Trump's Politically Incorrect Foreign Policy Speech

Robert W. Merry

Politics, Security, United States

Standing athwart the conventional wisdom.

Donald Trump’s foreign-policy speech at Youngstown, Ohio, on Monday calls to mind the first issue of William Buckley’s National Review, in which the young editor audaciously declared his magazine "stands athwart history, yelling Stop." The country was moving in a decidedly liberal direction at the time, but nine years later the Republicans nominated the National Review darling, Barry Goldwater. Sixteen years after that, the country elected Ronald Reagan, about as ideal a specimen of conservatism as Buckley could have imagined when he positioned himself athwart history.

What brings to mind the Buckley analogy is the extent to which Trump has set himself against the national zeitgeist at a time when few have felt any serious opposition could possibly emerge to challenge that prevailing national outlook.

Before this campaign began, the Republican Party’s foreign policy was considered the domain of its neoconservative forces, bent on maintaining the bellicosity of George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney toward various bad guys in the Middle East, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, a rising China, the specter of communist Cuba, and any tinhorn dictator who got in the way of American hegemony. Meanwhile, the Democratic foreign policy wasn’t much different, though humanitarian impulses undergirded the interventionist vision of the left.

That was the zeitgeist of American foreign policy a year and a half ago, and there was no reason to believe that anyone could emerge to take it on. Aside from Trump—whose views were obscure and whose prospects seemed dimmer than dim—the only politician who stepped forward on the Republican side to assume the realist mantle was Kentucky’s Senator Rand Paul. But he never projected the commanding presence needed to emerge from the pack. As for the Democrats, there was Bernie Sanders, but he wasn’t even a Democrat, strictly speaking, and nobody took him seriously.

And yet now we have this stumble-prone businessman of boorish demeanor and brief attention span who has become, at the least, the Goldwater of his time. He has managed it because the zeitgeist is generating a great deal of angst around the country and Trump has proved better than anyone else at identifying the substance of that angst.

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