The Trump doctrine

This Trump doctrine, in practice, isn’t the isolationism that he sometimes promised on the campaign trail; nor is it the flailing bellicosity that many of his critics feared. It’s a doctrine of disentanglement, retrenchment and realignment, in which the United States tries to abandon its most idealistic hopes and unrealistic military commitments, narrow its list of potential enemies and consolidate its attempts at influence. The overarching goal isn’t to cede United States primacy or abandon American alliances, as Trump’s opponents often charge; rather, it’s to maintain American primacy on a more manageable footing, while focusing more energy and effort on containing the power and influence of China…

No American president before the end of the Cold War would have found it strange or dissonant to take an interventionist and self-righteous line where Latin America was concerned, while accepting deals with bad actors and wooing autocrats in more far-flung and global theaters.

There is a rhetorical tension, obviously, involved in defending human rights in Venezuela while you ponder a treaty with the Taliban and seek an accommodation with Kim Jong-un or Bashar al-Assad — and Trump is not exactly the master of rhetorical finesse. But from the Monroe Doctrine onward the United States has traditionally treated our hemispheric neighbors differently than Eurasian powers — for the very sound strategic reason that they are close to us and countries like Syria and Afghanistan are not.