Trump’s critics may not see in the MAGA Doctrine principles that span beyond Trump’s own lifetime and beyond our own shores—but some people overseas do. Just as the United States was an inspiration to people resisting monarchies around the world at the time of the American Revolution and an inspiration to people resisting communist tyranny during the Cold War, the distinctive red Make America Great Again hats of Trump supporters have found their way to Hong Kong, during the 2019 protests there against some of the ways Beijing, back on the Chinese mainland, rules its less-communist “special administrative region.”
Brave protestors wear Make Hong Kong Great Again hats—and borrow other American symbols, including the American flag. Confused, the American press unhelpfully worries that bad elements, perhaps even white supremacists, may be infiltrating and exploiting the Hong Kong protestors, though an East Asian protest movement is an odd place to look for white supremacists.
The simplest explanation is that the protestors, like Soviet teens listening to rock and roll on the sly decades earlier, recognize symbols of Western-style freedom when they see them. And they should: Hong Kong was by some measures freer than the West when it was populated by refugees from the mainland’s communist rule for decades but not yet governed by the mainland (the United Kingdom handed it over to Beijing in 1997 after a century and a half of colonial rule). Let’s hope its freedom and love of the free market endure any crackdowns from Beijing.
Trump isn’t up against domestic foes as totalitarian as the Communists in Beijing, a few extremists notwithstanding, but, like the Hong Kong protestors, he faces the daunting task of transforming a stubborn, inflexible, corrupt, big-government system.
One irony of our situation is that the American government got this bloated in part by fighting actual Communism during the Cold War but hasn’t seen much of a “peace dividend” since then, despite the immense opportunity afforded by the collapse of European Communism to reduce military spending. Ryan McMaken, senior editor at the think tank the Mises Institute, notes that there has in fact been an increase in defense spending of about 44% (adjusted for inflation) since 1990, when the Cold War ended. In fact, combined spending on the departments of Defense, Veterans Affairs, and Homeland Security will reach nearly $1 trillion in 2020, about a quarter of the entire federal budget.
How can peace be almost half again as expensive as decades of war? The truth is, peace is not expensive. Peace allows people to engage in commerce, to work and to build businesses without fear of violent disruptions. What we have now is a combination of relatively small-scale regional wars as in Afghanistan with low-level police actions—and the maintenance of expensive bases—all over the world.
When Trump resists constant calls for more military intervention around the world—when he says no to putting more troops in Syria and publicly contemplates pulling troops out of Afghanistan—he is not only pointing the way to peace but implicitly taking on a system of defense contractors and sometimes-opportunistic allies that has reshaped American thinking in a profoundly unhealthy way.
Republican senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa put it well in the New York Times when he wrote, “Over the past few months alone, the Defense Department has had to explain why it’s been paying $14,000 for individual 3-D-printed toilet seat lids and purchasing cups for $1,280 each. These are just the latest examples on a long list of unacceptable purchases made by the department, including $436 for hammers in the 1980s, and $117 soap dish covers and $999 pliers in the 1990s.”
Whereas once we thought of wars as things that begin and end, we have been lulled, for reasons of both profit and ideology, into assuming that war, like domestic policing, is effectively permanent. There will always be a terrorist somewhere, a “peacekeeping” mission, an authoritarian regime that might be better kept in check if we engaged in a big enough show of strength (formerly called saber-rattling, a quite honest metaphor).
The rationales for more military spending are always close at hand, often eagerly provided by the defense contractors who stand to get subsidies from increased military activity (and by the various think tanks and pundits closely allied with those defense interests). It has been a standard conservative talking point at least since the Vietnam War that American defense spending has been cut to the bone by the left—and the left has sometimes made reckless cuts. Yet the United States still spends about three times as much on defense as China, ten times as much on defense as Russia, and vastly more than any of its other rivals—or its allies, who end up depending on us. We spend about as much as the next seven nations combined, and instead of gaining peace we gain the vexing sense that we “ought” to be intervening in every conflict that we might in theory be able to nudge to a better conclusion, every regime we might in theory be able to topple in favor of a slightly better one—even if our track record suggests this is only occasionally so.
It’s not that everything America does in the name of defense is evil or imperialist, but this is a system that has taken on a life of its own. If Making America Great Again means asking whether government spending is benefiting our nation, even the military defense of that nation must be open to critical scrutiny. At some point, waste becomes as toxic as hostile outside forces, and potentially provocative in itself. Military excursions that ought to make us think twice seem deceptively simple if the war planners have a trillion dollars to blow and the lives ended are not their own.
