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You're listening to Fox News Radio. I'm Ben Domenech. A month after the election shock of 2016, CBS's John Dickerson sat down with the 93-year-old Henry Kissinger to get his assessment of the incoming president. Donald Trump is a phenomenon that foreign countries haven't seen. So it is a shocking experience to them that he came into office. At the same time, extraordinary opportunity.
And I believe he has the possibility of going down in history as a very considerable president because every country now has two things to consider. One, their perception that the previous president or the outgoing president basically withdrew America from international politics so that they had to make their own assessments
of their necessities. And secondly, that here is a new president who is asking a lot of unfamiliar questions. And because of the combination of the partial vacuum and the new questions, one could imagine that something remarkable and new emerges out of it. I'm not saying it will. Extraordinary is one word for what followed.
Others could include chaotic, spastic, unnerving, nail-biting, a heart-attack-inducing rollercoaster of tweets that prompted Americans to fear for their lives. A Washington Post-ABC poll two years later found a majority of Americans fearful that Trump's tweets would lead to a nuclear attack from North Korea.
In the days after Trump's infamous January 2, 2018 tweet, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un just stated that the nuclear button is on his desk at all times. Will someone from his depleted and food-starved regime please inform him that I too have a nuclear button, but it is a much bigger and more powerful one than his, and my button works?
Fearful Americans jumped online to nukepills.com to order massive doses of potassium iodide in a desperate attempt to survive the incoming fallout. Yet there was another word for Trump's foreign policy tenure that, much as it may seem bizarre to say it, played out from the perspective of average Americans, and that word is stable.
For all the loud noises on the Twitter front echoed at length in hair-on-fire intonation by CNN, Trump started no new wars. He didn't get sucked into maelstroms that had any impact on American households. Much as the saber-rattling toward China and around increased under his tenure, the tone in the Middle East was surprisingly conciliatory as Jared Kushner's Abraham Accords project bore fruit.
The world kept on spinning, and prior to the global pandemic, the unexpected degree of stability had led many in Republican circles to espouse the president's leadership on the global stage as an asset.
Even anti-Trump Republican mega-donor Ken Griffin, who gave $5 million to a super PAC supporting former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley's long-shot bid in January, acknowledged as much. I know many of us, me included, struggle with some of Trump's behaviors, he said on CNBC, but there was a dimension of greater global security with him as president.
In Trump's final State of the Union speech, he said nothing about the little rocket man or Vladimir Putin or Vladimir Zelensky. He didn't need to. Instead, his foreign policy comments focused on China, where he touted trade deals, and Iran, where he displayed his pride in his decision to kill Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and Qasem Soleimani.
It allowed him to return to the comfort of Jacksonian toughness. America's enemies are on the run, he announced. In 2024, Trump's foreign policy critique of Joe Biden is built on the former president's attempt at going after the current president for achieving the opposite result.
Beginning with the disastrous Bosch withdrawal from Afghanistan, followed by the failure to deter Putin from taking Ukraine and continuing with the intelligence failures in both the Gaza attack and in the form of a terror watch list that basically is coming across the border on a daily basis. It all comes together to take the form of a traditional Republican critique.
It's one that we've heard from any number of GOP candidates in recent years. Weakness begets danger. Democrats made for weaker militaries, naive diplomacy and the like. And Biden has done all of this repeatedly, leaving us weak where Trump left us strong. What stands out about all this is how much it represents a break from the novel approach to foreign policy that Trump expressed in the past.
In 2015, he was an agent of chaos because of his backwards-looking criticism of the George W. Bush era foreign policy and a group of neoconservatives who got us into bad wars all around the world. But this time around, Trump doesn't really seem to be saying anything that couldn't be said by Tom Cotton or Marco Rubio or his best buddy and early endorsee, Lindsey Graham.
Just as his approach to foreign policy marked a return to Republican policy traditionalism and a step back from highfalutin Bible-quotin Wilsonianism, Trump's campaign rhetoric shocks by being extremely normal. More of the Ben Domenech podcast right after this.
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Yet there's one area where we can already see the outline of a major disagreement likely to crop up in the early days of any Trump 2.0 term in 2025.
Much of the focus today concerns disagreements on the right about the funding of Ukraine or the army of Taiwan, or perhaps stepped up military response to Mexican cartels. A step favored by many potentially once and future Tucker officials, including former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, but opposed by the likes of Tucker Carlson and much of the very new, very online new right.
But the biggest area where Trump 1.0 could conflict with Trump 2.0 is on the continued support for one particular entity, and that's NATO.
Talking with foreign policy staffers on Capitol Hill, the issue is ubiquitous. The same week that Rubio endorsed the former president, he was also shepherding through the Senate a national defense bill that included within it a pointed, unsubtle anticipation of Trump's return to power. An amendment co-sponsored with Democrat Senator Tim Kaine requiring that a president consult Congress before any withdrawal from NATO.
