Transcript: Will Trump pull America back from the world?

This is an audio transcript of the Rachman Review podcast episode: ‘Will Trump pull America back from the world?’

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Gideon Rachman
Hello and welcome to the Rachman Review. I’m Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator with the Financial Times. This week’s podcast is about Donald Trump and foreign policy. My guest is Dan Caldwell, co-author of an article often cited by Trump’s foreign policy advisers. Its headline is Trump Must not Betray “America First”. Caldwell’s a leading voice of the so-called restrainers who want the US to adopt a much less interventionist foreign policy. But will Trump really pursue a foreign policy of restraint? And what would that mean for the rest of the world?

Donald Trump’s voice clip
You know, the truth is that we started the war in Iraq. We spent $2tn on that war. We lost thousands of lives. We have wounded warriors who I love all over the place. It shouldn’t have started. We would have been so much better off if Bush and the rest of them went to the beach and didn’t do anything.

Gideon Rachman
That was Donald Trump speaking in 2016 during his first run for the US presidency. His willingness to condemn the Iraq war and President George W Bush marked him out as somebody willing to break with Republican party orthodoxy. Trump’s instinct is still very much to steer clear of Middle Eastern conflicts. Witness his recent social media post proclaiming Syria is a mess and the United States should have nothing to do with it. That view will have been music to the ears of restrainers like Dan Caldwell. I met him last week in his offices at the Defense Priorities think-tank in Arlington, Virginia. And Dan Caldwell began by explaining to me how his views on foreign policy were shaped by his years of military service.

Dan Caldwell
So I’m a veteran of the United States Marine Corps. I spent my first two years serving at the presidential retreat at Camp David. And then I deployed to Iraq with second Italian first Marines. And this is in 2008, 2009 at the tail-end of the vaunted surge. And the feeling at the time was that the counterinsurgency strategy — the nation-building strategy, essentially — that the United States was pursuing at the time, was working because violence had dipped somewhat. However, five years later, just about every place that I served was under the control of Isis. And after I left the Marine Corps, I started to learn more about the origins of the war. And the narrative that you saw from some people was that the Isis takeover of Iraq was a result of weakness, or Obama’s pullback from Iraq in 2011.

And people forget that we didn’t completely withdraw, but we had to pull down our force numbers because we couldn’t get an acceptable status of forces agreement with the Iraqi government. Iraqi government was largely shoving us out. But the core of what became Isis was essentially formed in American military presence in Iraq. And Isis would not have seized large parts of Iraq and Syria and you would have likely not had the Syrian civil war become as brutal and bloody as it is and continues to be today were it not for that original sin of invading Iraq.

Gideon Rachman
So you concluded essentially that American policy was counterproductive, that it had failed?

Dan Caldwell
I think that’s the nicest way you could say it. I would say it was criminal. I think the Iraq war was a monstrous crime. And I will tell you one moment that really appeals to me with President Trump is when he was on the debate stage in February 2016 in South Carolina. And the moderator, he said, oh, President Trump, you’re standing next to Jeb Bush. His brother George W Bush, has come to campaign. You said 10 years ago that you thought he should have been impeached. Do you still believe that?

And he gave one of the most righteous condemnations of the Iraq war that I have seen a politician give. He called it a mistake, a disastrous mistake. He said it destabilised the Middle East. It handed Iraq to Iran. You know, I have to say, a lot of times when President Trump is railing against American foreign policy failures, he is his most focused and righteously angry. And that really appealed to me in 2016. And I know that the word crime is very strong. But that’s all I can call it.

Gideon Rachman
Crime because it was illegal. It caused suffering to Americans and to Iraqis.

Dan Caldwell
It led to the deaths of likely up to a million Arabs, Iraqis and Syrians — Kurds as well. Destroyed Christian minorities in Iraq. You know, likely led to the exodus of up to a million Christians from Iraq. Whatever you can say about Saddam, and he was an awful tyrant, but he did allow a degree of religious pluralism in Iraq that essentially no longer exists. You had over 4,000 Americans killed who are in uniform. Several thousand more who were contractors were killed. You had tens of thousands of wounded. These were wounds that will affect them the rest of their lives. It will cause them pain. It will cause them challenges for the rest of their lives. It will impact their families.