Recall that our 2003 entry into Iraq was caused in part by our conviction that any conflict with Saddam Hussein would be as easily won and as quickly resolved as the repulsion of his army from Kuwait in 1991. Sixteen years after the second Iraq War began, we’re still picking up the pieces from that error in judgment. At some point the public has learned, but those in power haven’t. When we try to impose our way of life on others it has seldom worked. In the Middle East, it has yielded few benefits for the United States. Can anyone argue that the Middle East is better off today than it was prior to 2003?
The MAGA Doctrine is not a threat to other nations but an invitation to deal with each other out of practical self-interest instead of ultimatums, displays of might, reckless adventures, and big crusades against small-bore enemies such as Afghan villagers or Latin American coca farmers.
However, that transition from a world of constant war—and constant big spending on domestic projects at home—will not happen overnight. There will be many small steps forward and occasional big lurches backward. I think President Trump is hinting at an end to the Afghan war, though some neoconservatives might not be happy about it.
America should not be sacrificed for a mission of global transformation that may or may not improve a few foreign regimes but will not easily redound to our benefit at home, and may in the long run create more conflict abroad by fueling resentment of our efforts.
After nineteen years of the war in Afghanistan, nearly 2,400 American soldiers are dead, and virtually no US citizen could say exactly what our goal in that country is now. The immediate goal in 2001 was to strike back against al-Qaeda camps in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but that mission soon expanded to dislodging the Taliban government of Afghanistan that had sheltered al-Qaeda, then to eradicating Taliban influence throughout that rural, rocky, and divided country even after we’d dislodged the government from the capital and gone to great lengths to create and stabilize a new government.
Even with that goal largely achieved, we keep some fourteen thousand troops in that country, risk further accusations of being erratic as we call and then cancel peace summits (as the president did in the fall of 2019), and delay the day when the Afghans must, inevitably, take full responsibility for their own peacekeeping. I would not blame President Trump for pulling all US troops out of Afghanistan even without another peace conference with the Taliban (which beats adding to the $3.6 trillion we’ve spent throughout the Middle East since the war there began). He is admirably fond of making good deals, but the best deal for Americans may be to get out of there. Most Americans know that.
The days when fragile American pride required that we fight every imaginable enemy to the end of days are, I think, fading into history along with duels and empires.
One reason the post–Cold War foreign policy consensus, shaped by a mixture of neoconservatives and “Scoop Jackson” (that is, hawkish) Democrats, had such staying power was the relative stability of the Cold War standoff itself. So long as the United States and USSR (or later even just the United States and the remnants of the USSR) appeared likely to stay in place for decades, the same or very similar experts could make the same foreign policy pronouncements year after year and sound as if their words were not only wise but timeless. The Cold War seemed as if it might last forever.
But just a few years before I was born, all that was over, and though no one was quite sure what would come next, the old policy experts were still in place. They still had their right-vs.-left panel discussion shows. They still had their think tanks. They still had their cozy relationships with politicians old enough to head prominent congressional committees. No one was going to budge in their thinking if they could help it. Strategic ideas about confronting rival superpowers such as China would just be mapped sloppily onto new threats such as al-Qaeda, and if anyone questioned the wisdom of confronting such a stealthy movement with old-fashioned, massive displays of military resources, their patriotism could always be questioned to shut them up.
North Korea is a perfect example of how hollow the old ways look when applied to new circumstances. The large, relatively stable Russian and American superpowers engaged, albeit in radically different ways, with a much broader world and had their respective reasons to take treaties seriously, at least much of the time. North Korea was a one-man dictatorship, nicknamed “the hermit kingdom,” primarily interested in preventing almost any contact between its people and the outside world. Even limited trade with Japan might stir up curiosity in the North Korean people about an outside world they are forbidden to visit or exchange ideas with. North Korea would do or say anything to keep other nations off its back in the second half of the twentieth century until it could get back to doing the one thing that earns a nation truly hands-off treatment from the superpowers: building nuclear weapons.
This did not stop Bill Clinton from proudly proclaiming that an antinuclear accord with North Korea had been reached in the early 1990s, nor his secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, singing a jocular burlesque song at one international diplomatic conference about how North Korea used to be considered “rogue” (that is, it was on the official list of Rogue Nations) but now, having signed some papers with Bill Clinton, was “so vogue.” Cause for laughter, no doubt—and North Korea was the one laughing, since it had no intention of honoring any meaningless paper antinuclear agreements.
If the average American had opined in the late ’90s or the ’00s that diplomacy with North Korea is pointless because they don’t respect us and can’t be trusted to tell us the truth, that American would have been declared an obstinate know-nothing. Maybe the experts, in this as in so many other areas, need to be taken down a notch, and someone like Trump who’s willing to make a fresh start—and offer a dazzling vision of trade, hotels, movie-making, and new wealth to a newer, younger North Korean leader—is just what is needed.