So yes, even as Marco Rubio bent the knee to his 2016 foe while calling on his old pal Nikki Haley to drop out, he was pushing through a bill requiring a two-thirds vote of the Senate to get out of NATO, designed to prevent Trump or any other president from following his natural instincts. That tells you how seriously foreign policy-minded Republicans are in taking on this risk. The truth is that for all of Trump's railing about NATO failing to pay its fair share,
the war in ukraine has forced the european nations to stand up thierry breton a french european commissioner claimed that trump had promised to leave the alliance back in 2020 you need to understand that if europe is under attack we will never come come to help you and to support you trump said to the european union uh president ursula von der lund uh brenton claimed in remarks to the european parliament
Trump followed up by saying, by the way, NATO is dead and we will leave. We will quit NATO. He said similar remarks in multiple different instances.
Bretton called their remarks a big wake-up call, though, and if they were intended as such, they definitely worked. According to a January 2024 report by the Conservative Forum for American Leadership, in 2022, Europe spent an aggregate of $260 billion on defense, which marked a 6% increase over the previous year, the largest increase for Europe in the post-Cold War period. In 2023, 28 out of 31 NATO members increased their defense spending.
If it was a real sign of past presidential weakness that NATO partners got away with freeloading on US defense spending, Trump could on this point be credited once again for the success of his "diplomat as chaotic neutral" approach to mastering negotiating. Leaving after such a victory would be like declaring diplomatic bankruptcy. That hasn't stopped the people likely to staff any incoming Trump 2.0 team from suggesting repeatedly that they remain dedicated to exiting the alliance.
Russ Vogt, a longtime conservative staffer, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, who resided over the holding back of funds from Ukraine during those tense moments that led to Trump's first impeachment, has taken on a key outside role in charting the policy path for a second term. He is also a notable critic of any further funding for Ukraine and the continued participation in NATO, even to the point of arguing that the president can openly defy the Congress and requirements like Rubio's on both matters.
Unquote.
It's understandable that an outsider backbench bomb thrower like Russ Vogt might be interested in such a conversation, but there's precious little evidence to suggest that's a conversation that Donald Trump is personally invested in, even to the slightest degree. His interest is achieving big things for America, taking all the credit for them, or at least making the citizenry believe that both that the achievement exists and that that credit is due.
Some might argue it's possible to get all the upside of NATO without paying any price. They think that if Russia comes marching through Poland, all of Europe will beg us for our help. And conversely, that if we need European allies the next time America's interests are threatened, we have plenty of leverage to force them to our side. But that brutalist logic ignores the extremely risky downsides of such an exit. And furthermore, the reality that taking this posture will erode the chances of it working over time.
As a practical matter, the anti-NATO forces within the GOP have little to stand on. History informs us time and again of the importance of having allies where you have interests.
and that the United States should prefer to have allies who are reliable and whose values and interests are close to ours. NATO satisfies this goal, and it helps to ensure that the enormous strategic interests we have in Europe and beyond are protected. Even in Turkey, the most troublesome case, NATO countries are closer to us in values and interests than the alternatives.
In the past two decades, NATO soldiers have sent their boys to die in American wars of choice. And if you want a preview of what greater Europe looks like without NATO, look no further than the chaotic effort to protect the Red Sea shipping lanes, which devolved from a coalition operation to every man for himself. As America becomes less and less dependable, the calculus of all these countries will change, and they will seek to balance their risk elsewhere and elsewise.
The internal debates in these countries tip in favor of Russia and China without the existing infrastructure of NATO, and how far they will tip in the absence of the U.S. commitment is a question. And the lesson will not be one isolated from the rest of the world, where our allies might entertain the real possibility of a separate peace with Beijing rather than risk total destruction in war.
Of course, these are hypotheticals. Reality informs us that the major historical beneficiary of NATO has not been Europe, but the United States. NATO's major military actions have been participating in American-led wars of choice versus Serbia, participating in securing America's skies after 9-11, the first time that Article 5 came into play, participating in America's wars of necessity and choice in Afghanistan,
The very point of NATO at its roots is to guarantee American hegemony, ending the cycle of conflict that dragged America into major European wars five times from 1775 to 1945. As a guarantor of American prosperity at home, it has without question succeeded.
For the anti-NATO conservatives, even if they call themselves that anymore, none of this apparently matters. Instead, they find themselves in the awkward position of arguing against their once and future champion in Donald Trump, arguing for the policy preferences of the Biden administration, which, having enacted their stated policy goal in Afghanistan, no matter the cost, is at this moment trying to pursue a policy of benign restraint everywhere around the world with obvious and predictable results.
The bad news for foreign policy traditionalists in the Republican Party is that they will have to fight for their priorities against a Trump 2.0 team with several fanciful people who wish to play innocence abroad in a world that is not innocent. The good news is that Trump himself gives little indication he is on this team or cares for a moment about what they have to say. And traditionalists can take solace in this. Should Trump make it back to the Oval Office?
He'll have a long list of things to smash before he gets to NATO. I'm Ben Dominette. You've been listening to Fox News Radio. We'll be back soon with more to dive back into the fray. Listen ad-free with a Fox News podcast plus subscription on Apple Podcasts. And Amazon Prime members can listen to this show ad-free on the Amazon Music app.
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