Laurel Rapp
Good evening and a warm welcome to members and friends at Chatham House, where we have been convening on big issues of foreign policy for – over the last 100 years, and we’re delighted to have you again this evening to talk about a very consequential issue to continue this tradition. I’m Laurel Rapp, I’m the Director of the US and North America Programme here at Chatham House, and I’m really delighted that you’re joining us this evening to launch our inaugural conversation in our series running through October on “America at 250: the Enduring Debates.” This series commemorating the 250th anniversary of US independence runs through the autumn and will delve into some of the biggest questions Americans have been grappling with in our 250 years of history, what current shape they take and what the answers to these questions might mean for the future.
Today, we’ll be talking about matters of internationalism versus isolationism in US foreign policy. I’m sure our panellists will begin by rejecting that frame, and I will as well, but it offers a good context for us to begin this conversation on how the US defined its role in the world at its inception and how that is changing over time, and what that means for all of us who live outside of the United States. Next month we’ll do a discussion on “Free trade versus protectionism.” In September we’ll tackle “The separation of powers in the national security space,” and then we’ll wrap up in October with a conversation on “US interest versus principle in foreign policy.”
And so, these debates have altered the course of history. They’ve redefined the US place in the world and their impacts have been felt across all continents. They’re far from settled. And so, to remind you, tonight this discussion is on the record, it’s being livestreamed and it’s being recorded. We’ll have a conversation among our three panellists this evening, two joining in person, one joining virtually from Washington this evening, and then we’ll have plenty of time for questions and answers. So, please do think of your question and we’ll have a very spirited discussion towards the end of our session. And we will wrap promptly at 6 o’clock and then welcome all of you to join us for a reception, where we will continue these collective conversations.
So, with that, one of the most active, enduring debates across US history is this question of what the US relationship is beyond its shores. Should US foreign policy advance an internationalist worldview, or should it be one that is more internally focused, a bit more isolationist? And this is a debate Americans have been having across centuries, since the early days of the Republic. And you may recall President George Washington was maybe the original isolationist or non-interventionist when he chose US neutrality in the war between France and England in the 1790s, after France backed American revolutionaries a decade earlier. In his farewell address, he warned against permanent alliances, and you heard, if you listened to the Hamilton soundtrack before we all arrived on stage, you will hear Cabinet rap Battle number 2 really crystalises this very question of what the US role should be in the war with France and England. Jefferson echoed this approach when he became President. He said, “Americans should seek peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.” And so, neither of these argued for pure isolationism, but they did seek to set the limits of US commitments overseas.
So, fast forward a century and you see President Wilson trying out a very different model for the US role in the world. Trying to put the League of Nations into practice but was rejected by a Congress that decided that that US role was a bit too expansive. That led to the period of isolationism in the 1920s and 30s, when fascism was rising in Europe and Americans decided not to intervene until the US was attacked during Pearl Harbour. And so, this is the – this moment in the 30s when this binary of internationalism versus isolationism really crystalises, and it actually was used not as a way to define two groupings, but as an attack against those who sought not to intervene.
So, isolationist was an attack line and so, it’s no surprise that you will find no isolationists on our panel this evening, because that is not a tradition that has really found a lot of support over time, unless anyone has new announcements to make this evening. And so, you know, in the Cold War, in the post-911 period, in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, these are not questions about should the US engage, necessarily, but what form would that engagement take? You know, and we’re having these same questions in the US today of what is the US role in the world? What does the Trump administration’s approach to expansive use of military force look like, the coercive tools of sanctions and tariffs, this binary, this false binary that has not been a true binary from the start?
This administration has really broken those models apart, and so, now, Americans are thinking about what are those new differences? What are those new camps in those schools of foreign policy that will define the next generation? And these are questions we’re diving in on with the US and North America Programme, leading into 2028. We’re excited to engage you all in it, and no better way to kick that off than with this conversation this evening.
So, I am delighted to introduce our panellists. I will start with Peter Trubowitz to my left, Professor of International Relations and Director of the Phelan Centre at LSE, Associate Fellow here at Chatham House. Peter spent his career examining some of the domestic political routes of American foreign policy and has written extensively on that. We have Elliott Abrams to my centre, Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, who served as the Deputy National Security Advisor under President George W. Bush, Special Representative for Iran and Venezuela under President Trump. And he’s a leading voice in the tradition of conservative internationalism across four decades of Republican foreign policy. And joining us virtually we have Mira Rapp-Hooper, a Visiting Senior Fellow at Brookings and a Partner at the Asia Group. Hi, Mira.
Peter Trubowitz
Hmmm.
Laurel Rapp
She most recently served as Senior Director for East Asia and Oceania at the National Security Council, which is one – is the top White House advisor on the region. And before that, she was NSC Director for the Indo-Pacific Strategy. She’s also written extensively on alliances and the future of the international order.
So, I’m going to kick off this discussion from our Professor, Peter Trubowitz, here, to give us a bit of a sense of the historic breadth of this question. Looking back at these 250 years, when has this debate been most consequential in shaping where the US is headed after that moment?
