Following President Joe Biden’s  disastrous debate performance on June 27, it is almost a sure bet that Donald Trump will be inaugurated next January. Biden’s palpable decrepitude outweighs media hostility to Trump; the Kafkaesque quasi-
legal proceedings against him make no difference. Democrats have fallen victim to Biden’s handlers’ and their media cohorts’ misrepresentations of the president’s true condition. As in a Greek drama, the Democrat elite now observes the unfolding of a disaster of their own making. 

This scenario makes the issue of Trump’s foreign policy very important for many people, both in the United States and abroad. It is, therefore, unsurprising that, even before Biden’s debate fiasco, some likely or potential players in the second Trump administration would offer their spin on what Trump 2.0 should or would do on the world scene. 

Robert C. O’Brien, Trump’s fourth and, so far, last national security advisor (2019-2021), threw his hat in the ring in the July-August issue of Foreign Affairs. “The Return of Peace Through Strength: Making the Case for Trump’s Foreign Policy” is a charily worded but poorly reasoned, deeply flawed article. At best, it is a neoconservative wish list, cloaked as a MAGA-inspired manifesto, which will be ignored if Trump wins. At worst, it is an accurate summary of what Trump, in 2024, actually believes and intends to do. It deserves scrutiny because the issue remains unresolved.

The real target audience of contributors to Foreign Affairs is not the American public; it is the “foreign policy community” in Washington, D.C. O’Brien’s piece is a solid example of the genre. He is reputed to belong to Trump’s inner circle, and he writes with the air of certainty that, if Trump is reelected, his suggestions will be translated into policy. At the same time, he is signaling to the swamp that all will be well if Trump wins, that Trump will be rendered harmless if the author of the article is put in charge of the Department of State—or else the Pentagon—and that his bid, therefore, should be quietly supported by other would-be adults in the room.

In Trump’s second term, America will go back to being scary, O’Brien writes. It will return the competition with China to the level of ideology and cherish no illusions about the possibility of cooperation with Beijing. It will reapply utmost pressure on Iran and refrain from any effort to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It will boost arms deliveries to Ukraine to force Russia to negotiate on America’s terms—that is, from a position of weakness. At the same time, it will pressure Europeans to foot the bill and to accept Ukraine into the European Union immediately, but it will refrain from using rhetoric against America’s allies. It will boost American arsenals, both nuclear and conventional, but without increasing federal spending. 

If this is indeed the foreign policy manifesto for a second Trump administration, it is depressing and scary in equal measure. The tone and substance of the article reflect the fact that O’Brien is one of the few conventional Republicans—albeit of distinctly second-tier stature—to have served and survived under Trump while not making himself odious to the bipartisan foreign policy establishment. He is an opportunist who accepted Biden’s 2020 victory as legitimate yet remained at his post in the turbulent final weeks of Trump’s tenure. 

In O’Brien’s blueprint, there is no significant divergence from the strategic thought—if one can call it that—of the neoconservative-neoliberal duopoly that has shaped U.S. foreign policy for decades. The Reaganite notion of “peace through strength” means that America must flex its muscle to reestablish its credibility. Of course, this is the standard mantra in Republican foreign policy circles and has been for many decades. But O’Brien’s “strength” means the proactive imposition of one’s will on designated foes, not merely the ability to deter and defeat aggression.

In grand-strategic terms, O’Brien rejects any suggestion of cooperative competition with Beijing. He believes that America can and should coerce the People’s Republic into accepting a modus vivendi strictly on Washington’s terms. Some of his proposed measures are eccentric, to put it mildly, such as deploying the entire Marine Corps to the Indo-Pacific or arming Vietnam as lavishly as Israel to become an anti-Chinese bastion allied to the U.S. 

Equally frivolous are O’Brien’s suggestions of America reigniting ideological war with China and delegitimizing the Communist Party rule, with hints of the possibility of U.S.-instigated regime change in Beijing. O’Brien does not seem to understand that today’s America—with rainbow flags hoisted on its embassies everywhere, Beijing included—is in no position to offer an attractive model of social, political, and economic order to anyone in the world. Least of all is today’s America an alluring model to the Chinese. 

