The roots of Trump’s realpolitik Uncle Sam always drives a hard bargain

President Trump’s attempt to end the war in Ukraine has enraged liberal internationalists on both sides of the Atlantic. Dealing directly with the Kremlin and going over the heads of America’s European allies, publicly belittling Ukraine and its leader, and attempting to clinch a minerals deal as the price of further US support for Kyiv — all this counts as heresy among foreign-policy elites committed to “rule-based liberal international order”.

As often happens, Trump breaks with American presidential traditions more in style than in substance. In reality, the 45th and 47th president is in a tradition of realist presidents, going back to Theodore Roosevelt more than a century ago, who have viewed world politics as a great-power club, rather than an arena for idealism.

In brokering the Treaty of Portsmouth that ended the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-1905, for example, Theodore Roosevelt accepted a Japanese sphere of influence in Korea, South Manchuria, and Sakhalin Island as the price of maintaining a balance of power in East Asia between Russia and Japan. In his 1906 Nobel Peace Prize lecture, TR said that “it would be a masterstroke if those great powers honestly bent on peace would form a League of Peace not only to keep the peace among themselves, but to prevent, by force if necessary, its being broken by others”.

This realist tradition endured the reign of the arch-idealist Woodrow Wilson. Following the entry of the United States into World War I, Wilson asked his adviser Col. Edward M. House to draw up plans for a postwar League of Nations. House suggested to Wilson that such a body “might be confined to the great powers”. In a diary entry at the time, House wrote: “Why permit [smaller powers] to exercise a directing hand upon nations having to furnish not only the financial but the physical force necessary to maintain order and peace?  I am sorry to come to this conclusion, because it does not seem toward the trend of liberalism. However, the idealist who is not practical oftentimes does a cause more harm than those frankly reactionary.”

Wilson’s eventual plan for the League of Nations failed to win ratification in the US Senate, thanks precisely to the realists. Some of these, like Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, favoured a US-British treaty with France to deter future German aggression but thought that the League of Nations was a utopian experiment doomed to failure.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, often held up as an avatar by the internationalists, was much more in the realist grain than they would like to admit. FDR, who had served as assistant secretary of the Navy in the Wilson administration, sought to avoid his ex-boss’s mistakes in his own thinking about world order after the defeat of the Axis powers.  Roosevelt put his hopes for the postwar world in “the Big Four” or “the Four Policemen”: the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, and Nationalist China, which would dominate their respective regions, while smaller countries might have “ostensible” participation.

The only “policeman” with a democratic form of government was the United States: Winston Churchill’s Britain ruled its empire outside of the British Isles undemocratically, Stalin’s Soviet Russia was a communist dictatorship, and Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist China was an anticommunist dictatorship. When the Declaration of the United Nations (the term for the anti-Axis alliance coined by FDR) was signed on Jan. 1, 1941, the the Big Four signed it first; the other 12 members of the alliance had to wait until the following day.

In wartime Britain, too, realism dominated thinking about the postwar world to come. Like FDR, Churchill was skeptical about global institutions in which each state, no matter how small and weak, had equal authority. In 1943, Churchill proposed that a “Supreme World Council” run by the great powers that would oversee regional councils for Europe, the Pacific, and the Western hemisphere. In a visit with Stalin in Moscow in October 1944, Churchill came up with what he referred to as his “naughty document” — a secret agreement that assigned shares of influence in Central Europe and the Balkans to Britain and the Soviet Union. Greece was to be 90% under British influence and 10% under Soviet influence, Yugoslavia and Hungary were to be 50% British and 50%, and so on.

Focused on winning the war, FDR delegated postwar planning for the permanent United Nations organisation to his secretary of state, Cordell Hull, an ardent Wilsonian who recreated the flawed design of the League of Nations under a new name. Cold War rivalries immediately paralysed the great-power-dominated UN Security Council, because each member had a veto.

The Soviet-backed takeover of China by Mao’s Communists turned the Middle Kingdom from a US ally into an enemy, while Britain’s postwar economic weakness left Washington and Moscow as the only two global military powers in a bipolar world. However, the postwar recovery of Western Europe and Japan and the Sino-Soviet split led President Richard Nixon to conclude in July 1971 that there were now five centers of economic power, if only two of military power — the United States, the Soviet Union, Western Europe, Japan, and China.