Peter Trubowitz
Right. Laurel, wonderful to be here, and I think it’s really great that Chatham House is running this series to mark America’s semi-quincentennial. So, congratulations on that. So, I think the first thing to say, and Laurel has already set this up, this old chestnut of, kind of, internationalism versus isolationism, it’s something of a fiction. It’s a 20th century gloss on the great debates of the 19th and late 18th century. Hamilton and Jefferson, even in the play, you know, they don’t invoke these terms, they didn’t invoke ‘em in their great debate, over how the United States should comport itself in the early years. Nor did the many leaders who followed them across the arc of the long 19th century.
It’s also worth pointing out here that the meaning of these terms have changed over time. So, in the first quarter of the 20th century, internationalism was pretty much equated with, like, pacifism and, you know, it – Wilson, and I think especially FDR, expanded its meaning to include free trade, collective security, spreading democracy. And as for isolationism, as Laurel pointed out, it wasn’t used – I mean, you can find it in the Oxford Dictionary. Apparently the first reference to it is 1901, but it really is not used until, at least in the political arena in the United States, until the 1930s, and it’s used by internationalists pejoratively to disparage American Firsters of that era, to call them isolationists, in the great debate over neutrality that took place.
So, all of that said, all of these kinds of, you know, amendments and adjustments, said the internationalist-isolationist axis, if you will, or dimension, I think is actually a very useful frame, and that’s why a lot of Historians and Political Scientists use it. Among other things, what it allows us to do, it rea – it basically, reminds us that the American story, from the founding, all the way down to the present, is really a story about choices. Choices about how internationally engaged the United States should be and where, importantly, where?
So, you know, starting from if we start with Washington’s famous warning about no “entangling alliances with European powers,” to if you think about this in terms of an arc and the really pivotal moments, I would say the next one is really McKinley’s Open Door Policy of commercial expansion in East Asia that marks the turn of the, you know, the movement from the late 19th to the early 20th century. Teddy Roosevelt takes it forward, all the way down to, let’s say FDR’s, you know, announcement and elaboration of the Atlantic Charter. These are really big moments where Presidents – others did the same thing, they had to locate themselves on that axis between those two poles, and they identified different places on it.
These three choices, the reason I think they’re particularly important, is because they endured and they endured for decades, and that really brings us to the question that you asked me, is why? And I would say they endured for two reasons. One is that they aligned very well with the geopolitical realities of the moment, of their time, and the second is that they allowed each of those Presidents to achieve domestic political ends. And it was this kind of Janus-faced nature of the strategies that made them so attractive, and I think really helps explained why they endured.
And let me just briefly go through, kind of, each one of ‘em to set the table. In a way, this is, kind of, setting the table for the place we are today. Washington, what Washington understood was that America was in no position to screw around with the European powers and to take sides, you know, with – between France and Great Britain. And he also understood that what Americans were really focused on was developing, taking advantage of the vast continental potential that was before them. But to do that, he had to keep the great powers on the sidelines and make sure they didn’t screw things up. So, for Washington, geopolitical considerations and domestic ones were in alignment.
The same was true of William McKinley’s America. McKinley’s approach, his, you know – the push for some people call it informal empire, but commercial expansion at any rate, comes on the heels of America’s really dramatic ascent from the postbellum period, up until the beginning of the 20th century. You know, America was like China’s rise during that period. It was spectacular, it scared the hell out of some of European countries, like this one. They referred to in the late 19th century, “the American invasion” of goods that were coming across that were of better quality and cheaper.
What he realised, and those around him, is that the nation’s capabilities allowed it, both military and economic. American develops a blue-water navy to expand commercially in a big way, in underdeveloped regions, in particular Asia, but also Latin America. But it solved a problem for McKinley as well, and that was the populist prairie fires that were burning across the agrarian heartland. What he offered them was markets, external markets, and so, what he built was a coalition of the industrial north-east and the trans-Mississippi west, against the south, that lasted for 30 years, even with the Wilson interlude.
And something similar, and I’m coming to the end, happened in the 1930s and 40s, when the Democrats, led by FDR, capitalised on depression and war, to build a bipartisan coalition that spanned the great Mason-Dixon Line in the United States, and built this coalition, north and south, against the west, by offering the world something it desperately needed, international stability and security. So, once again, geopolitics and domestic politics were in sync.
So, what’s the takeaway? The core idea was laid out by Dean Acheson in a speech he gave in 1950 to American Newspaper Editors. He said, “There’s no longer any difference between foreign questions and domestic questions. They are all part of the same question.” What Acheson and many of Acheson’s contemporaries, Republican, as well as Democratic, understood, is that for foreign policy, a foreign policy to endure, it needed to solve for both geopolitics and domestic politics at the same time. And this is really what separates the strategies that endure from those that don’t.
Laurel Rapp
And that is very much a throughline to where we find ourselves today, right? This alighting of the foreign policy and the domestic policy, that’s something that US policymakers are really grappling with and are…
Peter Trubowitz
Yeah.
Laurel Rapp
…bringing different answers to that question, but all know they have to answer that question, in ways that they didn’t before. So, Elliott, I’ll turn to you. So, you come from a neoconservative tradition…
Elliott Abrams
Hmmm hmm.