Or as Don Jr. once put it, despite decades of experts and diplomats such as Albright calling the shots on North Korea, his four-year-old seemed to know about as much about how to deal with that nation as the purported experts. His four-year-old daughter had accomplished just as much as those career officials who had dedicated their entire life to engaging North Korea, and the result was zilch. Maybe someone willing to shove the piles of meaningless paper agreements aside and form a new, more personal bond with a rival leader is just the change in strategy that region needed.
Similarly, the USMCA, the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement, hammered out by the Trump administration during his first few months in office, was initially described by the longtime supposed trade experts as if it would devastate North American trade and ruin decades of delicate work done by lawyers and politicians throughout the region who had crafted NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, in the 1990s and managed its implementation since. Trump’s globalist critics were sure that he would smash the delicate web of commerce in his protectionist mania and, like a political neophyte, leave nothing in its place.
But USMCA, if ratified, will not just smash NAFTA. It refines it, making it easier for companies to share information across borders—and to seek redress for cross-border copyright violations—without some of NAFTA’s burdensome reporting requirements that made governments privy to all the data used by international corporations. Instead of creating insurmountable trade barriers between nations, which was the greatest fear of free-market conservatives of the pre-Trump variety, USMCA would lower most tariffs and simplify trade quotas.
At the same time, it gently increases the pressure on any new south-of-the-border signatories to recognize the right to collective bargaining. Unions may not deserve special subsidies or regulatory privileges from government, but the days of them being stamped out by government, as was routinely the case in the United States a century ago and is sometimes still the case today in Latin America, should end. One result of the MAGA Doctrine has been to expose the left’s incoherent policies, a product of hypocrisy at the highest levels of Democrat leadership. Think about it. For decades, Democrats complained about NAFTA, but it’s President Trump who gets a deal that unions should applaud. You would think Democrats would be jumping up and down to pass legislation benefiting everyday Americans, but instead they have stalled the process, and as of this writing the treaty has not been ratified. Nancy Pelosi continually moves the goal posts, always declaring Trump’s efforts insufficient.
The MAGA Doctrine aims for fairness and the rule of law, not just the pitting of one social stratum against another. It’s no surprise, then, that President Trump has stalwart supporters in the upper echelons of business and among blue-collar workers. If ratified, USMCA will be win-win for all the trading partners involved. And in the end, it’s all the individuals and companies engaged in trade, not the politicians who referee those trades, who matter.
The president must of course work in concert, and sometimes in conflict, with the two other branches of government, the judiciary and the legislature. But a president has a unique power to set the tone for future policy discussions, and I thus find it inspiring that President Trump has even dared to talk about restoring the gold standard.
We should not find that idea as shocking as we do these days. After all, the gold standard was the basis of the US dollar for over a century before Nixon abolished the last vestiges of that monetary order in the early 1970s. Gold is not some strange, alien substance. It’s just a reliable store of value to which the value of a unit of paper currency can be pegged. By contrast, when those units of paper currency are not explicitly pegged to some such physical standard, they tend to end up being inflated willy-nilly—that is, more dollars are printed, making each less valuable (and prices likely to rise accordingly) without you even feeling the siphoning going on in your wallet. With good reason, a currency that gains and loses value at the whim of governments’ central banks (with their printing presses) is called a “fiat currency.”
Like most presidents, Trump has shown a reluctance to have the Fed tighten the money supply suddenly and risk cutting off a boom on his watch, especially in an election year, but one of his charms is his willingness to remind people, so to speak, to hate the game, not the player. Just as he admitted during the 2016 campaign that he had schmoozed politicians when he was in private business but recognized the corrupt nature of the whole political class, so, too, is he willing to nudge the Fed’s interest rate decision-making timing in his favor while calling the whole system into question in a way few politicians would dare (with the notable exception of tireless critic of the Federal Reserve and defender of the gold standard Ron Paul).
The post–World War II financial order was a big move away from the objectivity and apolitical reliability of the gold standard, not coincidentally timed to coincide with the creation of powerful, intergovernmental financial agencies such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which are structured, not wholly by chance, as if to keep the world dependent on government loans from the major Western powers. The world resents the leash, and we should be letting the market, not bureaucrats, decide where wealth flows.
But the post–World War II order, launching as it did amid the efforts to rebuild nations ravaged by war, could always be spun as an economic order founded on “generosity.” The generosity is often more than we can afford, though, and the allegiance it supposedly fosters in the wider world has been shaky. All the while, though, the bureaucrats themselves, and their elite close business allies, seem to prosper. Swiss bank accounts were meant to be a haven for capitalists, not a model for elite governance.
