Trump-Reagan Fusion Can Win the New Cold War

From Real Clear Politics.com (Mar. 24):

Since Donald Trump’s rise within Republican ranks, conservatives have divided into two competing foreign policy camps. One contends that Trump’s approach suits the world in which we live and supersedes previous GOP national security and foreign affairs outlooks. A smaller contingent contends that Ronald Reagan’s understanding of America and his conduct of diplomacy remain the gold standard for U.S. foreign policy.

Atlantic Council colleagues Matthew Kroenig (also a Georgetown professor of government and international relations) and Dan Negrea contend that considerably more agreement about foreign affairs prevails among conservatives than they themselves realize. When fleshed out, a Trump-Reagan fusion represents, they persuasively maintain in their new book, “the foreign policy synthesis around which the Republican Party can coalesce.”

Taking their title from Ronald Reagan’s succinct 1977 statement of his stance toward the Cold War, Kroenig and Negrea argue in “We Win, They Lose: Republican Foreign Policy and the New Cold War” (the acknowledgements thank me although I contributed at most encouragement), that the United States has been thrust into the New Cold War by the People’s Republic of China. Trump administration veterans – Kroenig in the Defense Department and Negrea in the State Department – the authors maintain that Trump’s 2017 National Security Strategy rightly recognized that America had already entered an era of great-power competition with Russia as well as with China.

Notwithstanding “real divisions within the party,” argue Kroenig and Negrea, recognition of “[t]he existential threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)” provides conservatives “a central, unifying theme.” By combining Reagan’s characteristic “commitment to individual liberty, free markets, and a strong national defense” with Trump’s emphasis “on the interests of all Americans and confronting countries, such as China, whose economic policies harm American interests,” Kroenig and Negrea contend, conservatives can fashion a strategy for winning the New Cold War.

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The Trump-Reagan fusion promises much better by respecting America’s founding principles and by concentrating on advancing America’s interests in an increasingly volatile world. The fusion, according to the authors, comprises three chief elements.

First, the Trump-Reagan fusion seeks peace through strength. In the absence of world government – agreed upon international authorities with the power to make and enforce laws and adjudicate the controversies that arise under them – the United States must maintain the world’s most powerful and adroit military and make clear its readiness to use it to secure the nation’s vital interests. Reagan’s defense build-up, which hastened the Soviet Union’s demise, is a classic case of achieving peace by preparing for war.

Second, the Trump-Reagan fusion upholds free and fair trade. Reagan championed free-market and free-trade policies that sparked an economic turnaround in the 1980s and set the stage for dramatic innovation, entrepreneurship, and growth in the 1990s. But the freedom in free trade must be reciprocal, Reagan explained: “If trade is not fair for all, then trade is free in name only.” Trump applied this principle, write the authors, “countering countries like the PRC that systematically violate the rules of international trade.”

Third, the Trump-Reagan fusion takes pride in American exceptionalism. The United States is the world’s only rights-protecting and democratic superpower. Its constitutional system furnishes “an unending source of economic, diplomatic, and military strength that helps the United States excel in geopolitics.” Since the construction of the U.S.-led international order following World War II, the authors observe, democracy has proliferated, poverty has fallen dramatically, and the world has become, by any objective measure, “much safer, richer, and freer.”

To deal with America’s principal national security threats, the authors advance a “conservative deterrence and diplomacy strategy.” China is the foremost threat, and “getting to a point where the Chinese government no longer has the will or the capacity to threaten core U.S. interests” is the chief objective. The United States must operate simultaneously on two tracks, imposing costs on China’s malign conduct – in the economic, diplomatic, and military realms – in regions around the world while building “a pro-freedom, anti-CCP coalition” – which will include friendly authoritarian nations – in hopes of cooperating “with a future, reasonable government in Beijing.” This two-track approach applies also to Russia, Iran, and North Korea – authoritarian powers bent on undermining the U.S.-led global order. [read more]

This fusion triad will never be part of the mindset of Crooked Joe or any of the crazy Marxist Left. But this America First mindset is what we need to win the new cold war. Good article.