The Daily Signal - Donald Trump’s MAGA Approach to U.S. Foreign Policy | Victor Davis Hanson

Episode Date: January 9, 2025

What is the MAGA approach to U.S. foreign policy? Many of President-elect Donald Trump’s critics call him an “isolationist.” Moving America away from “endless wars” was a staple of his 2024 presidential campaign. However, during his first term, Trump did not shy away from flexing America’s military muscles, especially regarding Syria and Iran. In this edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words,” Hanson, Hoover Institute Senior Fellow and the author of, “The Case for Trump,” argues that the MAGA foreign agenda is neither isolationist, nor interventionist but something else entirely. Watch to find out more: The Daily Signal cannot continue to tell stories, like this one, without the support of our viewers: https://www.dailysignal.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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We'd love to talk. Business. Is the MAGA agenda and Donald Trump in particular isolationist? That's what the accusation is, that under no circumstances will we slave dragons abroad looking for them? Or is he a neo-conservative and he wants to intervene everywhere? And I think the answer, of course, is neither. Hi, I'm Victor Davis Hansen for the Daily Signal. Have you noticed recently that Donald Trump has both issues,

threats to our existential enemies abroad, and yet he's called for peace as well. In other words, he's told Hamas, you better let the hostages go by the time that I'm president or else. And yet he's also said at the same time, we don't want these 2,000 Americans in Syria. It's a mess. The country's destroyed. Get them out before they get killed. This brings up kind of a dichotomy that's been discussed, is the MAGA agenda and Donald Trump in particular isolationist? That's what the accusation is, that under no circumstances will we slave dragons abroad looking for them? Or is he a neo-conservative and he wants to intervene everywhere? And I think the answer, of course, is neither. It was Walter Russell Meade, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal who coined, he didn't

coined it, he rebooted the word Jackson in reference to Andrew Jackson, the hero of the Battle of New Orleans, a twice-termed American president. And what that really means is that America will be second to no one, preeminent military abroad. We will be no better friend to our allies and no worse enemy to our enemies. More importantly, we don't have to be perfect to be good abroad. We just act as Americans, and if we're better than the alternative, that's fine. How does this boil down, though, to actual policy? After all, Donald Trump at one point was reported to have told Vladimir Putin, don't go into Ukraine, or I'm going to look at the Kremlin, meaning he might even attack the Kremlin. And now he's saying, this is one of our endless wars.

and we want to get out of it. So how do you square that circle of restoring deterrence lost during the Biden administration and yet not getting bogged down in nation building and ground wars in the Middle East? And I think the answer is partly to be found in his first term. Remember what he did? During the Cold War of some 75 years, we didn't really ever kill Russian soldiers. We may have as pilots, as Russian pilots were flying in North Korea or Vietnam, but not knowingly and deliberately. Yet when the Wagner group, some 500 soldiers strong swarmed an American installation in Syria, they were devastated by U.S. air power.

He did kill Mr. Baghdadi, the creator of ISIS. He killed Kwasum Soleimani, the greatest Iranian. terrorist general Soleimani in the Middle East that was the architect of supplying weapons to Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis. And he also put a maximum pressure policy against Iran. But he did not get in a war, even when he threatened North Korea. So what is the MAGA approach to foreign policy? It's Jacksonianism. He's a Jacksonian. And by that is, he builds up the military to ensure that it can deter anybody, but he does it not to use it, but not to use it. Unfortunately, he's inherited a world that has lost U.S. deterrence after the Kabul fiasco, the greatest military humiliation in American, I think, in American history,

but surely in the last 50 years since we had helicopters flying off the embassy in Saigon in 1975, then we had the Middle East fiasco where some days we supported Israel, some days we didn't. Some days we said that Hamas, we can negotiate some days we didn't. We wanted to get back in the Iran deal. It was a complete mess. Complete mess. So when Donald Trump takes office on January 20th, he is going to have to restore deterrence to make a calmer world. But he can't get in an endless bogged down war. So he has to be very careful because that is one of the keystone premises of the make America a great, again, movement. We do not want another Afghanistan two decades. We do not want 10 years in Iraq. We do not want to create chaos in Libya. We don't want to be in the tribal infighting in Syria, but we want the world at peace. And so I think what we should look for is that at particular places, at particular times when the use of force favors the United States, that is, without getting in house-to-house fighting or terrorism, tit for tat in the streets of Baghdad

type of endless engagements, we will use overwhelming force to send a signal that we can destroy you without having to fight your type of war on your ground. And I don't think you'll have to do very much of it to restore U.S. calm and deterrence. And it will not be neo-conservative interventionism, and it won't be isolationism. It will be Donald Trump mega-Jacksonianism. Thank you. Thank you so much for tuning in today.

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