Laurel Rapp
…in Washington over many decades, and in this tradition, there is a very active US role in the world, including advocating for strong US use of military force, including regime change in certain situations, as well. Can you walk us through how that tradition has evolved since your first job in D.C. those years ago?
Elliott Abrams
I should start by saying I’m delighted to be here. When I was a student at LSE, I used to use the library here and I would sneak in, and it was a great library. Is a great library, I guess. It’s nice to be back.
Laurel Rapp
It’s still great.
Elliott Abrams
Still a great library…
Laurel Rapp
It’s very good, it’s, like – yes.
Elliott Abrams
…some years later.
Laurel Rapp
Yes.
Elliott Abrams
The neoconservative idea was to use American power in two ways, to advance American interests and to advance American ideals. And I think that’s a significant insight to the debates today, because I would agree in a sense with what you said at the beginning, it’s not about isolationism versus interventionism. It’s about using American power for what? I’m struck – I even brought some numbers here. Trump voters were asked, “Do you think it’s important that the United States remain the strongest country in the world, as opposed to Iran, China, Russia?” 89 to 8% yes, it’s important or very important, Trump voters. “The world is a safer place with strong principled American leadership,” 90 to seven. “It is the – in the vital national security interests of the United States to prevent China from controlling Taiwan,” 75 to ten, Trump voters.
So, Trump voters are not isolationists. They like American power. I think the difference here is that the – that President Trump doesn’t like to use American power to advance American ideals. It’s all transactional, and you see it, for example, in his treatment, say, of Zelenskyy versus Putin, or you see it in the treatment of NATO. There was a broad consensus in the US that – and this is a bit of America First, but also a bit of a broad consensus, that NATO countries have to do more. It’s, kind of, ridiculous that – I mean…
Laurel Rapp
It was a Democratic project, as well. That’s…
Elliott Abrams
Absolutely, I mean…
Laurel Rapp
Obama put this forward.
Elliott Abrams
Five/six Presidents in a row said it, although it really – Trump was the one who insisted on it. But from an American point of view, “Why is it that French people get to retire ten years before – ten years younger than we do?” “Well, one of the reasons is because they don’t have to spend much on defence. We spend it.” “Not fair.” That – you know, lots of Americans will believe that. But when you get Trump’s statements about Greenland, which is a threat against not just a NATO ally, Denmark, but a very good NATO ally, when you get his implications against NATO, now we’re talking about something else. It’s a, I would say, a deprecation of the value of alliances.
The neocon view was, you know, one of the things – I would say two points. One of the things that separates us from Russia and China is that we have alliances. They don’t really. I mean, who do the Russians have, Belarus? But the United States does, in Europe, in the Middle East, in Asia. But secondly, the – generally, the cement of those alliances, or one of them, is democracy. One can exaggerate that. It’s obviously not always true. We have alliances in the Middle East with absolute monarchies, but it’s always been part of the picture. It was in the Atlantic Charter. It was in the foundation of NATO, which initially had a big problem with Spain and Portugal ‘cause they were dictatorships, and that’s been eliminated.
And that is, in a certain sense, the neocon argument with Trump, or Trump’s argument with the neocons, all eight of us at this point who are left. It’s – I think it’s the misunderstanding of that it’s not isolationism, again, but it is a sense of the United States going it alone and pursuing – not pursuing its interests along with those of allies, but rather, pursuing its interests period and without reference, really, to any of the ideological questions that have for a long time, been part of American foreign policy. At moments – look, I always say to student groups when I talk to them, “A government is not an NGO. Every government will balance those ideals against commercial interests, financial interests, security interests, but I think the problem now is that we’re not balancing. We’re simply dismissing the ideological or idealistic interests.
And I think that debate, I think, will come back because the distance that President Trump has taken that is not all that popular. I think those numbers suggest it – many of his voters aren’t following him that far, and under a different Republican President, would agree, for example, “No, we must strengthen NATO.” And principled American foreign policy is quite important. So, I think some of this isn’t a big trend in Republican foreign policy. It’s the leadership of President Trump, which I think cannot be replicated after he leaves office.
Laurel Rapp
Hmmm hmm. Thank you very much for that, and I hope we get into a more spirited debate as the evening goes on, on all of these ideas and all of these questions. But before that, I’ll turn to you, Mira. So, you sit to the left in this conversation, and you’ve written extensively on the liberal internationalism and its shortcomings and how just simply refreshing what was is not right for this moment. Can you walk us through a little bit about where you see those challenges, where they’ve emerged, and then what an update to that order might look like, on the left?
Dr Mira Rapp-Hooper
Right, yeah, absolutely. Laurel, thank you so much for having me and thank you to the whole team at Chatham House for putting on this important event. It’s really a treat to be joining such distinguished fellow panellists, as well.
I actually really want to start by associating myself with what I thought was a terrific set of opening remarks by Peter, and to situate us in what I think is another moment of decoupling and will eventually become a moment of realignment between American domestic politics and American foreign policy. And to suggest that the changes in public preferences and perceptions that we have seen from Americans when it comes to American foreign policy over the last many years are not simply changes in public preferences unto themselves, but they are symptoms of structural changes in the international system.
