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President Donald Trump gave an important speech in Riyadh that may come as close to outlining a “Trump doctrine” for his second term as we’ll probably see.
It was a direct counterpoint to George W. Bush’s second inaugural address.
The simplistic way to put it is that what liberty was for Bush, money is to Donald Trump.
That’s not quite right, though. The speech had values, they just weren’t typical values — accountable government, human dignity — but rather prosperity and peace. These are universally regarded as goods, but Trump is elevating them over other goods — especially democracy — and putting his own distinctive gloss on them.
If Bush wanted to spread freedom, Trump wants to spread gleaming high-rise buildings.
He spoke glowingly of the new towers in Saudi Arabia and hailed Riyadh as “becoming not just a seat of government, but a major business, cultural and high-tech capital of the entire world.”
He continued, “Before our eyes a new generation of leaders is transcending the ancient conflicts of tired divisions of the past and forging a future where the Middle East is defined by commerce not chaos, where it exports technology not terrorism, and where people of different nations, religions and creeds are building cities together not bombing each other out of existence.”
Notably, there is no liberty in this affirming sentence — it’s all economic activity. Likewise, near the end of the speech, when he sketched out his vision of where the region could be headed: “It is within our grasp to reach the future that generations before us could only dream about, a land of peace, safety, harmony, opportunity, innovation and achievement right here in the Middle East.”
The speech was very critical of Iran.
His critique wasn’t that it’s a theocracy but that it isn’t constructing anything.
Its landmarks “are collapsing into rubble and dust,” and its buildings put up long ago “are largely falling apart, falling down while you’re building some of the world’s biggest and most incredible infrastructure projects.”
Trump’s speech wasn’t isolationist, or alien to American traditions.
The address ran in the slipstream of the Hamiltonian tradition as famously outlined by Walter Russell Mead, with its emphasis on the role of commerce in foreign affairs.
And there was, as always, a Jacksonian element, as Trump spoke of smashing ISIS, repeatedly bragged about the strength of the US military, and talked of smacking the Houthis.
There was, however, no Wilsonianism in the speech.
In the passage that got the most attention, Trump rapped neocons and liberal nonprofits for trying but failing to develop the Middle East because they didn’t know or respect the culture of the region.
There is merit in this charge.
We had no idea what we were getting into in Iraq and Afghanistan and only began to learn in depth about those countries when the wars were far along.
George W. Bush’s vision for the spread of democracy systematically failed to account for the influence of culture and for the centrality of order to liberty and almost any other social good.
That said, both Afghanistan and Iraq were originally conceived as wars of self-defense in the wake of a spectacular terror attack that shook America to its core.
Both conflicts initially also had wide support, including on Jacksonian grounds — we’d been hit hard and were going to eliminate any further threats.
It’s also unpersuasive to hold up the Gulf states as a counterexample of development.
Anyone can run an emirate sitting atop gobs of oil that is living under the security umbrella of the United States; if these countries had to make their own way, they would long ago have been gobbled by some neighboring wolf — say, Saddam Hussein — and wouldn’t look so alluring now.
For all that Trump emphasized the importance of the different cultures of different places, his vision is as universalist as Bush’s; Bush believed everyone could become a democracy, and Trump believes that everyone can prosper.
He wants Iran “to be a successful country.”
They can be “a wonderful, safe, great country, but they cannot have a nuclear weapon.”
Lebanon, too, long victimized by Iran-sponsored Hezbollah, can embrace “a future of economic development and peace with its neighbors.”
In Trump’s telling, the yearning of every human heart isn’t necessarily liberty but wealth and security.
He claimed that in brokering a cease-fire between India and Pakistan, “I used trade to a large extent to do it. I said, fellas, ‘Come on. Let’s make a deal. Let’s do some trading. Let’s not trade nuclear missiles. Let’s trade the things that you make so beautifully.’”
He’ll reach out to anyone and bring them into this charmed circle of commerce and comity.
“As I’ve shown repeatedly,” he said, “I am willing to end past conflicts and forge new partnerships for a better and more stable world, even of our differences may be very profound.”
He added, “I have never believed in having permanent enemies.”
In this, there was an echo of Palmerston (“We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies”), but it’s the British statesman as real-estate developer.
For Trump, it’s the results that matter — the prosperity and peace — not how a given government achieves them. That’s none of our business.
“I believe it is God’s job to sit in judgment,” he pronounced.
“My job [is] to defend America and to promote the fundamental interest of stability, prosperity and peace.”
In sum, the speech was a dealmaker’s realpolitik, or a doctrine that we won’t really have a doctrine except for trying to get everyone rich and to get along with as many people as possible, a few fundamental interests aside.
The address might have put more of an emphasis on all this given the venue and the audience in Saudi Arabia, but it was a notable contrast with Trump’s signature foreign-policy speech from his first term, in Poland.
That speech was all about our civilization — faith, freedom and culture — whereas the Saudi speech was more purely transactional.
The address was certainly bracing, and there is no doubt that Bush’s second inaugural never could be a practical guide to US foreign policy.
But values do matter.
Liberal societies are, as a general matter, more reliably our friends and more reliably achieve prosperity because it is less likely that they will be interrupted by civil war or revolution.
If Bush’s vision advanced an unrealistic view of what motivates mankind — all yearning for liberty, no yearning for power, revenge or honor — Trump also drastically simplifies human motivation.
As history has shown again and again, people will fight and die for faiths and ideologies when these have nothing to do with prosperity or actively run counter to achieving it.
Also, it should be said that standing for democratic ideals is an enormous part of America’s appeal around the world, and if we get into a competition with China purely over who is richer and can cut more deals, we are kicking away one of our major advantages.
That’s likely an insight for another president, though. Trump has his doctrine.