What Will The Trump Foreign Policy 2.0 Look Like?

The potential next SecState weighs in

Jun 19, 2024

Christian Whiton on Robert O’Brien makes the case for Trump 2.0 foreign policy.

Robert C. O’Brien, President Donald Trump’s former national security advisor, just published an essay in Foreign Affairs outlining the perils to which President Joseph Biden and his administration have subjected the United States. O’Brien details the growing danger and the path back in a notional second Trump term. There will be no return to an imperious, preachy, or triumphalist America. Instead, Trump’s America will be a traditional one that is secure and reticent but acts decisively when challenged.
Most notably, O’Brien calls for economic de-linkage from China, a process Trump set in motion with his tariff policy. He also charts what several administrations have signaled but failed to achieve—statecraft, including military power, that actually recognizes China as America’s greatest foreign threat. This “realism with a Jacksonian flavor,” as O’Brien labels it, will help bring back the secure America that marked Trump’s first term.
O’Brien’s essay is contrasted with one written by former Obama aide Ben Rhodes in the same edition of Foreign Affairs. Like many of today’s leading Democratic Party figures, Rhodes can’t help but assert, all evidence to the contrary, that Trump would “roll back American democracy” and thus “swing further in the direction” of “strong men.” In addition to Trump, Rhodes includes Chinese President Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu in this group. Did you get that? To today’s Democrats, conservative elected leaders of democracies like Trump, Modi, and Netanyahu are in the same boat as China’s dictator and the terrorism-exporting theocrat who runs Iran.
Rhodes also can’t help but betray the Democrats’ sympathy for Palestinians and their Hamas government. Like the progressive activists who took to college campuses this spring, Rhodes faults Biden for not breaking with Netanyahu sooner, which “…invited greater risks from the within the Democratic coalition and around the world.” Pleased with Biden’s subsequent evolution, Rhodes wants Washington “to use its leverage to press for negotiated agreements [with Hamas], Palestinian state building,” and he condemns questioning the Palestinian death toll, which even the United Nations conceded was grossly exaggerated.
These are today’s Democrats: confused globalists who condemn American patriots while giving the benefit of the doubt to U.S. adversaries, including Hamas and Iran.
O’Brien offers a different analysis and prescription. He was the final of Trump’s four national security advisors and the only one who was any good. His essay notes that Trump was a peacemaker who eschewed new wars and victoriously ended the one with ISIS. By focusing on the Iranian threat, Trump transcended the Palestinian matter that Biden’s policies have helped bring back to life. In a second term, Trump would again enforce U.S. sanctions and other forms of maximum pressure on Iran that so successfully put the Islamist regime on the defensive when Trump was president.
O’Brien condemns the Biden administration’s inability to secure the southern U.S. border as “perhaps its biggest and most embarrassing failure.” By noting that Mexican drug cartels “form a parallel government,” he foreshadows that a second Trump term would not solely view the immigration and fentanyl crises as domestic law-enforcement matters.
O’Brien ridicules Biden’s China policy by simply quoting the president’s words, which have ranged incoherently from saying that China’s economy is a “ticking time bomb” to “I don’t want to contain China.” Another Bidenism: “We’re all better off if China does well.”
O’Brien departs from more high-minded foreign policy ruminations to get into the nuts and bolts of building a military that can contain China and deter war in the Pacific. He calls for Congress to fund a 355-ship navy (which recently has fallen to around 290 ships from a nearly 600-ship force at the end of the Cold War). But O’Brien also singles out failed procurement practices at the Pentagon, especially the larding of program “requirements” that leave the military with weapons that are high tech but too few in number and which arrive late and grossly over budget.
O’Brien also spotlights the unfortunate but critical need to renew America’s nuclear deterrent given China’s rapid buildup of its nuclear arsenal. He argues for resuming nuclear weapons production and testing for the first time since 1992 to ensure reliability and safety. Just as important are delivery systems, especially fast and viable hypersonic missiles—a technology in which the United States trails Russia and probably China.
O’Brien’s defense-reform argument is notable for what it avoids: calls by some who argue the defense budget should grow to 5 percent of national output. To make such an argument, which would nearly double the defense budget, is to fail to understand the fiscal crisis that the Biden administration has left America: a bloated annual budget of $7 trillion, of which $1.8 trillion is borrowed despite the lack of a national emergency—piling new debt and $659 billion in interest on top of $34 trillion in existing debt held by the public. Either the military must achieve more with less and cut some of its liabilities, or it will cease any pretense of balancing and deterring China. Anyone can be a hawk; O’Brien is a hawk who understands math.

Blowback for Transgender Whistleblowers

Christopher Rufo.

