Trump’s Middle East strategy and the return of great power realism |
There’s something almost quaintly anachronistic about trying to pin down Donald Trump’s foreign policy in formal strategy documents. It’s like attempting to capture lightning in a bureaucratic bottle—the very exercise contradicts the subject. Yet here we are, with two substantial texts laying bare the administration’s worldview: the National Security Strategy from December and the National Defence Strategy from January. What they reveal isn’t merely a shift in American policy toward the Middle East. It’s a wholesale rejection of seventy years of post-war orthodoxy, dressed up in the language of “peace through strength” but revealing something far more primal underneath.
The documents matter precisely because Trump will ignore them when convenient. That’s not a bug; it’s the entire operating system.
But taken seriously (which we must) these strategies illuminate a fundamental transformation in how Washington conceives of its role in the world, and particularly in that perennial theater of American ambition and frustration, the Middle East. What emerges is a vision both boldly transactional and deeply traditional, echoing not the multilateralism of the post-1945 order but the muscular realism of an earlier American century. Think Teddy Roosevelt’s “big stick” rather than Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points. Think spheres of influence rather than universal values. Think nineteenth-century statecraft in twenty-first-century packaging.
The first pillar of this new doctrine is refreshingly honest in its cynicism: America is stepping away from the pretense of upholding a “rules-based international order” and embracing instead a world of sovereign competitors where might make it right. Or rather, where Americans might preserve American rights. The Monroe Doctrine gets a revival tour in the Western Hemisphere—just ask Venezuela. Europe gets lectured into doubling its defense spending. China gets “managed competition” rather than confrontation. Russia becomes a regional nuisance rather than an existential threat.
And the Middle East? It remains what it has always been in........