And while President Trump, particularly in his second term, is acting as an accelerant on some of those changes, these transformations are actually not new. They have been underway for the better part of two decades, and they entail a structural shift away from the unrivalled unipolarity of the United States that characterised the post-Cold War era, to something else. Now, that something else is not terribly well-defined yet. It is a new era that we are just entering into now, but there are some changes that have been afoot for a very long time that helped us to understand, long before President Trump came into office, and certainly before he returned a second time, that something fundamental about the international system was changing and that Americans in their public preferences seemed to recognise that.
Those global trends, of course, included things like China’s full and complete rise to the status of a peer competitor with the United States, shifts in power from West to East and North to South and incredibly rapid technological diffusion and innovation that changed the very nature of power and who holds it. In this world that has been emerging for many years, the United States remains incredibly mighty. In fact, our GDP has not decreased, but all of these other forces mean that Washington is operating in a world that is much more constrained than it has been in more than three decades and in a geopolitical environment that is highly contested.
Now, this transition away from the post-Cold War world would have happened regardless of who was President and could have taken place much more slowly than it’s taking place now and in a carefully managed fashion. But certain policy choices and in particular, I would note severe in this second Trump administration, from a global trade war to territorial and military threats against treaty allies, to new and highly disruptive conflicts of choice, have accelerated not only American, but global public perceptions. And the survey data shows us this, that the United States is actually abandoning the leadership of the international order that helped to sustain American power for decades, despite the fact that that order was still returning considerable benefits to Washington.
Now, international orders typically shift because of war or revolution or because the leading state collapses. But in this case, the system leader is actually contributing to the dimi – dismantling of its own power while that system is still very much in place. A term that Rebecca Lissner and applied – and I applied to it last year was “Superpower suicide,” and over the same period of time as the system was shifting, and long before the Year 2024, indeed since 2006, Americans have expressed consistent data – dissatisfaction with the country’s role in the world.
Now, that disacti – dissatisfaction is bipartisan and is most closely linked to America’s involvement in open-ended wars, in particular in the Middle East. And while there are some other facets of it, such as scepticism towards trade, I would note, as Elliott did in his very good marshalling of data, that American public preferences are not isolationist and continue to prefer a strong American leadership role in the world, including in the Democratic Party. And most closely amount to what I would call some version of a pragmatic internationalism, where the United States leads robustly, albeit in a way that recognises this new count – found constraint.
So, what do I mean by this? Americans support the country maintaining its alliances, even if that means they might have to defend a far-off ally in a conflict, and that’s true in the Democratic Party, as well as across the political spectrum. American’s support US membership in multilateral institutions so long as others also pay their way. They want the country to be a global leader, albeit one that isn’t bogged down in conflicts that don’t seem to connect to the lives of everyday Americans. And they see foreign policy as an avatar for the country’s stature in the world and care very much that others want to stand with us. Foreign policy in almost every public opinion survey comes across as essentially a litmus test of leader-level competence and how we are regarded by friends around the world.
Now, before going any further, I want to, sort of, issue an important proviso. Foreign policy experts have a long and venerable history of marshalling public opinion data to support their preferred pre-existing positions, and I’m going to do exactly that here myself. I’ll also note one other caveat, which is that much of the data that we have on American foreign policy preferences isn’t nearly as robust or fine-grained as we would like it to be to really help guide future policy. But what these contours do seem to suggest is that while we are living through a true reordering moment, both in American domestic politics and on the global stage, an interregnum of sorts, as the post-Cold War period comes to an end, before we know the shape of what is to come, Americans do not wish to withdraw from the world, as both Peter and Elliott have suggested, but rather, to lead on updated terms.
Now, when it comes to precisely what that looks like, because that’s what you asked me, Laurel, I’ll offer just one parting and very humble thought, because it’s a much bigger question than any of us can take on in just this one session. What Americans seem to have lost patience for is foreign policy that feels disconnected from them. Costly policies that seem not to deliver clear benefits when they are looking to meet their own needs and can’t do so domestically. And the mid-term elections are very unlikely to, sort of, clarify the balance of power in terms of what comes next in foreign policy. I’d also posit that even elections in 2028 are not likely to primarily, or even substantially, be about foreign policy.
But as presidential hopefuls from both political parties look to the next election, they would do very well to remember that the purpose of American foreign policy, going back to the founding, has always been to deliver security and prosperity for the country’s citizens. This was always the bargain that has been renegotiated time and again, as Peter so beautifully laid out, at each one of these historical critical junctures. And what we are living through in the United States is yet another renegotiation of that same bargain.
So, if hopeful leaders hope to return to these precepts, I think they’ll find that there is quite a lot of space for a new pragmatic approach to the world that is still very much internationalist, albeit internationalist amidst constraint. And I would surmise that, as Peter masterfully laid out, a successful answer will realign this fractious domestic moment with foreign policy in a novel way. I’ll stop there for now.
Laurel Rapp
Thanks very much, Mira, and you raised these questions about security and prosperity as drivers underwriting US foreign policy. Those are also ones that Secretary Rubio has called for, for US foreign policy, right? He’s said he’s instructed US Diplomats, as he came into Foggy Bottom, to the Sec – to the State Department, he said, “Policies must be does it make America more stable, more secure and more prosperous?” right? Which is, in some ways, a, kind of, a bipartisan call, right, I think across the spectrum. The left would also say, yes, of course, these are the goals, right, it’s a – it’s – but there are differences in how you achieve that, right? What does greater security mean? What does greater stability and what does greater prosperity mean?