Just as Trump has had the audacity to question basic elements of military and fiscal policy, he has shown a willingness to make sweeping, pro-business regulatory changes. According to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), Trump’s freeze on new regulations has saved the economy some $23 billion per fiscal year. By contrast, OIRA estimates that the Obama administration imposed $245 billion in regulatory costs in its first twenty-one months on the job (as recounted by the Brookings Institution). Donald Trump has always been a builder, from hotels to casinos to golf courses—Barack Obama was a community organizer who gave impressive speeches. However, one of the least eloquent points that President Obama made during a speech was his infamous line “You didn’t build that.” It’s no surprise that President Trump understands that businesses and growth are good for the economy and create jobs, while President Obama focused on the government as the solution.
The precise numbers will be debated endlessly, but the difference in philosophical orientation is striking: The Democrats think they are “helping” America the more rules they impose upon us. Their philosophy of “from cradle to grave” has been slowly creeping into the daily psyche. The government will always be there for me and will know what is best, according to many on the left. Yet, that’s not the motivating idea of America nor of our Founding Fathers. The less government exists, the more people are free and able to flourish.
Trump learned firsthand that new rules are a burden. And businesspeople don’t just want to get rid of regulations to run amok and poison their customers, either: Dead customers won’t make you much profit, their surviving relatives may sue, and such behavior will tend to make your insurance premiums go through the roof. Most regulation is redundant. As a product of the political process (its secretive, executive-agency parts, not even the out-in-the-open congressional debates we can all easily observe, which are authoritarian enough), not a product of market forces, regulation is not necessarily efficient. It just has to sound good in theory, or at least well-meaning.
Why have we for so long passively assumed regulatory bureaucrats know what constitutes good business behavior? Trump makes no such assumption. He is a skeptic, and his skepticism is directed at the powerful, not at those who suffer beneath the edicts of the powerful. He’s on our side.
The failed Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke strikes me as a perfect illustration of how the left isn’t just wrong in its notion of what laws and regulation can do—it’s evasive. Take gun control as an example. Not only did O’Rourke scoff at the idea that Democrats want to take away people’s guns, then say with pride during a primary candidates debate that he’s coming to take away your AR-15, as if he’s entitled to contradict himself at will, but like many Democrats, he doesn’t seem very interested in keeping track of what’s “voluntary” and what’s mandatory.
He said he wants a massive national gun buyback to get guns “off the streets” (as if career criminals won’t just buy new guns if they sell the old ones), then he says the gun buyback will be mandatory (making one wonder how the “buy” price is to be established, but that’s a comparatively minor detail), and then he predicts his mandatory buyback program will be complied with voluntarily. How convenient! That should avoid anything messy such as police battling to the death with reluctant gun owners who resist the edict. Everyone will naturally want to play along, and thus the legal penalties will be almost irrelevant.
I find this is how most Democrats, if pressed, think all regulation works: Their plans are so great that all but a few people will comply with them without even having to be threatened with fines or jail time. Of course, that makes me wonder why they still have to decree the fines, taxes, and jail time. Just for emphasis, I guess!
I don’t think it occurs to the Democrats that every time they make new rules, decent people must now scramble to comply with those rules. It pleases me that some Trump appointees have spent more time issuing decrees to their agencies to do a better job of policing themselves internally than they’ve spent issuing new decrees for society at large to follow. Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency head, for instance, ordered a drastic reduction in the use of testing on animals at that department. Good news for the animals. Better that than telling 330 million other Americans they have to perform six new tests before using pesticides in their backyard tomato gardens.
Democrats want to control your healthcare, your air travel, your vehicles, your light bulbs, your food, your straws, and your paycheck. It sometimes seems as if they want to tighten government control over everything in the world except the southern border of the United States (where, as I write this, illegal immigrants are literally creating contests to see who can get around or over the existing border wall the fastest, something that will be much harder to do if Trump is allowed to complete it).
They are eager to regulate and to censor, though they always seem to calculate how the regulating and censoring will affect their electoral prospects before taking action. I don’t think they’ll be too eager to rein in Google so long as that company and other social media giants lean anti-Trump, for instance. But nearly every other aspect of American life is regarded in the Democrats’ eyes as improved by the loving touch of regulation.
Ironically, the left have tried to rebrand themselves as “progressives.” The one thing they all seem to agree on is that America is in decline. We are losing cultural influence. We are no longer a moral beacon. Our workers are losing their jobs while Jeff Bezos gets insanely rich, and there is little anyone can do about it. Democrats are no longer optimistic about their country.
It takes a daring person, a larger-than-life person perhaps, to shrug aside those assumptions, to shrug aside the web of regulations, to shrug aside the guilt-tripping that the left so often now deploys as its main cultural weapon, and say, no, we’re going to do things differently now. Trump appears to be such a person.