According to Nixon, “these are the five that will determine the economic future and, because economic power will be the key to other kinds of power, the future of the world in other ways in the last third of this century”. Determined to extricate America from the war in Vietnam and to avoid similar entanglements, Nixon in 1969 had already espoused “the Nixon Doctrine”, declaring that “we shall look to the nation directly threatened to assume the primary responsibility of providing the manpower necessary for its defense”.

Following Nixon’s opening to the People’s Republic of China, the Shanghai Communique in 1972 acknowledged China’s interest in Taiwan: “The United States acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China. The United States government does not challenge that position.”

Following each of the three global conflicts of the 20th century — the two world wars and the Cold War — idealist hopes for a “new world order” free of great power conflicts excited many Americans. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union into independent republics in 1991 led liberal internationalists to call for “a league of democracies” to police a globalised world society, while neoconservatives dreamed of a single global market and “rules-based order” policed by the Washington alone as the “world’s only superpower”.

But China under Xi Jinping and Russia under Boris Yeltsin and his successors rejected American hegemony and called for a multipolar world in which they would be the hegemonic powers in their own regions. It is not “blaming the victim” to point out that invitations to join the US-led NATO alliance were followed by the Russian invasions of Georgia in 2008 and of Ukraine in 2014 (and, on a larger scale, in 2022).

The realists saw this coming. On Aug. 1, 1991, three weeks before Ukraine’s declaration of independence from the USSR, President George H. W. Bush, a consummate realist, told the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic that it would be better for Ukraine and the other Soviet republics to remain together in a loose union, rather than make a hard break with Moscow. In the speech, derided as “Chicken Kiev” by the neoconservative New York Times columnist William Safire, the elder Bush warned: “Americans will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred.”

For its part, the United States has continued to observe the Monroe Doctrine by treating the North American quartersphere as its own exclusive domain, toppling regimes it does not like and installing clients. Reagan invaded Grenada in 1983, Bush I invaded Panama in 1989, and Clinton invaded Haiti in 1994 in “Operation Uphold Democracy”. By abandoning Afghanistan to the Taliban after 20 years of warfare, Joe Biden tacitly acknowledged that Central Asia is less important to Washington than North America. Similarly, by moving quickly to end the costly proxy war in Ukraine and opposing Ukrainian membership in NATO, Trump is signaling that Eastern Europe is not a core American interest, either.

Nor is enmity against Russia baked into the American tradition. For most of the time since the United States achieved independence, Americans have been morally repelled by successive forms of Russian autocracy — even as US diplomats have viewed Russia as a counterweight to powers that pose greater potential threats. During the Civil War, to deter Britain from intervening on the side of the Confederacy, the Lincoln administration welcomed the Russian fleet to American ports, including New York, where Russian naval officers paraded down Broadway past cheering crowds. Harper’s opined that it would “be wise to meet the hostile alliance of the Western Powers of Europe by an alliance with Russia”.

Under Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, an American naval squadron arrived at the Russian Baltic port of Kronstadt to a 21-gun salute and a display of American flags. To thwart British influence in North America, Johnson’s secretary of state, William Seward, bought Alaska from the Tsar and tried but fail to obtain Greenland for the United States. In 1946, the Truman administration offered to buy Greenland from Denmark; in 1955, the Joint Chiefs of Staff urged President Eisenhower to try to buy Greenland; and Trump has revived the idea at a time of increased tensions with Russia and China.

Tsarist Russia was America’s ally against Imperial Germany in World War I, and the Soviet Union was America’s ally against Nazi Germany and Japan in World War II. Only the elimination of other great-power threats led to rivalry between Washington and Moscow. Now that China is viewed as America’s greatest strategic rival, an American strategy of seeking to pry Beijing and Moscow apart, if possible, is only to be expected.

There may be sound arguments based on realpolitik to oppose Trump’s strategy toward Ukraine. But to be consistent, moralists who invoke American ideals ought to condemn FDR and Churchill for agreeing to a Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe that lasted half a century after 1945. And they must condemn Eisenhower and Johnson for failing to take significant action to punish the Soviet Union from crushing democratic rebellions in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, and Czechoslovakia in 1968.

The ephemeral spasms of Wilsonian utopianism form the exception to the rule that American statesmen in every generation usually are guided by considerations of the national interest in their dealings with other major powers, including those whose internal regimes are repugnant to American principles. Uncle Sam may engage in flowery talk — but allies and enemies alike know that he drives a hard bargain.