In Saudi Arabia, Trump Lambasts Failed Neocon Foreign Policy

In what was probably the most important presidential speech in decades, President Donald Trump repudiated decades of failed interventionist U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East during an official visit to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Tuesday.

Not only did Trump lambast neocon “nation-building” in the region, he more or less vowed never to pursue the kinds of neocon misadventures that spilt American blood and treasure over the past 25 years in the insane pursuit of creating western liberal democracies in the Middle East.

In stark and unmistakable terms, the president reminded the world of the abject failure of decades of neocon and liberal interventionist U.S. foreign policy under both Democrat and Republican leadership. He specifically called out the trillions of U.S. tax dollars wasted in a totally unsuccessful attempt to turn Iraq and Afghanistan into western-style democracies as part of the global war on terror.

“In the end, the so-called ‘nation-builders’ wrecked far more nations than they built — and the interventionists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves,” Trump said. “The gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called nation-builders, neocons, or liberal non-profits like those who spent trillions failing to develop Kabul and Baghdad.”

His speech, which came after a meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the signing of economic agreements totaling $600 billion in new trade deals, heralds a new approach not just to Mideast politics but to American foreign policy generally. By disavowing the nation-building ideology of the neocons and liberal interventionists that dominated U.S. foreign policy under the Bush, Obama, and Biden presidencies, Trump articulated a vision of American engagement with the world that is both more tolerant, more transactional, and less concerned with the internal affairs of other nations.

In other words, Trump’s vision of American foreign policy isn’t driven by a zeal to remake the world into some version of a liberal western democracy. In Riyadh, he was saying that Saudi Arabia and the other Arab states can just be Islamic monarchies, and as long as they present no threat to American interests, and as long as they promote peace and stability, then we can do business with them.

He said much the same about Iran, no doubt much to the consternation of establishment neocons in Washington who are itching for war with Tehran. “I am here today not merely to condemn the past chaos of Iran’s leaders, but to offer them a new path and a much better path toward a far better and more hopeful future,” Trump said. “I want to make a deal with Iran.”

In doing so, Trump was in some ways repudiating the entire post-WWII liberal internationalist project, which was predicated on the idea that America would act as a guarantor of human rights and civil liberties for every backwater nation on the planet, ushering in an era of cooperative globalism and international harmony. The seed of this utopian ideology was planted even earlier, with Woodrow Wilson’s fatuous notion that it was America’s job to “make the world safe for democracy.” It turns out, that’s both impossible and morally insane. And even if it were possible, it’s not necessarily America’s responsibility to make it so. America’s responsibility, as Trump rightly sees it, is to look after her own people and their interests, which is how most American leaders prior to Wilson understood our role in the world.

All of this hearkens back to a defining moment of Trump’s first campaign for the presidency, during one of the first 2015 GOP primary debates. Standing on stage with more than a dozen GOP candidates, he was the only one who dared breathe a word of criticism against the last Republican president, George W. Bush. He said the Iraq war never should have happened, that it was a colossal mistake. By doing this, Trump was actually giving voice to what most Republican voters in 2015 actually believed. None of his rival primary candidates dared to say what everyone by then knew: America’s intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan was a debacle, and those responsible for it or who supported it should never be put into power again.

But the episode was a window into Trump’s idea of a sound American foreign policy, which is really just an extension of his idea of sound domestic policy: look out for the American people and the American people alone. If it doesn’t profit or prosper America to be meddling in some foreign backwater, then we should leave it alone. If they threaten us, we should make clear that the cost of harming us is higher than they can pay. This is peace through strength, and it’s one of the reasons America didn’t get involved in any new foreign wars during Trump’s first term in office.

Critics will simply repeat platitudes like we fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here, or that a world of liberal democracies is in the American interest. Maybe that’s true in theory, but in practice it amounts to a carte blanche to intervene anywhere in the world for any reason. What’s more, no one seriously believes that America has the ability or competence to plant stable democracies in Africa or Asia — or anywhere, for that matter. The reason for this is simple: stable democracies cannot be planted by any outside power, no matter how rich and powerful. They have to grow organically and domestically from the people themselves. We can applaud emergent democracies, we can do business with them, but there is precious little we can do to guarantee them, much less build them in the first place.

And not every nation has to be a democracy. The great lie of the Bush-era war on terror was that all people yearn for freedom and democracy. No they don’t. Some yearn much more for justice, or righteousness, or simply revenge. Some will simply be hereditary monarchies, or Islamic caliphates, or any number of other things. That’s fine. We shouldn’t be troubled by our differences with other nations, so long as they don’t threaten us. The idea that we could turn Afghanistan into a modern democratic state was perhaps the greatest delusion of the past quarter-century. As Trump said on Tuesday, “I am willing to end past conflicts and forge new partnerships for a better and more stable world, even if our differences may be very profound.”

That is actual tolerance, not the fake tolerance of liberal interventionists. And it comes from being clear-eyed about who you’re actually supposed to serve. In Trump’s case, he believes his job is to serve the American people, not the “global community” or international NGOs or the military industrial complex. Again from Trump’s speech: “In recent years, far too many American presidents have been afflicted with the notion that it’s our job to look into the souls of foreign leaders and use U.S. policy to dispense justice for their sins … I believe it is God’s job to sit in judgement — my job [is] to defend America and to promote the fundamental interests of stability, prosperity, and peace.”

That’s exactly right. This interests-based approach to foreign policy is how Trump can offer a fig leaf to Iran, Syria, and Lebanon in a speech praising the leaders of Saudi Arabia. He lauded what he called “a new generation of leaders” in the region, who are “transcending the ancient conflicts and tired divisions of the past, and forging a future where the Middle East is defined by commerce, not chaos; where it exports technology, not terrorism; and where people of different nations, religions, and creeds are building cities together — not bombing each other out of existence.”

Now, this is certainly optimistic. And of course it remains to be seen whether this rosy future for the Mideast will actually come to pass. After all, the American military recently had to carry out massive airstrikes against Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen to keep international shipping lanes open in the Red Sea, and the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran still looms over the entire region.

But what’s certain is that the neocon approach of starting and funding interventionist conflicts all over the world has not worked. Nation-building has not worked. It has actually been a disaster for the United States and the hapless countries we have tried to remake in our image. This week in Riyadh, Trump announced definitively that America is done with all of that. Good riddance to it.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.