The Republican Establishment may think that Donald Trump’s unexpected victory in the Presidential election somehow vindicates them. To be fair, confusion is rampant these days. Nearly all of the pundits (myself included) expected that structural Democratic advantages (a strong economy and an increasingly diverse electorate) plus idiosyncratic elements particular to each candidate (Trump’s lack of government experience combined with his penchant for alienating lots of people almost every time he opened his mouth or took to Twitter) would usher in a second Clinton administration this year.
What we all missed was the deep anger at the Establishment among many voters which both diminished Trump’s peccadillos and tarnished Clinton’s gold-plated resume. Popular dissatisfaction with Washington business-as-usual spans the political agenda, but I want to highlight the international components of it.
Since the end of the Cold War, both political parties have shared two core assumptions about America’s role in the world: first, there has been bipartisan support for the notion that the United States should play the leading role in shaping and maintaining the post-Cold War international order. Second, the blueprint for this order should be roughly liberal: it should be constituted by democratic states whose domestic economies and the global economic system are guided the free market.
To be sure, there were tactical differences between Democrats and Republicans about how America should play its leading role on the global stage. The former were more inclined to hide American dominance behind a multilateral fig leaf while the latter did not conceal the mailed-fist of U.S. power in the velvet glove of international institutions. But these differences should not obscure the broad Establishment consensus on liberal hegemony as the script for America’s leadership.
The Trump Revolution represents a repudiation of this conception of America’s role in the world. You can see this clearly in the president-elect’s deep reservations about free trade and easy immigration, two premises widely shared among the Republican (and Democratic) elite. His alternative view that free trade has thrown American workers out of their jobs and unrestricted immigration has opened the door to terrorists and criminals clearly ties international engagement with core domestic concerns of many Trump voters.
But unhappiness with an activist American foreign policy goes well beyond trade and immigration. Resentment about the unwillingness of U.S. allies to pay their fair share for their own defense is longstanding. What’s changed in recent years is a growing sense that with the end of the Cold War, Uncle Sucker no longer has any interest in paying more to defend rich countries than they are willing to pony up themselves.
And at the Republican primary debate at the Reagan Presidential Library last fall, the majority of the Establishment Republicans were quick to hop on the band-wagon to Baghdad, joining Jeb Bush in defending his brother’s disastrous Iraq War. But overwhelming majorities of Independents, Democrats, and even Republicans had long-since concluded that the war was not worth the cost in American blood and treasure. Whether Trump really opposed it at the time as he claimed, Senator Clinton’s well-documented vote for it did not endear her to war-weary voters in 2016.
Finally, while many Establishment Republican national security experts see ex-KGB officer Vladimir Putin as the second coming of Soviet strongman Joseph Stalin, most voters may have little love for his politics but do not think that containing Russia in Syria merits any risk of war, especially since Putin and his Syrian ally Bashar al-Assad are also fighting our enemy ISIS there.
So rather than vindicating the Establishment Republican (and Democratic) foreign policy of assertive international leadership, Trump’s victory is a clear repudiation of significant elements of it. Conservative foreign policy mavens at the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, and other Beltway perches for out-of-power politicos may think that they will be back in the driver’s seat come January. But if they do, it is based on a serious misreading of the public mood which seems ready for a major change of course by America’s ship of state, including in our foreign policy.
Michael C. Desch is Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science.
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