In a Gallup poll released this September, voters in the United States revealed they trust Republicans as the “party better able to keep America safe from international threats” by a margin of 54 percent to 40 percent. In today’s hard-fought U.S. political system, a fourteen-point edge for one party over the other is something close to a landslide. Yet, most academics believe that the superiority of the Democratic Party’s foreign policy approach is self-evident.
So, who’s right—the voters or the academics? Let’s consider the evidence of the last eight years.
In January 2017, when the Trump administration began, it inherited a broken U.S. deterrence posture. Its predecessor, under Barack Obama, pursued a foreign policy based on gossamer assumptions of international accommodation, polite retreat, the need to prioritize “transformational” left-wing domestic reforms, and the superior morality of American liberals. Obamanauts placed tremendous faith in their man, but his ethical scoldings failed to impress anti-Western forces overseas. By the last year of Obama’s presidency, China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and ISIS were all on the march, ramping up their aggressions, including copycat terrorist attacks inside the United States.
The Trump administration then proceeded to introduce more hard-line U.S. policies in every major region overseas.
In Europe, the administration pushed for increased allied burden-sharing, bolstered America’s troop presence along NATO’s eastern frontier, withdrew from unfavorable arms control treaties such as INF, killed Russian mercenaries in Syria, and provided lethal aid to Ukraine. Of course, if you were watching CNN at the time, you would never have known any of this.
In the Middle East, Trump and his advisers pursued policies that were clearly superior to those of Barack Obama. Based on the novel idea of supporting your country’s friends and opposing its enemies, they ramped up a pressure campaign against the mullahs of Iran and withdrew from Obama’s ill-advised nuclear arms control agreement.
Trump was the first twenty-first-century U.S. president to recognize that liberal democracy was not about to sweep through the Greater Middle East. He succeeded in rolling back ISIS. He supported Arab allies in the region straightforwardly without trying to micromanage their internal affairs. And he was, without any doubt, a very good friend to Israel. With this new approach, his administration succeeded in doing what........