And then you had hundreds of thousands more veterans who suffered unseen wounds. It’s commonly known here as post-traumatic stress disorder. You could argue it too, as moral injury. And hundreds, thousands of those veterans, their lives have been irreparably changed as a result of that. And that impacted communities, wives, mothers, sons, daughters. The scale of the suffering that that war inflicted, I think, is often either ignored or understated. And putting aside the human suffering for a second, the monetary costs were significant. Over $2tn and counting because the Iraq war is still going on. Since the October 7th attacks, I believe you’ve had nearly 100 troops wounded in Iraq by attacks by Iranian militias who, by the way, are technically part of the Iraqi government that we’re funding and training.

So this is an ongoing conflict that is born out of arguably one of the worst foreign policy decisions in American history and may turn out to be the worst. Now, does that mean I think everybody who supported the Iraq war should be thrown in jail? Absolutely not. But I think our media should stop elevating these people. And I think administrations like the incoming President Trump administration shouldn’t hire these people. Now, the good news is I don’t think President Trump is going to hire a lot of those people like he maybe did in his first term. I think there’s a lesson learned there. But that’s what I’d really like to see now is accountability.

Gideon Rachman
When you say Trump isn’t hiring people like that, I mean, it seems to me quite ambiguous who he is hiring. I mean, Marco Rubio, who’s gonna be secretary of state, I would have, at least in 2016, classified as a neoconservative, exactly the kind of people you dislike.

Dan Caldwell
Well, what I was talking about, the people there, I’m talking about the people who are actually responsible for advancing the war, like John Bolton who played a key role and other individuals like that. But you bring up an interesting point here. I’m not gonna sit here and pretend that Senator Rubio and I agree on every foreign policy issue. I don’t think we do. I do have a lot of respect for Senator Rubio. I think, you know, one thing I actually worked with his office on was fixing the veterans healthcare system, which is an issue that’s very important to me. And he deserves credit for being a leader in that fight.

But Senator Rubio does not hold the same foreign policy beliefs that he held in 2016 that he does now. And he has really come around to accepting a very important point: is that the United States exists in a world where its power is more limited than it has been since the end of cold war and arguably before that. We simply cannot afford financially, militarily, on an industrial level to keep doing all the things we’re trying to do around the world without risking a financial catastrophe. And we have no choice but to prioritise. I really believe that foreign policy these days for the United States is a matter of not what should we do, but what can we do. And I think Senator Rubio has come around to that position. I think based on what he’s written and said over the last few years, it’s very clear he’s undergone an evolution on these issues.

Gideon Rachman
And you wrote in Foreign Affairs in the joint article not just that you advocate a policy of restraint, but that also America should give up on the goal of American primacy. That’s quite a big thing to say sitting here in the DC area.

Dan Caldwell
I think the United States should strive to remain the most powerful country in the world. But in my mind, that is different from trying to achieve primacy. In my view, attempting to be the dominant power is different from trying to be the most powerful country. There are smarter people than me that may disagree, but I’m not advocating, embracing or accepting American decline. I’m advocating the opposite is that we need to do things to reverse American decline.

And I think our pursuit of primacy has ultimately made us weaker as a country. It has led us to undertake foreign misadventures like the Iraq war, to stay much longer in Afghanistan and to attempt to turn one of the most tribal nations in the world, a nation with a history of rejecting outside interference and influence for millennia, into a liberal democracy, to repeat the same mistakes again and again in places like Libya and Syria. Those misadventures have made us weaker. They’ve made us weaker militarily by wearing down a lot of our most important military assets by costing us thousands of lives and also forcing us to build a military that isn’t actually focused on the real challenges, mainly what we’re dealing with in the Pacific.

For 20 years, we essentially built a counterinsurgency military. We prioritised investments in the army. We prioritised investments in systems that were designed to fight tribal fighters. And we neglected our navy and our air force and other things that we needed that were more critical, in my view, to actually preserving core American interests and American physical safety and the conditions of our economic prosperity. And then not to mention, it has likely added upwards of $10tn to our national debt. So it’s weakened us financially and then ultimately economically. And that has always been the engine of American power and strength. It’s been our economic engine. And when that’s undermined, that is where we start to really get into trouble. I’m advocating for recognising our limits and to pull away from pursuing a foreign policy that I don’t think anybody can say with a straight face has made the United States safer and arguably hasn’t made the world safer or more stable.

Gideon Rachman
You make a very interesting point about emphasising the Pacific, and I’ll come to that in a moment. But Ukraine is obviously the issue of the day right now. Trump has said he’ll bring peace within a day. Maybe that’s hyperbole, but do you think America has interests at stake in Ukraine?