Peter, I’m going to turn back to you briefly. I think one question we have here, as you’ve laid out the history really, really well, is, where – and you started to allude to this, the “Where are we headed from here?” question. And there is – I think we’ve settled this debate, and I will ask the audience, right, there’s this question of is the US going to have – is this a pendulum swing that is…
Peter Trubowitz
Hmmm.
Laurel Rapp
…coming back to settle in some new middle ground, if there’s a different President of either party after 2028, or is this a more fundamental reordering of US policy? So, who would say it’s a pendulum swing that’s coming back to the centre at some point? Let the record state there are two people in this room.
Peter Trubowitz
Three.
Laurel Rapp
Three, we have three. None of our panellists, none of our panellists. Do we? Maybe.
Peter Trubowitz
You mean a reaction to the reaction?
Laurel Rapp
Well, do you – are – what camp – with what camp do you associate yourself? And I will turn this question to you now, Peter. Where are we headed and what are these new paradigms we should be watching for as we look at this question?
Peter Trubowitz
Well, you know, I mean, just to follow up on that, with the three that put their hands up there, I…
Laurel Rapp
Brave souls.
Peter Trubowitz
Well, I – yes, I’m going to align myself with them in the following sense. I think there will be, and I think it’s manifesting now, a backlash to the backlash, and I don’t think that means that we’re going back to hyper-globalisation, support for new supernational institutions, you know, the multilateral governance. I think, you know, those pushing those – that agenda had a lot to do with the reaction that the – kind of, the Trump moment. He seized on the concerns about the cost of hyper-globalisation in terms of jobs and job security. He seized on the concerns that I think Americans have about the sovereignty cost of supernationalism.
Now, I mean, I agree and I look at the same polls and I know that with respect to alliances, this does not necessarily hold, but I think it does hold when it comes to the UN and to the IMF and the World Bank, the Bretton Woods institutions. And I’m not saying that Americans are ready to scrap it. I’m saying that there’s a concern about those costs, and so, I think in a way, what Trump did is he tapped into that anxiety. But often, when leaders try to deal with, like, one problem, they overreach. I would say, you know, maybe the most generous way to put this is he’s overcorrected and he’s overreached, and Americans are not fans of the tariff wars. This is very clear in the polling. They’re not fans of the unilateral display of military force. Yes, they favour defence spending, that’s very clear, but I don’t think the current, you know – America’s presence right now in Iran, the war in Iran, is – well, it’s obviously not very popular in the US.
So, what I would say is I think what’s happened – so, often, the way I think about what – how the, kind of, the platform, if you will, of liberal internationalism from the post-war period, down to, let’s say 2008 and, you know, maybe Biden tried to re-resurrect some of this, was a commitment to trade liberalisation, originally managed trade liberalisation. And that was lost by democratic adminis – by a democratic administration in the 1990s. And in fact, this was a problem of centre-left Politicians across the West. You could tell the same story in this country, in France, in Germany, where they moved to a, kind of, unf – you know, kind of, unfettered version of trade, of – and the same thing, I think, happened with the commitment to institutionalised co-operation and supernationalism.
The thing that concerns me, and maybe this goes to points that Elliott and Mira have both raised, I think the – if I think about one commitment that the US has held to for the last – well, up until today, let’s say, but roughly for 80 years, was a single idea. And that idea was that no country or group of countries would be allowed to gain disproportionate influence on the Eurasian land mass. Republican Presidents, Democratic Presidents, bought into that. This is a principle, it’s a British principle, it’s Sir Halford Mackinder’s principle, basically, that guided also US foreign policy. There is a – you know, the US version is somewhat different and so forth. But what I see going on right now is that it’s – and living on this side, you – of the pond, you really – you feel it and see it. And there’s a lot of anxiety about whether or not the US – even if Donald Trump disappears from the scene, if you’ve seen it once and you’ve seen it twice, why won’t you see it a third time?
And so, this, I think, is a real problem for the United States, because what matters here, in a sense, is, you know, our allies have a vote and if they’re – you know, this is why the Carney speech was so significant. If the – what I hear just over and over, and then I’ll shut up here, is the trust has been broken. That that’s where we are right now internationally, and that somehow U – the US has to have a set of policies that appeals domestically, but at the same time, reassures America’s allies and friends internationally. And I think that’s – you know, credibility is hard to earn and easy to lose, and I feel like that’s where we are.
Laurel Rapp
Thank you, Peter, and Mira, if you’ll allow, I might come to you just after Elliott on this question of trust and what that process might look like and what elements that might entail. But Elliott, so Mira mentioned thinking about “leading on with updated terms,” right, what that looks like on the left. For you on the right, and, kind of, if – once President Trump is no longer on the top of the ticket and he’s no longer setting what that foreign policy direction is, what are the remaining elements of a conservative vision for the world? And, you know, to, kind of, pull into the neocon tradition and the critiques that that has faced over the years, which you are, I’m – quite familiar with on…
Elliott Abrams
All wrong, of course, but it’s – you know.
