Why Trumpism will reshape international strategic culture

Donald Trump leaves after speaking during a campaign rally at the University of New Hampshire.

In his second term, Donald Trump will be determined to pursue a foreign policy that more closely resembles how the US engaged with the world for the first 170 years of the republic – pursuing abundance at home and selective engagement abroad.

He will do so not because the US is weak and in decline but because it is powerful. Its power is a function of its economic size, military superiority, cultural influence, energy security, business innovation and productivity, labour flexibility, growing population, deep capital markets and immense private wealth, and the omnipresence of the US dollar and US Treasury bonds. US power will give Trump greater freedom to act, including by asking more of allies and partners who seek to benefit from the application or deterrent effect of that power.

True, US power faces several structural challenges. Compared with the Cold War era, America’s industrial base is weaker, as evidenced by its current inability to build nuclear-powered attack submarines at a fast enough replacement rate, which will likely compromise Australia’s ability to acquire Virginia-class submarines in the 2030s.

There will be a reckoning in relation to US public debt, which will rise to 122 per cent of GDP by 2034 and already requires more to be spent on public debt interest than defence. Trump will need to better balance America’s commitments and its power if his foreign policy is to command domestic support.

However, these and other structural problems are reversible. They do not qualify as the great power killers that have led to the decline and fall of more conventional powers throughout history.

By virtue of its power, the US is able to shape world order to an extent no other actor is able to – China included. Trump is a power politician. He understands that foreign relationships and transactions are an unsentimental function of power relativities and not abstract global rules that seek to fetter the exercise of sovereign power by nation-states. (On this, his speeches to the UN General Assembly are worth re-reading.)

Trump will be prepared to continue to extend US security to those who are prepared to do more to defend themselves, so long as doing so is also in the interest of the US. Those who spend less on defence than the US (at least 3 per cent of GDP) will have to lift their spending or make commensurate in-kind contributions to their own security.

Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin

Australia is well placed to make or extend mutually beneficial deals with the second Trump administration, especially in relation to critical minerals, the production of nuclear-powered attack submarines at a faster rate, advanced military technology and further access to our geographically crucial facilities and infrastructure.

However, our weak levels of defence spending will become a point of contention if it is judged that we are not doing more to ensure the self-reliant defence of Australia.

We should not assume, however, that a return to this older style of US foreign policy will result in a withdrawn and isolated US. The world is today too interconnected and closer than was the case in the early 1940s, when isolationists held significant sway in US politics. On the contrary, the US is likely to remain very active in the world, but under different terms and in pursuit of more focused objectives. When it is in the US national interest, Trump will take resolute action – as he did in his first term against Iran, including by way of imposing oppressive sanctions, withdrawing from the Obama-era nuclear deal and ordering the assassination of Qassem Soleimani.

As a disrupter, Trump may strike a grand bargain between the US, Israel, Saudi Arabia and others, whereby Israel would be secure, Palestinians would be able to live in peace and Iran would be contained. That deal would be worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize.

The US will be a powerful actor under and after Trump. For it to be great again, there is one challenge it will have to meet. Trump will have to intensify efforts to ensure that China does not establish itself as the hegemon of Eurasia.

Were it to do so, across time it would gain dominance over the resources, markets and economic power of the world’s strategic heartland. This would undercut the strategic and commercial interests of the US.

A hegemonic China would grow in strength and eventually threaten the US in its hemispheric citadel. It will be in the interests of the US to prevail in this struggle for mastery in Eurasia.

Donald Trump and Xi Jinping leave a business leaders event at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing in 2017.

Trump will prefer to do this by way of aggressive trade, investment, technology decoupling and strategic deterrence, avoiding a military clash if possible. Intrinsic to this approach will be the maintenance of forward-deployed US forces in the western Pacific and the strengthening of the latticework of US-centred regional security partnerships that has emerged across the past decade.

Still, he will need to be convinced to defend Taiwan. The arguments for doing so would have to be framed within this counter-hegemonic strategy. Taiwan will need to show it is willing to do much more to defend itself, including by way of an extensive rearmament program.

There is a prospect of a golden age of American power, where a self-interested US, working with equally self-interested allies and partners, and not embarrassed to wield that power, accomplishes a world-changing quadrella: to thwart China, flip Russia, contain Iran and isolate North Korea. If it can accomplish this sweep of the grand chessboard of Eurasia, the US will be not just powerful but great again. Motivated by “America first” instincts that are deeply rooted in US strategic culture, Trump has the opportunity to bring about a transformation of the world order that would rival the earlier achievements of Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan at the bookends of the Cold War.

Mike Pezzullo is former secretary of the Department of Home Affairs.