#WTH The Trump Doctrine's Fatal Flaw

Donald Trump returned triumphant from a profitable trip to the Middle East last week. His major address in Saudi Arabia was dissected, billions changed hands, and Trump happily flew home to America to deal with his own far less tractable democracy.

Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, summed up both the trip and Trump’s big speech:

President Donald Trump gave an important speech in Riyadh that may come as close to outlining a “Trump doctrine” for his second term as we’ll probably see.

It was a direct counterpoint to George W. Bush’s second inaugural address.

The simplistic way to put it is that what liberty was for Bush, money is to Donald Trump.

That’s not quite right, though. The speech had values, they just weren’t typical values — accountable government, human dignity — but rather prosperity and peace. These are universally regarded as goods, but Trump is elevating them over other goods — especially democracy — and putting his own distinctive gloss on them.

If Bush wanted to spread freedom, Trump wants to spread gleaming high-rise buildings.

There is nothing wrong with this. As Trump noted, in recent decades, Western efforts to spread democracy have borne qualified successes at best, and abject failures at worst. Of course, Trump doesn’t recognize that the traits he admired so warmly in the Gulf — the high rises, the golf, the glitz — are only there thanks to two things that have precisely zero to do with the local governments: an American security guarantee and oil. Still, there are worse places to live than Dubai or Doha or Jeddah. And there are worse doctrines to embrace than peace and prosperity.

The problem for Donald Trump’s vision of the world — his “doctrine” — is not doing business with Gulf potentates. Trump is great at that. The problem is doing business with nations that don’t share the President’s priorities. Our enemies, Russia, China, Iran, and others, like money just fine, and their leaders have stolen lots of it from their people and stashed their lucre around the world. The problem is that money is not their goal; rather, they are after power in pursuit of an ideology. They are, for lack of a better term, true believers. And in the DJT worldview, such people don’t exist. For this president, everyone has a price.

Adam Smith dismantled the Trumpian mercantilist worldview long before visions of Qatari jets glittered in Trump’s eyes. Smith’s construct, that the “wealth of a country consists, not in the quantity of gold and silver in it, but in the quantity of the produce of its land and labour which goes to market," is, pace Trump, at the heart of the American economic experiment. Thomas Jefferson echoed similar views about the evils of mercantilism, for which colonialism was in service, in preaching the virtues of human liberty, itself inseparable from the true wealth of a nation.

Needless to say, we’re not in Jefferson’s America anymore. And that’s fine too. One of the blessings of our own liberty is the evolution of political views and political parties, and Trump represents just such an evolution. The problem is that his doctrine will fail to meet the moment, at least on the question of national security.

In Trump’s utilitarian view, Vladimir Putin’s excuses for his first and second invasions of Ukraine make sense. The Russian leader felt hemmed in by NATO’s post-Cold War expansion, and worried for the fate of Russian-speaking minorities in the post-Soviet states. Were this true, the remedy — a pledge to keep Ukraine out of NATO, protections for Russian speakers — could suffice. But these excuses are little more than pretexts (and stolen ones at that, ahem, Hitler), and mask Putin’s true motivation. “Ukraine,” Putin has said, “is not just a neighboring country for us. It is an inalienable part of our own history, culture and spiritual space.”

If you’re still doubtful, here’s another event where Putin tells us what he’s about:

“The collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century. [...]As for the Russian nation, it became a genuine tragedy. Tens of millions of our fellow citizens and countrymen found themselves beyond the fringes of Russian territory.”

To paraphrase Margaret Thatcher on a different Russian leader, Putin is not a man with whom we can do business. He is on a mission from God to reconstitute the Russian Empire, and he will not be bought.

In the same vein, the Islamic Republic of Iran is premised on a set of ideas that have nothing to do with wealth. Doubtless, the clerics who rule are fond of their caviar and bling, and sensitive that the Iranian people have less of that than they’d like. So if there are ways to compromise temporarily in order to bank the benjamins, they’re all for it.