Laurel Rapp
But just to restate, for the audience, a, sort of, you know, expansive US military overreach, the impacts not just on those around the world, but the, kind of, opportunity costs among Americans and the, kind of, incomplete projects that were launched during these periods. So, how do you, kind of, build that altogether and what would you advise the next candidate for President on where conservative policy should go?
Elliott Abrams
I would try to restore, and I think you’d have a lot of popular support for doing so, first alliances, and yes, I mean, it’s completely, totally unthinkable that the United States would – any American President would suggest using military force against a NATO ally. Well, but he did it, I mean, he said it, he thought it and so, you now cannot say it’s unthinkable. But what the next President could do, in a polite form, would be to say, “Yeah, but, you know, we’ve had 47 people, 47 presidencies, and this happened once and it’s never going to happen again. That was Donald Trump.” And I think even now, you can see that this is highly contested. So, that, for example, the President announced, “We are withdrawing 4,000 troops from Germany.” So, much was there a Republican negative reaction, that within days he announced, “Well, we’re sending 5,000 troops to Poland.” So, there was a lot of Republican support, conservative support, for what I guess I’d call old-fashioned Republican internationalism, which valued the alliances very highly.
I would argue, also, that you saw among a series of Republican Presidents until now, a high valuation placed on the ideological component, think Reagan, the ideological component of these relationships. And that – all of this, I think, will not be impossible to restore, in part because I think that there are a lot of people who will be very happy to see it, to hear it. I don’t think what – let us suppose you have a new President of either party who wants to recommit to NATO and talks about, for example, a big NATO project on AI and military weaponry. And who says, you know, “If we take troops out of Germany, it is because they need to be in the Baltic states and Poland, because that’s the countries that are a threat – that’s the neighbourhood that’s at a threat from Russia.” I don’t think what you’re going to hear from, you know, the Ukrainians, the Poles, the Balts, is, “Well, but Trump wasn’t” – no, what you’re going to hear is, “Great, great, we’re getting back to where we should’ve been and where we were 15 years ago.”
I think the same thing is true – you know, I – people often say, President Obama said it in 2009, “We need to be very careful about American intellectual and political support, moral support, for the protestors in Iran,” in 2009. And President Obama has also said, “I was wrong.” You didn’t hear the protestors saying we don’t want American support. They wanted it, and I think again, that if you have a new President who offers it, I’m talking about moral support and political support, I think it would be welcome to people who are struggling for freedom all over the world. They need all the friends they can get, and the United States is a significant friend to have.
So, I’m reasonably optimistic. I think, you know, if you look at the US Senate, there are 53 Republican Senators. Three of them, Josh Hawley, Mike Lee, Rand Paul, are what we might actually call isolationists.
Laurel Rapp
Hmmm hmm, and might call themselves, too, in some ways.
Elliott Abrams
But 50 aren’t. The other 50, you know, they’re Republicans, they’d have been happy in the Reagan administration, they’d have been happy in the Eisenhower administration, I think. So, I think there’s likely to be, and this may be the wish being father to the thought, I recognise that, but I think there’s likely to be something of a reversion to a more traditional Republican view. I do think that you’re right and Mira’s right, that there’ll never be a full reversion. For example, the idea that China – I mean, the idea that it was a great idea to bring China into the WTO and it would change China, okay, mistake. Who paid for the mistake?
I live near Washington. I am a denizen of Washington, official Washington. In those days, what people like me said to – was – about American workers, was, “You know we’ve got some retraining programmes. Congress will appropriate $400 million,” and this is what creates populism and this is what creates Donald Trump.
Laurel Rapp
And these are the lines on AI, job displacement, right now, right?
Elliott Abrams
Yes.
Laurel Rapp
Retraining…
Elliott Abrams
I mean…
Laurel Rapp
…right?
Elliott Abrams
…out in the country, we lost a gigantic amount of manufacturing capability to China, and those jobs went. And if you read Hillbilly Elegy, JD Vance’s book, these are areas, there are many areas, formally highly industrialised areas, that lost an awful lot of jobs. And people in Washington got it wrong, weren’t watching, didn’t care and – or I wouldn’t say mostly didn’t care, didn’t think it was going to happen or thought we could, you know, we could make sure the effects were not so great. Thus, the American form of populism, but – so, we’re not going back to where we were 25 years ago, or 45 years ago.
But I think the data show – I’m just going to read another number or two, ‘cause it’s – it…
Laurel Rapp
And then I will quick…
Elliott Abrams
Okay.
Laurel Rapp
…come to Mira, before we…
Elliott Abrams
Just…
Laurel Rapp
…go to the questions.
Elliott Abrams
…Americans, not just Trump voters, Americans polled by Gallup. 88% think “working with multinational organisations like NATO to protect the security of the US and its allies important or very important,” 88%, and “defending our allies’ security, our allies’ security, important or very important,” 84%. So, I think there’s a very good possibility, bo – on the right and for the country generally, to do a significant amount of reversion to the old-time religion.
