On Jan. 20, 1961, President John F. Kennedy used his inaugural address to proclaim America’s commitment to protecting and promoting democracy and freedom across the globe. This country, he promised, would “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”
Kennedy spoke of being “unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.”
This eloquent expression painted a vision of America as a beacon of democracy and freedom on which the whole world could rely, and it informed the entire post-World War II global order.
Every president who followed embraced Kennedy’s vision. Everyone, that is, until Donald Trump.
The president’s first inaugural address, delivered on Jan. 20, 2017, is memorable for its unabashed declaration of “an ‘America First’ approach to foreign policy [that] reflected an isolationist strand that had largely been marginalized in national affairs since World War II.”
Despite his words, Trump’s first term did not offer a coherent picture of what he wanted America’s role in the world to be. That picture was finally laid out nine years later in the administration’s National Security Strategy, which was released Dec. 4.
With its embrace of nationalism, chauvinism and a world of great powers, each dominant in its sphere of influence, the 33-page document reads like it was pulled from a time capsule.
With its embrace of nationalism, chauvinism and a world of great powers, each dominant in its sphere of influence, the 33-page document reads like it was pulled from a time capsule. If Trump gets his way, the late 19th and early 20th centuries will be reborn.
The National Security Strategy outlines an approach to foreign policy “in which American interests are far narrower than how prior administrations — even in Mr. Trump’s first term — had portrayed them,” the New York Times reported. “Gone is the long-familiar picture of the United States as a global force for freedom, replaced by a country that is focused on reducing migration while avoiding passing judgment on authoritarians, instead seeing them as sources of cash.”
Just as significant, the National Security Strategy is xenophobic to its core, seeing migration as a threat to Western civilization and diversity and pluralism not as a sign of strength, but as objects of fear.
The implications for the fate of democracy and freedom in other nations are dire. For decades, America’s vast power, prosperity and political commitments have been an irreplaceable asset for democratic forces everywhere. We have been able to build and maintain global alliances because other countries trusted that they were dealing with a nation that was not simply driven by its own parochial interests and bottom line.
The post-World War II global order was shaped by a commitment to a political ideal that put democracy and freedom at its core and acknowledged the interconnectedness of those values with national security and economic well-being. World leaders have long understood the indispensable role played by the United States in exemplifying and supporting those values.
So have the American people. A national survey released earlier this month revealed “growing, bipartisan support for active U.S. leadership in the world, robust military power to deter authoritarian adversaries…[and to build] strong alliances to defend freedom.”
You would never know this from reading the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy. Words like “freedom” and “democracy” are barely used. Instead, it says that the U.S. is committed to “prioritiz[ing] commercial diplomacy” through “tariffs and reciprocal trade agreements.”
The document promises an American retreat from parts of the world, including Europe, that have relied on our help and our commitment to keep them safe. The administration’s intent for our allies could not be any more direct: They will now have to assume “primary responsibility” for their own defense.
Make no mistake, as we retreat, China and Russia will be happy to fill the vacuum — and put our own national security at risk.
The document could not be clearer in its intent to bury Kennedy’s commitment to the advancement of democracy and freedom. “Since at least the end of the Cold War,” it reads, “[a]dministrations have often published national security strategies that seek to expand the definition of America’s national interests such that almost no issue or endeavor is considered outside its scope.”
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One section of the strategy explains this new posture in ways that sound like Trump is directly addressing Kennedy himself: “After the end of the Cold War, American foreign policy elites convinced themselves that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the best interests of our country. Yet the affairs of other countries are our concern only if their activities directly threaten our interests.”
That view is now “undesirable and impossible.”
Instead of a global power advancing democracy and freedom on the world stage, Trump is taking the final step to portray America as focusing first on the Western Hemisphere. The new strategy is in fact an old one — a return to the foreign policy approach of President Theodore Roosevelt’s “gunboat diplomacy.”
In 1904, the United States announced the “Roosevelt Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine. Under this new approach, the United States would intervene “to ensure that other nations in the Western Hemisphere fulfilled their obligations to international creditors, and did not violate the rights of the United States or invite ‘foreign aggression to the detriment of the entire body of American nations.’”
In an odd twist of history, Roosevelt’s policy shift was prompted by a particular concern about Venezuela.
While the “Trump Corollary,” as it is called in the National Security Strategy, doesn’t mention Venezuela, the current situation with that country seems to float between the lines of sentences like this: “The United States will reassure and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere, and to protect our homeland and our access to key geographies throughout the region.”
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In other places, the document dispenses with ambiguity altogether. “The era of mass migration is over,” it proclaims in bold font while pointing out, among other issues, the threat of “civilizational erasure” posed by migration. It targets Europe for ignoring its “real problems,” which it defines as the “Loss of national identities and self-confidence” and of “civilizational self-confidence” brought about by migration.
By repudiating pluralism and diversity, Trump’s National Security Strategy undermines democracy. What Kennedy and other presidents understood, as historian Robert Kagan observed, was that standing up for democracy and freedom throughout the world was “not just a matter of keeping faith with our own values. It is a matter of national security.” They knew that “Americans and other free peoples… have an interest in supporting democracy where it exists and in pressing for greater democratic reforms in the world’s authoritarian nations, including the two great power autocracies.”
But not Donald Trump. The president’s National Security Strategy would have Americans accept what it calls “the timeless truth of international relations” — namely that “larger, richer, and stronger nations” will have outsized influence in their neighboring regions. This will leave our country less safe and the world less democratic.
Nothing could be further from Kennedy’s vision of America’s role in the world.