Some years ago, Vanessa Sivadge thought she had it made, having just accepted a position as a registered nurse at Texas Children’s Hospital. She had wanted to be a nurse since high school and felt a sense of joy in helping children.
But her feelings toward Texas Children’s didn’t last. Beginning in 2021, Sivadge saw a dramatic rise in the number of “transgender children” treated at the hospital. These patients struggled with various problems: depression, anxiety, addiction, suicide attempts, physical abuse, and discomfort with puberty. But rather than deal with these underlying psychological conditions, Sivadge says, doctors at the hospital would diagnose them with “gender dysphoria” and assign them to a regimen of “gender-affirming care.”
The practice made Sivadge recoil. “In the cardiac clinic, we were taking sick kids and making them better,” she says. “In the transgender clinic, it was the opposite. We were harming these kids.”
Then, the following year, she breathed a sigh of relief. Under pressure from the state attorney general, Ken Paxton, Texas Children’s CEO Mark Wallace said that he was shutting down the child gender clinic. But it wasn’t true. Mere days later, it had secretly reopened for business.
And business was booming. Doctors, including Roberts, Paul, and Kristy Rialon, were managing dozens of pediatric sex-change cases, performing surgeries, blocking puberty, implanting hormone devices, and making specialty referrals. They were motivated not only by ideology, but by hope for prestige: they were saviors of the oppressed, the vanguard of gender medicine.
Sivadge soon had seen enough. She read my investigative report exposing Texas Children’s sex-change program, which relied on testimony from Haim, and reached out to share her own observations.
“I work very closely with this provider, Dr. Richard Roberts. I’ve been in the room with him when he speaks with these patients,” she told me in an interview. “Dr. Roberts is extremely encouraging of their transition and will essentially do whatever he can to make sure that they are happy, at least externally happy. Because I am absolutely certain that they are not internally happy. He is very accommodating. He does whatever they want. Essentially, there is no critical analysis of the process.”
In Sivadge’s view, Roberts and other providers were manipulating patients into accepting “gender-affirming care.” When parents objected, the doctors bulldozed them, she claims. Some families, she believed, feared that the hospital would call Child Protective Services if they dissented.
Then, two months after I spoke with her for that story, Sivadge called me in a panic. The FBI had sent two special agents, Paul Nixon and David McBride, to her home. The agents knocked on the door, asked her about “some of the things that have been going on at [her] work lately,” and then asked to enter her home. She was terrified. (The FBI declined to comment.)
The agents told Sivadge that she was a “person of interest” in an investigation targeting the whistleblower who had exposed the child sex-change program. They told her that the whistleblower had broken federal privacy laws. “They threatened me,” Sivadge said. “They promised they would make life difficult for me if I was trying to protect the leaker. They said I was ‘not safe’ at work and claimed that someone at my workplace had given my name to the FBI.”
The authorities—the FBI, the hospital, and, as Sivadge would later discover, federal prosecutors—were all circling the story. Both the Department of Justice and the hospital leadership were ideologically committed to “transgender medicine.” They had been embarrassed by the investigation that had exposed their actions, and they were looking for revenge.

America’s Great Partisan Sort

Mitch Daniels.

We have watched the national polarization that divides Americans in eerily equal numbers play out in vastly uneven ways, state to state. But talk of “red” and “blue” doesn’t capture either the full extent of the imbalance, or the knock-on consequences for the formation and pursuit of sound public policy.
The issue isn’t simply that states lean reliably Republican or Democratic. It’s that now a big majority are heavily, maybe irrevocably, tilted in one direction or the other. Where that obtains, office seekers pitch their initial appeals to the hard core on their side, as primary candidates always have. The difference is that, instead of the winner’s traditional post-primary imperative, to reach out to nonpartisans and even open-minded members of the opposing party, now their job is finished.
It happened pretty quickly. In the early 2000s, three-fifths of the states saw reasonable political balance between the two major parties. Today, “trifecta” government, meaning one-party control of the governorship and both legislative bodies, has become the norm across the 50 states. In 40 states, containing 83 percent of the American population, one party enjoys trifecta dominance, and often by overwhelming margins.
The roots of this phenomenon have been well studied. They include the cultural aggression of elite institutions and the predictable reaction to it, the nationalization of issues abetted by the collapse of local media and the pernicious effects of the antisocial media.
The gerrymandering that once exaggerated a dominant party’s political margin is no longer much of a factor; social clustering and these other factors have often done a more effective job than the political bosses ever did. In many jurisdictions today, one would have to reverse gerrymander, mixing geographies and crossing all kinds of legal boundary lines, to produce a truly competitive electorate.
Political campaigns need not necessarily be dispiriting, narrowcasting mudfests. They can be vehicles, in fact the best possible vehicles, for floating constructive ideas to an attentive public. Ideas proposed by a successful campaign have a higher likelihood of enactment after the election. Ideas fashioned not to stroke the erogenous zones of a riled-up minority of left or right, but to speak to the broader public in pursuit of a general election victory, evoke our common interest instead of our differences and antagonisms. But such campaigns rarely make sense these days.
In 2024, 30 states feature not only trifecta government but 2-to-1 majorities in at least one house. In that setting, both campaigns and governance look totally different than they do in genuine two-party polities.