Dan Caldwell
I do not think we have vital national interests at stake. If we do have one interest at stake in the moment, it’s actually a result of our over-involvement in that conflict. And that is we have an interest of it not escalating into a nuclear confrontation with Russia. And I think there is heightened risk to that because we have gotten too involved in that conflict as a country. The Biden administration has, particularly the last six months, undertaken many policies that I view as unnecessarily escalatory. And they really stem out of a decision by the Biden administration, and it really predates the Biden administration, to treat Ukraine like it is a core national interest when I don’t think any reasonable assessment of the country would lead us to believe that this is absolutely critical for American safety and prosperity.

But right now, it has cost the United States, if you count the money spent to deploy troops to eastern Europe, the intelligence support we’re getting, $170bn since February 2022. That is a significant expenditure, especially in an environment where you have 1tn or $2tn in your national deficit and then a $35tn national debt, you know, that you’re spending the budget for the United States Marine Corps every year on Ukraine. And I don’t think that’s sustainable for the United States.

Gideon Rachman
So if Ukraine loses to Russia and is either reabsorbed or basically becomes something a bit like Belarus, where it’s, you know, nominally independent but basically dominated by Russia, would your argument be, well, that’s sad for the Ukrainians, but it’s not ultimately a problem for the United States?

Dan Caldwell
Look, I went to Ukraine in June. I went actually with my co-author of the piece, Reid Smith, is that we had an opportunity to go. I spent about five days there. We went to Odesa. And what I walked away with was the current policy that’s being pursued by the United States and the west, mainly Nato, but other nations that are involved as well too, is essentially destroying Ukraine as a nation state. I’m not taking the Russians off the hook here. They were the aggressor. They were the ones who made the decision to invade and start this war. But the policies that we’re currently pushing the Ukrainians pursue and enabling the Ukrainians to pursue will lead them to be demographically destroyed.

This is an anecdote, it’s not data. But one thing that struck me walking around Odesa was the absolute lack of young men. And if you saw them they were in uniform. And there was a particular type of young men in uniform, these were guys in battle dress uniforms with batons, and these were recruitment officers. And while I was there, there was actually a reporter from the BBC who was reporting on these recruiting officers, how people are hiding and how people are being pulled off trains and buses and out of their jobs and storefronts and essentially sent to the front line without any real training.

And then when we were leaving Ukraine through Moldova, it was harder to get out because they were looking for draft dodgers. And I remember the Ukrainian soldiers sweeping through a field looking for people trying to hide. I told that story because the question about whether Russia reabsorbs Ukraine, that is, I think, a possibility. I don’t think it’s a likely possibility. But the current path that Ukraine is on right now, I don’t think it will be a viable country if this continues much longer, whether economically, demographically or whatnot. But to answer your question, not to dodge it, the war is a tragedy. But for the United States, whether or not Russia controls Donbas or Crimea is not a vital interest to us.

Gideon Rachman
Right. And there are some people who actually take your viewpoint perhaps a bit kind of a bit farther way in Spain, Portugal. But in eastern Europe, they think, well, we’re next. And there’s a great concern about Trump that he might pull out Nato or even if he doesn’t do that, he’ll undermine Nato by saying things as he said in the past, you know, that he might not automatically defend Nato allies. The policy of restraint that you advocate, what does that mean for Nato?

Dan Caldwell
I want to be clear. I don’t speak for President Trump. I don’t speak for his transition or his campaign. I will note that President Trump, I don’t believe, will pull out of Nato. Even his vice-president JD Vance, whom I have a lot of respect for and who I think his foreign policy views very much align with mine, that’s not what they’re advocating for. They’re advocating, first and foremost, for more burden-sharing. Down the road, there may be burden-shifting — I hope there is — where more of the burden for actually defending Europe, I would hope almost entirety of the burden, falls on the Europeans, and the United States serves a role as a balancer of last resort or a logistics provider of last resort, only providing certain types of combat power.

I don’t think you should ever take something like pulling out of Nato off the table. I don’t think alliances should be viewed as holy sacraments. It’s worth noting I think our first president, I’d argue our best president, George Washington, in his farewell address, went out of his way to warn against maintaining permanent alliances. Alliances are a means to an end. They are not an end of themselves. And so we should always be re-evaluating our alliances. Now, in regards to Nato, my personal belief is yes, we do want to maintain a security relationship with Europe, but the balance of that needs to change. And it’s my hope that under a Trump administration that you would see that.

