Why Trump wasn’t, and won’t be, a foreign policy disaster

Across more than two decades of American foreign policy failure, from 2001 to the present, Trump represents something of an exception.

Depending on whether you love or hate him, Donald Trump’s one (possibly first) term was the best of times or the worst of times.

Much contemporary analysis – including Troy Bramston’s column on Tuesday – claims that because Trump 1.0 was “a disaster” the sequel will be worse. For America and the world – and for Australia. These gloomy predictions are built on a false premise.

It is not entirely clear what the Trump foreign policy disaster actually was. Sure, his refusal to leave office gracefully, his flirting with rioters on January 6, 2021, and often bizarre approach to the Covid epidemic, take your pick, compromise his domestic record. Economists continue to argue about the economy he bequeathed Joe Biden.

But abroad? His record was not that bad. Across more than two decades of American foreign policy failure, from 2001 to the present, Trump represents something of an exception. It is an essay question I now routinely set my students: “Donald Trump has the most successful foreign policy record of any president since the end of the Cold War.” Discuss.

I warn them that concluding he was lucky won’t cut it. Trump clearly enjoyed luck. But then success and failure often get decided by providence as much as by design. Jimmy Carter had bum luck: an oil shock and the Iranian revolution. Bill Clinton, like Carter, a former Democratic governor of a big southern state, enjoyed good luck: a disintegrating Russia and a dot.com boom. He had to manufacture his own constitutional ­crisis, in his trousers.

But Trump’s luck, from a temporarily quiescent Putin to a busily tunnelling Hamas, is exaggerated. Through design and instinct, he avoided the catastrophes of his predecessors. He said he would, and he did.

Trump’s record is absent major conflict. We still live in the shadow of the Long Iraq War. George W. Bush’s legacy will never escape his botched occupation of that Arab nation. It claimed the lives of at least 150,000 Iraqis, 4431 Americans, 318 coalition troops (including two Australians), created the ISIS caliphate and empowered Iran. Nothing in Trump’s foreign policy comes close.

US President Joe Biden

Indeed, in an act of boldness verging on the reckless, which Joe Biden seems psychologically incapable of repeating, Trump took the fight to Iran. In January 2020, he ordered the drone assassination of Qasem Soleimani, the regime’s second in command. Did this cower the mullahs in Tehran? It certainly gave them pause. Trump made them look weak; Biden’s coddling of the regime has not had that effect.

Barack Obama, the great cosmopolitan-in-chief, the president whose first foreign trip was an apology tour for the crimes of American history, killed more Muslims than Trump ever did. He did so both directly and indirectly.

No president before or since was as fond of drones as a way of killing, extrajudicially, jihadi terrorists. His half-hearted invasion of Libya (“from behind”) led to the brutal murder of its murderous leader, Muammar Gaddafi.

Obama’s hasty retreat thereafter left this huge Arab nation in a state of chaos from which it has not recovered.

He repeated this cynical approach in Syria. By abandoning the few democratic forces opposing Bashar al-Assad in 2011, Obama was complicit in a civil war which has killed over half a million Muslims. I have never seen protestors in Melbourne or Sydney demanding justice for these women and children. But murdered they were, by a regime Obama failed to confront.

Under Trump, combat and civilian deaths – of Americans and of foreigners – are tiny next to the presidents who came before and after him.

Barack Obama

My argument is not that Trump would have done the opposite in each case. He would surely have abandoned Libya and Syria as speedily as Obama did. And he, of course, set in train the skedaddling from Afghanistan that so stains Biden’s term. But to construe Trump’s presidency as a foreign policy disaster and elide the much worse records of Bush, Obama, and Biden – in the Muslim death toll alone – is historically myopic. Trump secured the Abraham Accords. There has been no more significant Arab-Israeli agreement this century. It is the basis for the diplomacy to end the ongoing war in Gaza.

We will never know if Putin would have invaded Ukraine had Trump won the 2020 election. We do know this war did not start when Trump was in the White House. Ditto, Hamas. Were they reluctant to kill Jews under Trump but felt free to do so under Biden? Almost certainly not. But history will record that the largest pogrom of Jews since the Holocaust happened under Biden’s watch.

What about his record on China? Well, again, compared to what? Trump was always sceptical that the rush to lock the People’s Republic into the World Trade Organisation would benefit American workers.

Muammar Gaddafi

That scepticism was proved right with every American factory shuttered in the years since. His trade war with China has been more mimicked than repudiated by his successor.

Will he honour AUKUS? Yes, if he gets the opportunity, I rather think he might. The Australian government needs to worry less about Trump 2.0. Fretting about January 6 will do Australian interests little good. Rather, at every ­opportunity, we must connect the containment of China with the realisation of AUKUS. Trump will get that.

Peace through strength – by luck and by design. It is a good summary of the foreign policy he wrought. And not the season of darkness painted by his detractors.

Timothy J. Lynch is professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne.