Opinion | This Isn’t the Donald Trump America Elected
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Guest Essay
Feb. 9, 2025
Credit… Kevin Lamarque/Reuters By Ben Rhodes
Mr. Rhodes is a contributing Opinion writer. He served as a deputy national security adviser under President Barack Obama.
In 1962, not long after President John Kennedy created U.S.A.I.D., the federal agency tasked with administering foreign assistance, he welcomed its first mission directors to the White House. He noted the difficult politics of sustaining foreign assistance but called it essential to America’s role as leader of the free world. “There will not be farewell parades to you as you leave,” he said of their imminent deployments, “or parades when you come back.” The reward was the work itself and the larger cause of freedom it served.
A nation’s foreign policy is a good window into its psyche. The America that created U.S.A.I.D. had an expansive view of itself in the world: defending freedom, buttressing international institutions, waging battles for the hearts and minds of peoples across the world — an effort that dovetailed with the civil rights movement at home. The America that is cannibalizing U.S.A.I.D. has a very different sense of its place in the world: threatening conquest of smaller nations, withdrawing from international institutions, casually proposing ethnic cleansing in Gaza — a worldview that complements the mass deportations and erasure of diversity programs at home. A nation growing smaller in size and self-conception.
President Trump, of course, ran for re-election promising to transform America’s place in the world. After the grinding conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, he vowed to discipline the national security elites who refused to learn from forever wars. After decades of complaints that our trading partners benefited more than we did from globalization, he pledged to use older tools of statecraft such as tariffs to leverage better deals. After parts of the federal work force resisted his agenda in his first term, he sought to fill it with loyalists who would serve him and his movement. In a chaotic world full of transactional strongmen, Americans would have their own.
Many Americans, myself included, support overhauling the sclerotic national security consensus that has governed our policies since Sept. 11, 2001. Yet it would be wrong to dismiss Mr. Trump’s dizzying array of pronouncements and executive actions on foreign policy as simply the fulfillment of his campaign promises. He did not run on the dismantling of U.S.A.I.D., the conquest of Greenland or the occupation of Gaza. Rather than showing strength, his foreign policy betrays a loss of American self-confidence and self-respect, eliminating any pretense that the United States stands for the things it has claimed to support since fighting two world wars: freedom, self-determination and collective security.
In many ways, Mr. Trump cuts a more familiar picture from history: an aging strongman musing about territorial expansion to consolidate power and cement his legacy. At best, this kind of foreign policy will help shape an international order reformed in opposition to American excess; at worst, it could accelerate a global trend toward disorder and great-power conflict.
Consider what the rest of the world has seen these past few weeks. Mr. Trump is the first president in my lifetime to enter office pledging to “expand our territory.” He has insisted the United States take back the Panama Canal and seize Greenland, despite repeated objections from the governments and people of those countries. It’s possible this is posturing to open negotiations, albeit for things that aren’t top of mind for most Americans: reducing fees for U.S. vessels transiting the Panama Canal or obtaining more access to resources and military bases in Greenland. It’s also possible Mr. Trump means what he says about territorial expansion.
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