On Trump’s National Security Strategy

How the US president is breathing fresh air into international affairs that had been poisoned by too much moralism

THE LAST WORD | ANDREW M. MWENDA |  For the first time in my adult life, I have read a United States National Security Strategy that speaks sense. What President Donald Trump calls “Flexible Realism” has been the missing ingredient in American foreign policy for nearly four decades. “U.S. policy will be realistic about what is possible and desirable to seek in its dealings with other nations,” the new NSS begins. “We seek good relations and peaceful commercial relations with the nations of the world without imposing on them democratic or other social change that differs widely from their traditions and histories. We recognize and affirm that there is nothing inconsistent or hypocritical in acting according to such a realistic assessment or in maintaining good relations with countries whose governing systems and societies differ from ours even as we push like-minded friends to uphold our shared norms, furthering our interests as we do so.”

This basic common sense has been missing in US foreign policy as liberal imperialists sought to promote democracy across the world. Unable to find easy converts, American, and with it, Western European policy became one of preaching, lecturing, hectoring, threatening, blackmailing, etc., of other countries considered non-democratic. Under this foreign policy regime, democratisation ceased to be a process but an event; it ceased to be a people centered struggle from below and became an imposition not just from above but from outside the country. Finally, democracy was no longer a system of government that evolves organically out of a nation’s political struggles, nourished by nutrient local culture, values, norms, and habits. It became a universal religion, secular though it was, that everyone had to adopt or be sanctioned and even bombed to accept it.

The beneficiaries of this new form of democratization were not active participants in the struggle for their own emancipation. Instead, they became passive spectators as America and her Western allies preached, lectured, pressured, sanctioned and, in extreme cases, even bombed their governments to force democracy down their throats. Alongside many other forms of foreign aid – financial, technical, humanitarian, etc. – the intended beneficiaries of this new wave of democratisation became passive recipients of international charity. Backed by a large army of human rights mujahedeen, America’s democratisation-at-gunpoint in real terms undermined democratic development. Opposition groups, seeing powerful nations backing their often unrealistic demands, refused to negotiate and to compromise, the two foundational premises of democracy.

Trump has, by one stroke, stopped this religious crusade to promote democracy by recognizing the most basic fact about international affairs, the sovereignty of nations. “The world’s fundamental political unit is and will remain the nation-state,” the great Trump states. “It is natural and just that all nations put their interests first and guard their sovereignty. The world works best when nations prioritize their interests. The United States will put our own interests first and, in our relations with other nations, encourage them to prioritize their own interests as well. We stand for the sovereign rights of nations, against the sovereignty-sapping incursions of the most intrusive transnational organizations, and for reforming those institutions so that they assist rather than hinder individual sovereignty and further American interests.” Hear, hear!!

This is basic common sense. Reading it, one wonders how such basic common sense had been neglected. And seeing the cost of American misadventures in Libya, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc., one wonders why intelligent people like Barack Obama could not see, did not see, this basic common sense. It turns out that intellectual and cognitive ability may not be good for humanity when it is rooted in ideological and cultural superiority.

When it comes to the war in Ukraine, which NATO so recklessly provoked and which it is now clearly losing, again Trump stands tall. “It is a core interest of the United States to negotiate an expeditious cessation of hostilities in Ukraine,” his NSS says, “in order to stabilize European economies, prevent unintended escalation or expansion of the war, and re-establish strategic stability with Russia, as well as to enable the post-hostilities reconstruction of Ukraine to enable its survival as a viable state.” This very basic common sense was missing under the Jo Biden regime (pun intended) and is still missing among America’s vassal states in Europe.

Let us listen to the Great President Trump to understand how everyone in Europe, except the leader of Hungary, had gone nuts. “The Ukraine War has had the perverse effect of increasing Europe’s, especially Germany’s, external dependencies,” the NSS states. “Today, German chemical companies are building some of the world’s largest processing plants in China, using Russian gas that they cannot obtain at home. The Trump Administration finds itself at odds with European officials who hold unrealistic expectations for the war perched in unstable minority governments, many of which trample on basic principles of democracy to suppress opposition. A large European majority wants peace, yet that desire is not translated into policy, in large measure because of those governments’ subversion of democratic processes. This is strategically important to the United States precisely because European states cannot reform themselves if they are trapped in political crisis.” Wow!

Trump’s NSS makes clear that it will prioritize re-establishing conditions of stability within Europe and strategic stability with Russia; enabling Europe to stand on its own feet and operate as a group of aligned sovereign nations, including by taking primary responsibility for its own defense, without being dominated by any adversarial power; and most importantly (and only the Great Donald Trump would say this basic commonsense policy objective), “ending the perception, and preventing the reality, of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance.” How can an alliance have no limit to the number of members it can invite? And what strategic value do so many of these new members bring, especially if set side by side with the costs that come with offering them Article 5 protections? The West has stopped thinking, mired in its own moral superiority complex but also consumed by its own narratives. Nowhere is this better pronounced than in Trump’s ideas on American engagement with Africa.

“For far too long, American policy in Africa has focused on providing, and later on spreading, liberal ideology,” Trump’s NSS states without paying attention to previous policy. “The United States should instead look to partner with select countries to ameliorate conflict, foster mutually beneficial trade relationships, and transition from a foreign aid paradigm to an investment and growth paradigm capable of harnessing Africa’s abundant natural resources and latent economic potential.”

Need I say more?

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amwenda@ugindependent.co.ug