The Han nation, true to its Confucian roots, cherishes stability. It abhors drastic challenges to the established moral and social order, of which America is the most aggressive promoter. The leadership in Beijing is more than ready to frame the contest with the United States as an existential struggle between two incompatible civilizations and global-strategic paradigms. In this respect, China is leading the overwhelming global majority, all of BRICS included.

In his first term, Trump was tempted but refrained from adopting the course of Chinese regime change, which clearly entailed the risk of an all-out war. Instead, he wisely framed the dispute primarily in terms of trade and tariffs. He would make a historic mistake were he to shift course in his second term. It is safer and more rational to follow the policy of watchful containment. China has been and remains an American rival whose ambitions should be curtailed. It is decidedly not a foe with whom there can be no coexistence. 

Of course, Xi Jinping and his team have made clear their intention to reintegrate Taiwan eventually, but they are most unlikely to risk an outright war to that end in the foreseeable future. America has no interest in upping the ante in the Indo-Pacific region, or indeed anywhere else, perfectly safe as she is from direct threats from abroad. The course of its contest with China is, therefore, entirely contingent on the definition of American global and regional interests and goals. The optimal MAGA model would be a new version of the old multipolar European system of the balance of forces that secured peace and prosperity without precedent in Europe from the Vienna Congress in 1815 until Sarajevo 1914.

O’Brien is on the other side of that barricade, however. He does not provide a coherent strategic framework to justify his advocacy of escalating tensions with China. Diplomacy is the art of give and take, yet O’Brien expects that China will comply with his fiats, sanctions, and tariffs—just like that.

After China, the greatest designated threat to the U.S. national security, according to O’Brien, is Iran. Trump’s return to the White House, he suggests, would mark a return to placing the greatest possible pressure on the regime in Tehran. There would be a U.S.-instigated end of nuclear negotiations, rigorous enforcement of sanctions, and massive air and naval deployment in the Gulf. 

Remarkably, O’Brien claims that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a symptom, not the cause, of Middle Eastern instability. The real source of the problems, to him, is the existence of a revolutionary and theocratic regime in Iran. Tehran must be faced head-on, with the possibility of war clearly allowed if the Persians resist abject submission to demands for de facto surrender of sovereignty. Those demands remain unclear all along. A cynic may remark that they are therefore perfectly in line with Antony Blinken’s “rules-based international order.”

All of this is light years away from Trump’s promises, before and during his first term, that there would be no more regime-change operations and no more endless
wars in the Middle East, given they have never yielded any benefit to America. O’Brien’s ideas could have been penned by any one of the legion of neoconservative hawks who gave us the war in Iraq, and they must be music to the ears of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. If implemented, however, the intractable problem of Israel-Palestine would still be there—even if the Shah’s heirs were to return to power. A war with Iran could embroil the United States in a new quagmire, more costly in life and treasure than the disaster in Iraq, with no clearly attainable end game and no exit strategy. 

More alarming still is O’Brien’s claim that Trump would escalate the war in Ukraine by removing limits on weapons supplies in order to weaken Putin’s negotiating demands. European countries would finance additional lethal aid to Ukraine while keeping the door open for diplomacy with Russia. The Europeans, furthermore, should admit Ukraine into the European Union immediately and—it is implied—assume the enormous burden of its recovery.

O’Brien insists that Trump 2.0 would refrain from criticizing America’s European NATO allies as he had done in his first term. He even hinted, somewhat disingenuously, that they would be his partners in joint decision making. That is at odds, however, with his point-blank insistence that all 27 nations of the European Union, with half a billion people, should succumb to the incoming administration’s demand to admit Ukraine “immediately” into the Brussels club. 

That is an impertinent and arrogant demand, patronizing in the extreme, and seemingly calculated to poison America’s relations with the Old Continent for years to come. Even some staunchly pro-Kiev EU countries, such as Poland and Romania, are adamantly opposed to Ukraine’s immediate membership. They know that two decades ago the EU admitted Cyprus into its ranks despite a host of unresolved territorial and legal issues, with the self-proclaimed Turkish entity in the north of the island effectively existing as a sovereign state. Today’s EU is adamant that the mistake will not be repeated with any other candidate country. In any event, the war notwithstanding, Ukraine’s standards of governance are abysmal and its anti-corruption efforts are pathetic.

