The roots of Trump's realpolitik
President Trump’s attempt to end the war in Ukraine has enraged liberal internationalists on both sides of the Atlantic. Dealing directly with the Kremlin and going over the heads of America’s European allies... and attempting to clinch a minerals deal as the price of further US support for Kyiv - all this counts as heresy among foreign-policy elites committed to “rule-based liberal international order”...
In reality, the 45th and 47th president is in a tradition of realist presidents... who have viewed world politics as a great-power club, rather than an arena for idealism...
This realist tradition endured the reign of the arch-idealist Woodrow Wilson...
Like FDR, Churchill was skeptical about global institutions in which each state, no matter how small and weak, had equal authority...
Determined to extricate America from the war in Vietnam and to avoid similar entanglements, Nixon in 1969 had already espoused “the Nixon Doctrine”, declaring that “we shall look to the nation directly threatened to assume the primary responsibility of providing the manpower necessary for its defense”...
On Aug. 1, 1991, three weeks before Ukraine’s declaration of independence from the USSR, President George H. W. Bush, a consummate realist, told the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic that it would be better for Ukraine and the other Soviet republics to remain together in a loose union, rather than make a hard break with Moscow...
For its part, the United States has continued to observe the Monroe Doctrine by treating the North American quartersphere as its own exclusive domain, toppling regimes it does not like and installing clients. Reagan invaded Grenada in 1983, Bush I invaded Panama in 1989, and Clinton invaded Haiti in 1994 in “Operation Uphold Democracy”...
The ephemeral spasms of Wilsonian utopianism form the exception to the rule...
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