Trump's Team of Realists

President Donald Trump’s “America First” foreign policy is taking shape. Its essence is geographical, and the tools to facilitate it are economic, diplomatic, and military power. It eschews abstractions and sentiment in favor of Bismarckian realism. If Abraham Lincoln led a “team of rivals,” Trump leads a team of realists whose members understand that global stability and peace don’t emerge magically from idealism and crusades, but instead result from spheres of influence and the balance of power.

Trump’s team of realists include Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, National Security Adviser Michal Waltz, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard—combat veterans all. It includes Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who previously flirted with neoconservatism but now pursues realism with the zealousness of a convert. And, thankfully, it will include Elbridge Colby as Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, who was recently confirmed by the Senate. Colby, who was the principal author of the 2018 National Defense Strategy in Trump’s first term, is a consummate realist in the mold of Henry Kissinger and George Kennan.

Geoeconomically, the realists include senior counselor for trade and manufacturing Peter Navarro and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who are the key strategists behind the recently announced reciprocal tariffs that have unsettled stock markets and stunned our trading partners whose tariffs on American goods helped produce the massive U.S. trade deficits, and DOGE’s Elon Musk who is leading the charge to reduce U.S. government spending by eliminating waste, fraud and abuse and by consolidating and streamlining government operations.

The most important foreign policy realist in the Trump administration, however, is President Trump. Trump’s realism likely stems from his decades-long business dealings and was further shaped and refined by his experiences during his first term as president. Trump is more of a doer than a thinker, but his foreign policy instincts are manifestly realist. He may not have read Machiavelli’s The Prince or Hans Morgenthau’s Politics Among Nations, but he acts as if he had. His realism is reminiscent of Richard Nixon’s approach to the world—an approach that may have involved the most sophisticated diplomacy in our nation’s history. Time magazine’s legendary president watcher Hugh Sidey once described Nixon as “a man who understood the men, the ingredients, the glory, the brutality, the action and reaction of power as well as anyone else of our time.”

Nixon’s overriding foreign policy goal was to maintain the geopolitical pluralism of Eurasia. His “triangular diplomacy” with China and the Soviet Union, his Middle East policies, and his withdrawal from Vietnam all contributed to that end. Nixon’s pursuit of America’s interests sometimes meant dealing with unsavory regimes, conducting secret diplomacy, and opposing and sometimes abandoning allies. Ruthlessness in the pursuit of American interests was the sine qua non of Nixon’s approach to the world.

Trump may prove to be Nixon’s equal in this respect. Like Nixon, Trump understands that in a dangerous world you need to deal with foreign leaders as they are, not as how you wish them to be. Just as Nixon refrained from insulting Mao Zedong, Leonid Brezhnev, Josip Broz Tito, and Nicolae Ceausecu, despite the brutality with which they treated their citizens, because there were larger geopolitical issues at stake in U.S. relations with those countries, Trump knows that there is nothing to be gained by hurling insults at Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping or even Kim Jong Un because Trump’s goal is to ease tensions with Russia and deter China and North Korea without having to fight a kinetic war.

Similarly, just as Nixon was willing to settle for an imperfect settlement in Vietnam in order to achieve America’s larger geopolitical goals, Trump knows that Ukraine’s goals of victory over Russia and the reclaiming of all of its pre-2014 territory are not as important as improving U.S.-Russia relations to drive a wedge between Russia and China. America’s national security still depends on the geopolitical pluralism of Eurasia.

One of President Trump’s most important geopolitical gambits is the reinvigoration of the Monroe Doctrine. Trump has announced that he wants the U.S. to take back control of the Panama Canal due to growing Chinese influence there. He also seeks to acquire Greenland as American territory, and has publicly called for Canada to become the 51st state. Trump is effectively proclaiming what President James Monroe and Secretary of State John Quincy Adams announced in 1823—that the Western Hemisphere is the United States’ sphere of influence. This, too, is reminiscent of Nixon’s successful enforcement of the Monroe Doctrine when the Soviet Union attempted to construct a submarine base at Cienfuegos Bay in Cuba in 1970, and when Chile’s Salvadore Allende allowed Cuban intelligence agents to use Chile as a base to export communist revolution to four other Latin American countries. The Soviets abandoned Cienfuegos and Allende was overthrown with covert U.S. assistance. Trump’s goal is to lessen and ultimately remove China’s influence in the Western Hemisphere.

Trump’s approach to the Middle East is to work with our most important allies there (Israel, Saudi Arabia and other moderate Arab states) to lessen Iran’s influence and to disrupt China’s designs in the region. Trump understands, perhaps even more than Nixon did, that the Palestinian issue is nothing more than a weapon used by Israel’s enemies, and that it is more important to focus on diplomatic efforts with existing states instead of promoting a chimerical two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In 1973, during the Yom Kippur War, Nixon’s airlift helped turn the tide of the war in Israel’s favor and his nuclear alert deterred the Soviets from intervening in the war. The so-called Nixon Doctrine relied on Israel and Arab proxies (the Shah’s Iran, Egypt, and the Saudis) to provide stability in the region and to lessen Soviet influence there.

Trump’s sphere of influence approach also applies to Europe, where he has continued to urge and pressure our NATO allies to provide more for their common defense. In this, he has followed the lead of almost every post-World War II president since Eisenhower, including Nixon, though Trump has been much more outspoken about it. Trump’s approach is consistent with his geographical, sphere of influence worldview. Ukraine is far more important to Russia and the other European nations than it is to the United States, as even President Barack Obama recognized when refusing requests to back Ukraine when Russia seized Crimea in 2014. Ukraine, to put it bluntly, is in Russia’s sphere of influence. John Kerry and others might argue that spheres of influence is a 19th century concept, but realists would respond that it is alive and well in the 21st century. It never really went away, except in the minds of neo-Wilsonian idealists.

Trump’s geoeconomic strategy combines domestic government efficiency with a semi-mercantilist approach that seeks to make the United States a manufacturing and industrial powerhouse again, increasing American jobs, rebalancing our trade relationships with both allies and adversaries, improving our domestic defense-industrial plant, lessening our dependence on supply chains controlled by China, and making the United States a more attractive investment than China. This is where geoeconomics complements geopolitics.

Order, stability, a geoeconomic offensive, and the balance of power don’t appeal to sentiment and naïve visions of a democratic world trading freely in goods and services. But they are the best that a flawed humanity can achieve and the most that Americans should want their leaders to accomplish. For it is not the realists but the crusaders and the dreamers that have so often paved the road to Hell with their good intentions. President Trump and his team of realists want to keep America safe and prosperous, protected by our unmatched power in the Western Hemisphere and the balance of power on the Euraisan landmass. The Trump Doctrine is all about geography, spheres of influence, and geoeconomic strength.