The Complexities, Nuances of Trump’s Jacksonian Approach to Foreign Policy

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of the accompanying video from noted historian Victor Davis Hanson.

Have you noticed recently that Donald Trump has both issued threats to our existential enemies abroad and that 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 [Make America Great Again] agenda and Donald Trump in particular isolationist? That’s what the accusation is, that under no circumstances will we slay dragons abroad, looking for them. Or is he a neoconservative, and he wants to intervene everywhere. And I think the answer, of course, is neither.

It was Walter Russell Mead, a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, who coined—he didn’t coin it—he rebooted the word “Jacksonian” in reference to Andrew Jackson, the hero of the battle of New Orleans, a [two-term] 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 [Russian President] 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. airpower.

He did kill [Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi], the creator of ISIS. He killed Qassem Soleimani—the greatest Iranian terrorist, Gen. 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, 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 … that is, he builds up the military to ensure that it can deter anybody, but he does it not to use it, but to not use it.

Unfortunately, he’s inherited a world that has lost U.S. deterrence after the Kabul [Afghanistan] fiasco, the greatest military humiliation … in American history, but surely in the last 50 years since we had helicopters flying off the [U.S.] 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 Jan. 20, 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 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 neoconservative interventionism, and it won’t be isolationism. It will be Donald Trump-MAGA Jacksonianism. Thank you.

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