald Trump isn’t really part of that bipartisan consensus, which makes his China policy quite a bit more complex in some ways even than the Biden administration’s policy. It’s not simply the case that the Biden administration continued his policy or that he will continue theirs. In fact, the Biden administration’s policy toward China has been much more full-fledged than the Trump administration’s was. And what I mean by that is that they have elements of geostrategic containment through their military dispositions and their alliance relationships in the Indo-Pacific. And they have a geoeconomic strategy, which is based on not just tariffs, but actually export controls and technological constraints and investment restrictions.

Trump was just about tariffs. And actually it’s been very clear in his thought that he doesn’t really care very much about the geostrategic elements. At the same time, at least two of the schools, the primacists and the prioritisers, very much do. And so I think it’s predictable that even though Trump doesn’t precisely want it, that the prioritisers are in a very good position to win out on China policy, because essentially what they’ll be doing is saying to Trump and the other restrainers in the administration, look, we can cut back everywhere else, but China is the place where we really need to have a geostrategic containment policy. You can buy off most of the primacists with that. The Congress will be happy with it. And it’s Europe and the Middle East that we can really pull back. So I do think that overall, because of the importance of China policy for the primacists, it will be the prioritisers, despite the fact that they’re at least represented in both the base and the establishment, that will probably dictate the overall foreign policy of a putative Trump administration.

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Gideon Rachman
That was Jeremy Shapiro of the European Council on Foreign Relations, ending this edition of the Rachman Review. Thanks for listening, and please join me again next week.