Now to your question about the eastern Europeans, if Russia was more at my doorstep, yes, I can understand why they would have a different view of that threat than I do sitting here in Washington, DC. I know there’s been a lot of arguments about how Putin views eastern Europe and how it’s different from Ukraine. I don’t think he has the same imperial ambitions at this time for eastern Europe. But that said, let’s put that aside. Let’s look at the actual balance of power. Russia has been worn down by the Ukraine war. And they have material advantages and they have population advantages vis-à-vis Ukraine, but those advantages are not as pronounced vis-à-vis eastern European states like Poland or Romania or Finland or Sweden. And some of those issues that Ukraine has of demographics, so do the Russians.

Those are things that are very hard to overcome. And Russia economically is not doing as bad as people would have hoped with the sanctions. But even then, I think it’s gonna be hard for them to be able to — in a rapid period of time — retool a military that could all of a sudden start invading Nato countries. I do not view that as a guarantee if Ukraine were to lose the war, whether that means surrendering sickening amounts of territory or collapsing as a state. If certain things continue, that is, I think, obviously a real risk. But I don’t think that in itself is even a guaranteed outcome.

Gideon Rachman
But I think you’ve said, used quite an interesting phrase in the past that Uncle Sam was becoming Uncle Sucker in Europe.

Dan Caldwell
That is not a phrase that I have come up with. First of all, I have to give credit where credit’s due. The person who put that in my brain is my friend Justin Logan at Cato. So I always have to credit him for that. But that actually comes out of something that Eisenhower said. The great internationalist Republican, the guy that slayed the evil isolationist in Bob Taft, well, he sounded a lot like Senator Taft towards the end of his presidency. And he felt that the Europeans — and he told his commanding general in Europe that — the Europeans were making an Uncle Sucker out of Uncle Sam.

I can’t get too mad at the Europeans for that, is that they have played us very well on that front. They have been very effective at buck-passing and cheap-riding. I’m mad at the American politicians that have let that happen, and I don’t want to speak for Europeans, but I don’t think it’s helped them either, because I think they’re in a position now where they are less prepared than they should be for the fact that the United States, regardless of who’s president, in my view, does have to retrench from Europe, not completely, to be clear, but there has to be some level of retrenchment from Europe.

Gideon Rachman
And you mentioned earlier that the priority should be the Pacific. And that seems to me a quite interesting division of opinion in Trump world, as far as I understand it, that there’s a group that says all-round retrenchment, and then there’s a group — which I associated with Rich Colby, who may go into the administration, we’ll see — who say, well, because China is such a challenge, we can’t afford to do as much as we were doing in Europe and the Middle East. But that isn’t America retreating from the world, sort of concentrating on the Pacific and on a potential conflict with China. Do you think if it came to it, it would be worth America fighting with China over, say, the future of Taiwan?

Dan Caldwell
This is a very good question. And I think somebody we both know, Jeremy Shapiro, and others have divided up the Republican foreign policy camps between prioritisers, restrainers and primacists. The prioritisers and restrainers agree on a lot, but there’s some important — although maybe oftentimes overstated — differences of opinion on China. Bridge Colby’s a friend of mine. I don’t want to speak for him, but I think even he sometimes is mischaracterised as an ultra-China hawk. He’s been talking a lot lately about how because of the balance of power between Taiwan and China, and mainly the fact that Taiwan hasn’t been doing what it needs to do to get ready for a war with China, that maybe that should come into question because the Taiwanese have simply not taken their own defence seriously.

But pointing back to the bigger question, I think the more interesting divide is over whether China is a military or economic challenge. And I think there’s people that view China mainly through the prism of it as an economic challenge, and that the primary way to deal with China is through economic means, whether it’s decoupling or tariffs or things like that. Now, there are people in the restraint camp that say like, well, either way it’s going to lead to a military conflict. I don’t want to get into that, but I think that’s the more interesting divide in Trump world. Now, what I would say is that China is the pre-eminent security challenge for the United States. It is an incredibly powerful country economically and militarily that we need to take seriously. It is much more powerful than Russia. They pose threats to American interests and potentially to American safety. So that is the challenge that we need to orient to.

Now, where I would differ from some other people is that I would not commit to defending Taiwan. I would not make more security commitments in the Pacific. And I would sum it up by saying I would not trade Taipei for Los Angeles because we can’t ignore the fact that China is a nuclear power. Losing Taiwan would not be good for the United States. And it’s not that we have it, but if Taiwan were reabsorbed by China and that potentially could lead to some bad things. My approach to that is not to make a direct military commitment or do things that would preordain a conflict, but to do things that would deter conflict.