Laurel Rapp
Thank you, and Mira, I’ll turn to you and I will also pose our first question from the audience as I do so, because it aligns with the prompt. And I will just take this moment to say, as you have questions and answers in the room, if you can raise your hand, the microphone will come to you. You can remain seated. Please identify yourself, your affiliation and then, ask your question, and I will be strictly enforcing a question mark at the end of that question. But online, we have a question from Rex Holman, “Can soft power alone rebuild trust in the US?” So, Mira, what is – what does the, kind of, trust – US managing a trust deficit in a next administration of either stripe?
Dr Mira Rapp-Hooper
It’s a great question, Laurel, and I think, you know, the way I would put it is that I agree with much of what both Peter and Elliott have said and nonetheless, it can still be true that there is no going back to America’s role in the world as it was. And at least for my money, all three of those things are true at the same time. I think it is very possible that we will see certain policies that feel like reversions to the mean, both within the Democratic Party and within the Republican Party, that feel texturally very familiar. I believe that all of our treaty alliances will survive this period and will be available to the United States as – not just available to, but critical to the United States as tools of geopolitics in this new era where constraint dictates that we really can’t do anything other than work with our closest treaty allies in both Europe and Asia.
But I also believe that there are likely to be changes made over the course of the next few years that will reshape the fabric of geopolitics, that we will meet in 2029 and that will prevent us from stepping back into the same river that we left in 2024. Just to give you one example, not one that we’ve touched on in any depths with this panel. and we don’t have time to cover it in detail, but the rapprochement that’s currently underway between the United States and China is quite literally a sea change.
In my mind, it probably won’t last all that long because China is China and the structural politics of international relations are what they are, but it is possible that if the United States stopped selling arms to Taiwan and takes a tack towards Xi Jinping that is dramatically more accommodationist than the bipartisan consensus has permitted for the last ten years, that the fate of Taiwan in the international community will have been radically transformed by 2028. Which will mean that we re-enter a fundamentally different world, from the perspective of what our alliance system is for, from the perspective of the global economy and from the perspective of way we approach critical and emerging technology, is, of course where Taiwan is absolutely at its core.
So, that’s just one example of how much hangs in the balance with some of the changes that are taking place at this moment. And I believe that although there remains a strong desire for American leadership that will, kind of, be welcome back in some form, it won’t be the same America shaped hole that was left four years prior, when and if the country does return. But allies will stay open to us, because frankly, they don’t have better options, because diversifying away from the United States when it comes to defence capabilities or intelligence capabilities is extremely costly. And because as Elliott alluded to, the costs of going it alone or in a multilateral coalition without the United States are so prohibitively staggering that they won’t become palatable over the course of the next three years.
But to my money, the question of winning back trust comes to something that Peter said that was absolutely fundamental, and that is what I would call forevermore the four-year problem. If you have seen the United States of America elect Donald Trump not once but twice, with the chaos that it has introduced into American…
Laurel Rapp
Three times…
Dr Mira Rapp-Hooper
…foreign policy.
Laurel Rapp
…someone said.
Dr Mira Rapp-Hooper
So, once – I would not be among them. I would not be among them. You cannot unsee that volatility and that intensity of change over an incredibly short period of time. And what that has done is not just erode trust in some, kind of, fuzzy, intangible way. It has created a fundamental problem of how you structure co-operation with an America that is that volatile. It has essentially reduced the time horizon for international agreements and other forms of co-operation to four years. And the challenge that creates for future policymakers, and I’m sorry to put it in such political sciency terms, is basically, how to make new types of agreements, new initiatives, incentive compatible, over a much shorter time horizon, even if you hope we can re-establish some of this bipartisan comity that would allow them to last much longer.
So, as I see it, one of the critical questions that ho – all of us who hope there will be a next chapter and are looking forward to what comes next, need to tackle, is the question of how you start a new era of co-operation, where open-ended global institutions will not have their same mandate and you have to be able to structure co-operation for these much shorter time horizons, even if everyone wishes that it were otherwise.
Laurel Rapp
Thank you so much, Mira. So, with that, the floor is open. Let’s go second, over here.
Dr Nick Westcott
Thank you very much. Nick Westcott at SOAS. The Trump administration, not just Trump, but the administration, seems particularly hostile to the European Union, which it sees as an economic rival and a values rival. Do you think that will last in future US policy? In which case, you know, we are looking at a much more multipolar world. Thank you.
Laurel Rapp
And just in the interests of time, I’m going to bundle three questions. So, let me see a couple more hands. Including from any women in the audience.
Peter Trubowitz
Hmmm hmm.
Laurel Rapp
No. Second in the left, here.
David Levick
[Pause] Hi, thanks for you being here. I’m David Levick from – LSE master’s student. I was wondering if you could touch a little bit thinking about policy towards Latin America. We didn’t really speak much on the capture of Nicolás Maduro and the military operation there. I’m wondering how you think that plays into all this, and, you know, we spoke a lot about trust as well, and I’m wondering – and not taking away from the, sort of, ilmegiti – illegitimacy of Nicolás Maduro’s rule, but can any, sort of, foreign Head of State act diplomatically with the US in good faith when something like that can happen?
Laurel Rapp
Okay, I’ll take two more, just here.