But these tactical concessions are only minor deviations from the leadership’s Islamist ideological goals. You will hear me (and everyone else who understands Iran) suggest that the most important job for the Islamic Republic’s government is regime protection. That’s true, because the regime embodies the mission for which modern Iran was created in 1979, per Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini: “Islam is a complete system whose aim is to establish the rule of God on earth and to prepare the way for His universal sovereignty. The Islamic Republic is not a mere government, but a system of governance based on divine justice and guidance.”

“Divine justice” > GDP.

Needless to say, the Chinese Communist Party, far from being the business partner Trump hopes, is a similarly rigid ideological body, committed more to “China’s complete reunification” — i.e. the capture and forced subjugation of Taiwan, as well as Chinese sovereignty over the South China Sea, which, per Xi, has “been China's territory since ancient times.”

For decades, the Chinese Communist Party has been allowed to have its cake — the fruits of the global trading system — while consolidating its dictatorship over the Chinese people. In his first term, Trump signalled the end to China’s Western-subsidized rise, but in his second term, he appears to believe that the problem with Beijing is more trade deficit than national security threat.

Donald Trump's unshakeable confidence in his ability to manage even the most intractable of foreign threats is not bluster alone. His accomplishments during his first term, whether the deterrence of Russia, the maximum pressure campaign against Iran, the Abraham Accords, or the changed European mindset on China, are substantive and even revolutionary. As Matt Continetti wrote on Trump’s mindset, the man likes to “think big,” values tenacity, works hard, and is the ultimate outsider, even in his second term. His dream is not to have a chair named for him at the Council on Foreign Relations.

In foreign policy, Trump has every reason to believe that the greybeards of Washington and elite academia don’t know what the hell they’re talking about, have precious few successes to tout, and are mired in oldthink that precludes big wins like a real deal with Russia, Iran, or China. That’s not dumb. But ultimately, while it may appreciate the nature of our diplomatic class, it ignores the ideology of the foreign party.

Trump faced this problem in dealing with Kim Jong Un in his first term. The North Korean dictator proved he, too, was not a man with whom Trump could do business. So Trump moved on. There are some indications that should Trump’s single-minded efforts to bring peace between Russia and Ukraine fail, as they appear to be failing right now, he will move on from that as well. And one must assume that if Iran fails to accept the rather plush offers Steve Witkoff proffers from time to time, Trump will give up on that, too.

Heaven knows, every other president who has preceded Trump has proven incapable of facing up to the trifecta of challenges that bedevil DJT. But just because Trump walks away doesn’t mean that the problem is gone. Vladimir Putin is intent on all of Ukraine, and probably a couple of NATO allies as well. China is intent on Taiwan, the South China Sea, and the domination of Asia. Iran wants a nuclear weapon. Each one of these threats is near-term — months or a few short years. Trump may hope to kick the can down the road, but it’s unlikely his foreign friends will cooperate. And there’s another problem.

Putin, Xi, and Khamenei believe they have Trump’s number. Where in the first term they believed him to be a salesman and a cowboy, this time around, they got the memo from the likes of JD Vance and Pete Hegseth that the cowboy has retired. In other words, while Trump may not like their bellicosity and geostrategic ambitions, he’s not persuaded it’s his job to deal with the problem. With America out of the picture, Russia, China, and Iran’s grand ambitions may well appear less risky to their leaders.

This is the inherent danger of the new Trump Doctrine. It underestimates our enemies, fails to appreciate the role of ideology, and encourages adventurism by rogue states. But there’s another piece of history Trump may also fail to appreciate: There is no conflict that does not ultimately entangle the United States, determined efforts to avoid it notwithstanding. Ask Woodrow Wilson. Ask FDR. Ask Ike, or JFK, or LBJ. Ask Carter, Bush, or Clinton. Or W or Barack Obama. Our enemies always find us, one way or the other. It’s usually better that we find them first.