On balance, O’Brien’s proposal for the end game in Ukraine is a blueprint for disaster. The assumption that unrestrained use of U.S.-supplied long-range weapons to Ukraine can force Russia to negotiate an unfavorable deal is brazenly speculative and unsupported by any facts on the ground. Russia is winning the war of attrition. If escalating the war to end it on “our” terms is indeed what Trump believes, then the danger of uncontrollable escalation leading to nuclear war would be greater with him in the White House than it is now. It clearly implies that if the Russians make a significant breakthrough later this summer, O’Brien’s putative team may call for tactical nuclear strikes.

Equally incongruous is O’Brien’s call for America’s massive rearmament. He claims it would be of limited scope and within strict budgetary constraints. This is rubbish. O’Brien is calling for any number of latest-generation naval vessels, including submarines, not to mention strategic bombers and hypersonic missiles. Furthermore, he writes that the United States should resume atomic tests and renew the production of enriched uranium and plutonium. That is supposedly necessary because China is rapidly expanding its atomic arsenals, and America must gain an advantage over the nuclear capabilities of Beijing and Moscow combined.

Yet again, the strategic calculus is unclear. O’Brien’s assertions assume that unrestrained global hegemony is here to stay. To what end, for how long, and at what cost is unclear. The notion that the U.S. should have more missiles than Russia and China put together is alarming. It makes sense only if it is assumed that—in the fullness of time—America would fight a nuclear war against both Russia and China simultaneously. Indeed, that may be the final and predictable result of O’Brien’s proposals. He should have the decency to acknowledge the logic of his reasoning. It would mean the end of the world.

It is evident that O’Brien is just another neocon hegemonist who wants to use Trump as a possibly unwitting instrument of the swamp’s never-ending global neurosis. His insistence that countering an emerging axis of anti-American autocracies requires strong alliances among the countries of the free world could have come from Antony Blinken or Hillary Clinton. His readiness to escalate tensions and, if need be, fight on several fronts simultaneously could have come from Trump’s disastrous third national security advisor, John Bolton, or from any other treacherous member of his previous inner circle (James Mattis, John Kelly, Rex Tillerson, Mike Pompeo, or Mike Pence).

If Trump agrees with O’Brien’s Foreign Affairs article, well … then there is no hope. It would mean that he has not learned any lessons from his first term, that he has
given up on his early anti-hegemonist, noninterventionist instincts. It means that during his second term he will continue to appoint neoconservative hawks—second-rate swamp creatures like O’Brien and his ilk—who will become backstabbing saboteurs at any moment if the president they despise does not follow the script.

It would also mean, tragically, that keeping Team Biden in place, letting them manage the pathetic figurehead in the White House vault, would be somewhat less perilous to America’s security and well-being and to the general peace in the world than reelecting Trump.

If this is not the case, if Trump is not in agreement with O’Brien’s foreign policy plan as presented in the prime organ of the D.C. establishment, he should declare—urgently and without hesitation—that his former national security advisor had no authority to create the impression of speaking on his behalf. He should explicitly reject the unsustainable and self-defeating “strategy” of trying to increase pressure on all one’s foes, real or assumed, simultaneously, as practiced by Phillip II of Spain, Louis XIV, Napoleon, and, of course, Hitler. He should specifically disown O’Brien’s irresponsible suggestion that the war in Ukraine should be expanded to make Russia crawl, waving a white flag, to the negotiating table, at which America would dictate the terms. That will never happen. 

Trump needs to declare his vision. It would be in the American interest for Trump to turn out to be a sane, anti-globalist patriot reminiscent of his first term. Where he stands today, we do not know for sure. Frankly, he is not a man with a firm grounding in any moral or intellectual school of thought. 

If he wins in November, however, and subsequently appoints Robert C. O’Brien to a key post in his foreign policy team, we’ll know that the regime in Washington, D.C., under either party, is unassailable and permanent. ◆