President Trump's first overseas visit was filled at every stop with foreign policy symbolism as well as substance. But in terms of pivots from campaign rhetoric, no stop reflected a greater departure from Trump's emotion-laden, Islam-focused speeches from last fall than the president's visit last week with Saudi King Salman.
- Mr. Trump's rhetorical flourishes through his party's convention, coupled with his early-on executive orders sharply restricting immigration and refugee flows from selected Muslim-majority Middle East and African countries, painted a dark, dystopian picture of Islam and its relationship with the U.S..
- Yet the president's speech in Riyadh (except for warnings on Iran) mirrored many of the themes of President Obama in highlighting the contributions of Islam to global history, science, and culture.
Why the pivot? For over a century, American presidents have attempted to strike an always difficult balance in formulating a foreign policy doctrine; the balance has traditionally been between pursuing unvarnished U.S. interests on the one hand, and advocating universal principles ("values," in other words, like human rights, rule of law, and democracy promotion) on the other.
- The most famous advocate of a pure interest-driven foreign policy was a 19th Century British Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, who said, "We have no eternal allies and no perpetual enemies; our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow." Richard Nixon perhaps best exemplified in more contemporaneous times this interest-focused Palmerston view.
- On the other end of this "interest-values" continuum are U.S. presidents like Wilson, Carter, and Obama; they stressed a values-laden foreign policy that, in their defense, reflected American ideals, but which at the same time often complicated relationships with traditional friends.
President Trump, closely counseled by his team of Tillerson, Mattis, and McMaster on the strategic significance of regions like the Middle East, is clearly operating at the "interest" end of this continuum. Further, Trump's statement in his Riyadh speech that he "was not here to lecture, not here to tell other people how to live" was the strongest rejection of a "values" component in US foreign policy by any President since WWII.
- This statement was also a rebuff to President Obama, who made no secret of his disgust with Saudi policy on religious tolerance and women's rights. Obama famously was quoted in his interview a year ago in The Atlantic magazine that the Saudis practiced "state-sponsored misogyny." In this light, is it any wonder that Trump was feted with a traditional Arab sword dance and verbally hugged by the Saudi leadership? Or that he made the first overseas stop of his Presidency in a country at the heart of a religion he once pilloried?
Looking ahead, the interest-focused Trump foreign policy doctrine both predicts and explains U.S. behavior toward nations headed by authoritarian leaders but where U.S. security interests are closely intertwined. Duterte in The Philippines, Sisi in Egypt, Erdogan in Turkey, and all the monarchs of the Persian Gulf are hardly model leaders of liberal, pluralistic democracies; but they've all been fondly toasted or tweeted.
- As Henry Kissinger related in his book Diplomacy in 1994, "Nations have pursued interests more frequently than high-minded principle." Expect this reality to hold true for the duration of the Trump Presidency.
