Yes, Trump Is a Realist

“In Trump’s first term, these realist impulses were muted and sometimes stopped by hawkish national security staffers who did not share his vision. But having learned that personnel is policy, Trump will not make this mistake again.” 

So write Andrew Byers and Randall Schweller in Foreign Affairs. Schweller, an academic at Ohio State, is a card-carrying foreign policy realist, and is willing to put his name to a claim that we have argued in these pages all along: Donald Trump, despite his mercurial nature and despite the opposition from entrenched interests in Washington, DC, is fundamentally displaying a realist instinct in his foreign policy. 

That might be an anathema to most traditional swamp creatures. “To most foreign policy elites, who view U.S. power as a normative good, this trend appears dreadful,” as they write. Yet “an ‘America first’ agenda is an intellectually defensible, fundamentally realist program that seeks to ascertain and act on the United States’ national interests rather than the interests of others. It is born of an inescapable premise: the United States no longer has the power it once did and is spreading itself too thin. It needs to sort its essential national interests from desirable ones. It must devolve more responsibility to its wealthy allies. It must stop trying to be everywhere and do everything.” 

In simple words, geography is destiny, America should shift defense burden back to its allies and prioritize theaters, instead of going insolvent trying to overstretch and imploding. 

It is a warning we should all heed.