If there’s one thing that we saw coming out of the Ukraine war, it’s that there’s a lot of ways you can cheaply bleed and hold up a great power military. And I will say one thing that really impressed me about Ukraine is that without a navy, the Ukrainians were able to effectively push back the Black Sea fleet through the use of cheap drones and other things like that. I think we need to be focusing on supporting the Taiwanese, building those capabilities, anti-access aerial denial capabilities instead of shipping them prestige weapons that they like. And we do that with our other partners, and that raises the costs of a Chinese invasion and hopefully ultimately deters it so that they don’t pursue a military reabsorption of Taiwan, at least in the near future.

Gideon Rachman
So finally, coming back to the area where you served and that’s you know, you think about a lot — the Middle East. Some people have said to me that Trump will basically pursue a policy of restraint, and he sees himself as a peacemaker, but that the Middle East might be a cop-out because the Republican commitment to Israel is, if anything, much more full-throated than the Democratic commitment to Israel that quite divided the Democrats. They have a progressive wing who are very critical of Israel. And that, if anything, the Republicans have been criticising Biden for being too tough on Israel, not supporting them enough, and that therefore you might see a Trump administration that’s restrained in other respects but has actually prepared to fight another war in the Middle East. What do you think of that?

Dan Caldwell
Well, I would just note that both President Trump and Senator Vance have stated pretty clearly a couple of things. One, they don’t want a direct conflict with Iran, that they want to avoid that. And they both ultimately don’t want to undertake a regime change effort in Iran. That separates them from a lot of Republicans in Washington, DC. I also know, two, that both have railed against the Iraq war, have questioned troops in Syria. Senator Vance even voted against the legal authorisation — he was one of, I believe, only five senators — that allows us to keep troops in Syria and Iraq.

And I also know in regards to Israel is that President Trump has at times been critical of the Biden administration for not being supportive enough of Israel. But he’s also made clear that the end state he wants is a deal and that he has appointed his brother-in-law — the father of his daughter Tiffany’s husband, they’re from Lebanese family — to be a personal emissary to the Middle East. That shows he’s serious about peace. Now same time, it doesn’t mean that he’s gonna tolerate Iranian aggression or threats from terrorist groups that have the intent and capability to harm the United States. I want to be clear, I think we need to pull back significantly from the Middle East.

Gideon Rachman
Do you think you’ll win that argument within the Republican party? Because there are very hawkish people like Brian Hook, for example, who’s been put in charge of the State Department transition team. He’s a noted Iran hawk.

Dan Caldwell
That is probably the liveliest debate right now in Republican foreign policy. There’s debates over Ukraine and there’s debates over China. But especially around Ukraine and Europe, almost everybody, except for maybe Senator McConnell and a few holdouts, has come to acknowledge that we need to do less in Europe. And even on China, there’s an acknowledgment that a war is less than ideal, but that’s where we need to prioritise. And that’s oversimplifying it. There are clearly important differences between the camps, but the real debate is whether America doubles down in the Middle East or does what President Trump and Senator Vance campaigned on. So whether I would win or not, there still will likely be a lively debate in Congress and in the Trump administration over what that looks like. I do think it’ll be a real lively debate.

Gideon Rachman
Again, last thing, just taking a step back, there’s a lot of concern among people I normally mix with in the US and certainly in Europe about what a Trump administration might mean for world order. But you obviously have some hopes for it. So if things go well, what kind of state will America’s relations with the world be in the world as a result of American power being four years’ time after another Trump administration?

Dan Caldwell
I’m not a non-interventionist. I would have not joined the Marine Corps if that were the case. Militarily, there are places where we need to be. We’re prioritising those. But the biggest thing I would like to see is, I think, fairly called a mindset shift is that America’s leaders no longer view primacy as a viable foreign policy and that our role is no longer to impose or create the conditions for liberal hegemony.

I think once we reject that, it ultimately will be good for the American people first and foremost. But I also think it will be healthier for the rest of the world, is that we will have a more normal set of relations with Europe, with different folks in the Middle East and ultimately in the Pacific. I’m not gonna pretend that it’s gonna lead to peace breaking out or world peace. There will be challenges. We will still have adversaries. But rejecting primacy, I think, is absolutely critical to getting to a better place for American foreign policy.

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Gideon Rachman
That was Dan Caldwell of the Defense Priorities think-tank speaking to me in Arlington, Virginia last week. And that’s it for now. Thanks for listening. Please join me again next week for the last show of 2024.