The Parts of Trump Foreign Policy That Aren't Bullshit are Insane

It's Almost as Bad as His Domestic Plans

Talk about diminished brain function! Have you taken a moment to study the Republican Party platform they released a couple days ago? It is a sad scary mess, a Trump social media post on steroids.

Lots of folks have discussed its Trumpian bombast and flourishes in all caps. Some have noted it just doesn’t discuss abortion because if you’re party’s position is anathema to the vast majority of Americans, why would you? But what about foreign and national security policy? I thought I would take a look at it from that perspective and see what I could see.

In a preamble invoking “brave men and women who gave everything” for “Love of Country” what you find is mostly hot air. But there are a couple discordant notes. In the second paragraph it talks about how in the last century “America vanquished Nazism and Fascism.” Not so fast there, fellas. While the Greatest Generation may have attempted to do that, we know that Trump and MAGA are actually working to bring ‘em back. It also notes we “triumphed over Soviet Communism.” But, we know that Donald is Useful Idiot Number One for the Kremlin and read deeper into the document and you will see indications that if Trump is re-elected it’s good news for a resurgent Russian empire.

The Parts That Aren’t Bullshit Are Insane

Next up, the document notes that “we are a Nation in SERIOUS DECLINE.” No evidence is presented of this fact and we know that based on our economic performance and the innovation of American companies and the strength of our alliances worldwide, that is certainly not true. Having said that, given that Trump is, at the moment, the leading candidate to be America’s next president, you could draw the conclusion that our prospects are bleak. I don’t think that’s what they meant though. I think they just wanted to scare everyone because that is, as you know, what authoritarians like to do.

A little later they build on this theme by saying that thanks to the Biden Administration, “America is now rocked by Raging Inflation, Open Borders, Rampant Crime, Attacks on our Children and Global Conflict, Chaos and Instability.” So…um…maybe we should start to get worried at this point.  Whatever committee of Trumpniks wrote and authorized this is clearly out of touch and paranoid or are pathological liars. Because of course, there is no raging inflation. Annual inflation is at 3.3%. While prices are still above pre-pandemic rates, most of that is due to corporate price gouging…something you can absolutely rest assured Trump will do nothing about. Now, maybe they’re thinking of Trump’s plan to impose a universal tariff on all goods imported into the U.S. That would dramatically increase inflation! But that’s them not us and that’s then not now.

Open Borders? Do you think the American people have forgotten that Biden supported the bi-partisan border bill that Trump scuttled? Rampant crime? No, crime in our cities is down markedly. As for “attacks on our children,” I have no idea what that means. But it sounds bad. Do they mean the accusations of pedophilia against Trump? If so, then they’re right. That’s pretty repulsive.

As for the assertions that the world is wracked by conflict, chaos and instability…well, welcome to the planet earth. But as we shall see, Trump policies are likely to make all those common global maladies worse.

Let’s skip through the rest of the preamble because it is all bullshit about why their policies (many of which are nutso in the extreme) are all based on common sense. Riiiiight.

Don’t Forget Project 2025

So what about their party’s To Do list? Now, we know the 900 plus page Project 2025 report is the real to do list. You know the one Trump says he knows nothing about that was essentially prepared by his entire campaign team? But there is a kind of Casey Kasem’s Top 20 in the platform document—if Casey Kasem were the stage name of Stephen Miller or Joseph Goebbels (I always get those two confused.) And a few of those are related to national security or are national security adjacent, so let’s give them the once over, shall we?

Number 1 is “Seal the border and stop the migrant invasion.” Well, we’ve already discussed Trump’s opposition to doing anything about this earlier this year. But just for a moment let’s examine this statement. “Seal the border?” Seriously?  Close the border with Mexico, our top trading partner? A border across which something like $855 billion in two way trade flows? Or do you want to throw in our number two trading partner Canada?  On top of the universal tariff? Excellent idea! No tourism, too? Or do you mean something less? Like…um…we are doing and were going to expand until Trump quashed the deal?

Carry out the largest deportation operation in history is number 2. Well, doesn’t that sound like a nice little police state. Can you imagine the resources necessary to round up the millions they have said they want to round up? It would have to involve the military. How would that look, military vehicles and police cars prowling every town and city in America rounding up families, throwing them into concentration camps? Ugly. Quite apart from the likely illegality of it and the court challenges. This one sounds awful, would be awful and would also be nearly impossible to do. Thankfully.

Third is ending inflation. See the above points about the tariff and the borders and the corporate price gouging that Trump’ll never make a move to stop. Forget it.

Wanting to Do What Biden’s Already Done

Four is easy. It is make America the dominant energy producer in the world. We are already the dominant energy producer in the world. So…check. That one’s already done.

Next is a pledge to stop outsourcing and to turn America into a “manufacturing superpower.” Well, we are the number two manufacturing power in the world, responsible for about 17 percent of global manufactured output. China ahead of us with more than 28 percent. Given their pricing structures that is unlikely to change. That said, no president in modern memory has done more to restore America’s manufacturing base than Joe Biden. Investment is way up. The infrastructure investment and the Chips and Science Act help a lot. Almost a million manufacturing jobs have been created since Biden took office.

Number eight on the list is really the big one when it comes to national security. It reads: “Prevent World War Three, restore peace in Europe and in the Middle East, and build a great iron dome missile defense shield over our entire country—all made in America.” You know what this one means, right? Hand over Ukraine to Russia. Give Israel the green light to, as Trump has put it, “finish the job” in Gaza. Abandon NATO and retreat into Trump’s gated community vision of America’s role in the world.

Number 12 is “strengthen and modernize our military” to make it “the strongest and most powerful in the world.” Once again: check. Been there. Done that. It already is. By an insurmountable margin. This is just blather although it will likely lead to more overspending on defense.

The next one is to keep the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency. In brief, the insane economic policies described by Trump and implied by this document would actually dramatically weaken the dollar. So…um…no.

Most of the rest of the agenda is culture wars stuff and while it is also lunatic, we’ll have to save that for another day.

The punchline is that if you remember Trump 1.0 (remember kowtowing to Putin and playing footsie with Kim Jong Un, remember trying to pull out of NATO and wanting use the military in the streets to put down protests, remember him wanted to launch missiles at migrant “caravans” in Mexico, pulling out of the Paris climate accords, being an anti-science outlier in combatting COVID), listen to Trump on the campaign trail (Russia can do whatever the hell it wants with Europe), and then read stuff like this “platform” you get a crystal clear idea of what Trump foreign policy would be like if he’s re-elected.

It's bad. Real bad. Horrifically dangerous for us and for the world. In fact, and this is saying something, it’s almost as bad as his domestic policy agenda. So, we might want to factor that into our coverage of the current political campaign. Because…you know…voting…democracy…freedom.