Jamil Gulzar
[Pause] Jamil Gulzar, a member of Chatham House. The question is straight to Trump. Is Trump, with his policies around the world and domestically, is he going to be the last Emperor of the American Empire? Would you agree with me that now is the beginning of the end of the American Empire?
Laurel Rapp
Okay, and a final question just here, please.
Kevin Liu
Yeah. Hiya, Kevin Liu from the University College London. And has the debate over Ukraine reviled the limits of contemporary American internationalism, particularly when long-term strategic commitments begin to conflict with domestic political fatigue? Thank you.
Laurel Rapp
Great. So, we have a really rich set of questions, ranging from the EU, to Maduro, to Ukraine, to US, Trump as Emperor. So, why don’t I go backwards, starting with Mira, if you – if that works for you.
Dr Mira Rapp-Hooper
Happy to. I’ll just take the final one and happy to leave the others to my colleagues. I do not believe that this is the end of the United States’ global reign, although I do believe that some form of American return, as I’ve said throughout the programme, will need to happen on different terms. Although what we are seeing transpire before us is quite shocking, geopolitically borderline cataclysmic, I might proffer, it is also the cause that the United States remains globally mighty, not just by current metrics, but by any historical metric, when it comes to a superpower. And what international relations would teach us is that one of the biggest questions about whether or not we can endure is number one, do we have friends who will still stand by our side? Which I believe that we do, and number two, how effective will our nearest peer rival be at upstaging us and in filling our vacuum during this period of chaos?
I’m someone who watches East Asia very closely and I will say that both in the first Trump administration and in this second one, I have been surprised to see that Xi Jinping and China have not been nearly as effective as filling the United States’ vacuum as I might have expected. In particular, have shown very little interest in issues like global governance, true global leadership and other forms of leadership that would demonstrate that they are really ready and prepared to take up the mantel of what it means to be a superpower in the modern area.
So, based on these basic calculations, I see the world as being one that America can very much return to, so long as it solves that domestic and foreign policy realignment puzzle once again.
Laurel Rapp
Thank you. Elliott.
Elliott Abrams
Let me take on the Latin America one.
Laurel Rapp
I thought you would pick that one.
Elliott Abrams
Yes. The – I think the answer to the question is partly a memory of what happened in Panama in 2009, when the United States seized Panama’s Noriega. Manuel Noriega was not the President of Panama. There was a President, an elected President, and he was a usurper, a dictator, and that is how we told ourselves it was, in fact, not just his brutality and corruption, but that he wasn’t the Head of State, the Head of Government, legally. And the same argument is made, I’d make it, about Nicolás Maduro, that Nicolás Maduro clearly lost that election. There is no NGO, there is no observer who said he won that election. A usurper, an illegitimate leader, a dictator, quite brutal. So, from the international law point of view, that’s the argument.
But question, you know, how can other Latin American leaders have a relationship with the United States that – well, they all do. They all do now. If there are some people like Noriega and Maduro who are worried about whether they might actually be arrested and seized, my reaction would be to say, good, good, they should be worried, because we’re talking about people who are in fact, criminals and who commit in – day in and day out, terrible abuses against the people of their countries.
Peter Trubowitz
Let me just first, say something about the Europe question and then, I’ll turn to the American Empire, or Emperor. So…
Laurel Rapp
All in one minute.
Peter Trubowitz
In one minute. So, quickly on Europe, I mean, I think the thing here is that one has to bear in mind path dependency. So, that I don’t think that it will have the, kind of, hard edges that we see with the Trump administration. But let’s say there’s a Democratic, Jon Ossoff is the next President of the United States. I’m not predicting that, I just threw it out there. LSE graduate.
Laurel Rapp
Oh.
Peter Trubowitz
But if – I think that it will be difficult to move the needle. It’s worth remembering that Trump set things on trade in his first term. Biden did not pursue a trade liberalisation package in his term. And so – you know, and I think also that we will see a move on both parties, I think Mira referred to this, to more informal, kind of, Coalitions of the Willing, informal co-o – modes of co-operation, but much depends here on China and what…
Elliott Abrams
Hmmm hmm.
Peter Trubowitz
…China does, and whether it pulls the United States in that direction.
On the US Empire and is it declining and so forth? So, I’m going to end on an optimistic note here, ‘cause I know we’re running out of time. The US has a remarkable capacity, and this was part of the study at the very beginning, that I was unpacking, to reinvent itself. It has done it many times. So, it would be always a mistake to count the United States out. You know, I always – I – at moments like this, I’m always reminded of a quote from Bismarck. You know, in moments when the US seems too chaotic and it just can’t get its act together, he said, “God has a special place in providence for fools, drunks and the United States of America.”
Laurel Rapp
So, on that, what I believe is an optimistic note, I’m very grateful to all three of you for joining us this evening and to each of you in the audience, here in person and around the world online, for this inaugural conversation. Please join us for the next in our series. It will be July 15th on “Free trade versus protectionism.” I’m threatening to make tote bags for this series on the enduring features. So, if that is not an inducement, I don’t know what is. But in all seriousness, what we’re hoping to do is look at some of these longer arcs in history, not just of this current moment, because history often tells us not just where we’ve been, but where we’re headed. So, thank you all so much. Reception just upstairs. Excited to see you all there. Thank you, all [applause].
