VANCOUVER, British Columbia — Every American president has a foreign policy doctrine. But no president has ever had one quite like Donald Trump’s.
With President George W. Bush, it was to invade resource-rich countries under the pretext that there are terrorists there, preferably preemptively. Bomb them to spread freedom and democracy, but leave the Middle Eastern monarchy in Saudi Arabia that’s backing them alone, because, well, they already run a country that sells oil to the U.S.
President Barack Obama ran the show like a party van. Pile in as many allies as possible for the trip down regime-change highway. And if some of them insist on driving — like France and the UK did en route to overthrowing Libya — then all the better for when the crash inevitably occurs.
Trump has been nothing short of a gravitational force that has bent global conflicts to his will — for better or worse — like Bush. But he also likes having allies around, like Obama. The difference? No president has ever been so overt in factoring in the cash benefit for America. And one American, in particular: himself. Arguably, the Trump Doctrine could be described as overtly monetized hegemony.
The transatlantic relationship under Trump looks like a subscription renewal scam, with Trump telling Europeans that their 2 percent NATO defense spending commitments just randomly got upped to 5 percent.
Trump also recently went over to Israel to celebrate the peace deal he says he worked out between Gaza and Israel. In his speech to Israeli parliament, he singled out from the audience Israeli-American megadonor Miriam Adelson, whom he suggested loves Israel more than America. He conveniently left out the fact that his campaign benefited from about $100 million of her largesse, according to Forbes.
Of course, peace talks under the Trump Doctrine come with a side of commerce. In September, the Trump administration also proposed selling Israel $6 billion more in weapons, the Associated Press noted. “We make the best weapons in the world, and we’ve got a lot of them. And we’ve given a lot to Israel, frankly,” Trump said in his speech, turning alleged war crimes into a showcase opportunity. “I mean, Bibi would call me so many times, ‘Can you get me this weapon, that weapon, that weapon?’ Some of them I never heard of… But we’d get them here… And they are the best.”
Trump also talked about how rich the surrounding Arab countries are, and how they’re going to pay to rebuild Gaza now. So here comes “Trump Gaza,” the resort, probably — if the AI-generated video that Trump posted on Truth Social earlier this year is any indication.
Trump’s son-in-law, real estate mogul Jared Kushner, was front and center during Trump’s Israel trip as a negotiator without any public mandate, and has already publicly salivated over the “valuable” Gaza oceanfront property.
Sounds very American profits first. War is milked for weapons sales as long as possible, and then things wrap up with a connected few well-positioned to get first dibs.
Similarly, Trump had been talking up the notion of giving long-range Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine capable of striking Moscow — something that Europe wasn’t even yet willing to do with its German Taurus missiles despite all their anti-Russian tough talk. Why not? Because any plausible deniability would go out the window. Tough to argue against the idea of the West being directly at war with Russia when its own personnel would be needed to operate the guidance systems for these long-range strikes.
But we’re not talking about Trump giving Ukraine a gift here. Rather, it would mean him selling them to European countries for Kyiv. Suddenly the guy who keeps talking about how much he wants the Nobel Peace Prize sounded like he was on the verge of the kind of recklessness that could launch a third world war, and the only thing standing in the way was the notoriously janky common sense of European leaders.
It was after a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin that Trump’s mind refocused back on peace, at least temporarily. Trump said that the U.S. needed to keep its Tomahawk supply and that “a lot of bad things could happen” if they were to be used. Surely his change of heart has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that, by his own admission, he and Putin talked about future trade deals between the U.S. and Russia for when the bombings wrap up.
See the pattern? Peace first. Unless there are easy profits to be made for America from war. At least until there’s an even better opportunity for private profiteering.
Rachel Marsden is a columnist, political strategist and host of independently produced talk shows in French and English. Her website can be found at http://www.rachelmarsden.com.
Your Essential Guide to How Trump Will Handle Literally Any Foreign Crisis was originally published by the Tribune Content Agency and is republished with permission.
