This is an adapted excerpt from the Feb. 12 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
Donald Trump’s foreign policy vision is starting to come into focus — and it is worse and more dangerous than you may have imagined. The president and his MAGA allies appear poised to rapidly undo the American-led global, democratic order.
The unraveling began Wednesday with an announcement from Trump’s secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, that America was pulling back from defending its allies.
“We must start by recognizing that returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective,” Hegseth said during a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group in Brussels on Wednesday. “Chasing this illusionary goal will only prolong the war and cause more suffering.”
“The United States does not believe that NATO membership for Ukraine is a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement,” Hegseth added. “We’re also here today to directly and unambiguously express that stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe.”
On Thursday, Hegseth attempted to walk some of those comments back, telling reporters that “everything is on the table” in negotiations between Ukraine and Russia.
But part of the reason this type of rhetoric is so dangerous has to do with what NATO stands for and when it was created. These institutions and orders were established after World War II precisely because of the competitive, conquering aspirations of rising empires and fascist regimes throughout the world. NATO was formed by the U.S. 76 years ago to pledge that an attack on one member was an attack on all — what is known as Article 5. It started with 12 countries and now has 32 members.
The only time Article 5 was invoked was when all the allies joined together in one fight: when they all came to the United States’ aid after Sept. 11, 2001, and pledged their troops and materiel to the war in Afghanistan. Canadians, Italians, Danes, Spaniards, Norwegians, Estonians, Latvians and more gave their lives for the U.S.’ war on terror. Because that is how alliances work. Allies are supposed to have each other’s back. At least they were before Wednesday.
Not long after Hegseth spoke, Senate Republicans voted to confirm Tulsi Gabbard as the next director of national intelligence. Gabbard is a policy lightweight whose greatest foreign policy achievement was visiting Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, along with his top cleric, who threatened suicide bombings in the United States. (Last month, Gabbard told senators she was unaware of the cleric’s threat at the time of their meeting.) She’s also been accused of siding with Russia and President Vladimir Putin over the U.S. intelligence consensus. But all that sat just fine with every Republican in the Senate except Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who joined 47 Democrats and independents in voting against Gabbard.
At almost the same moment Gabbard was being confirmed Wednesday, Trump was getting off the phone with another international leader: Putin. Trump took to social media to break the news about what he called a “highly productive” call with Putin, writing, in part:
we both agreed, we want to stop the millions of deaths taking place in the War with Russia/Ukraine. President Putin even used my very strong Campaign motto of, ‘COMMON SENSE.’ We both believe very strongly in it. We agreed to work together, very closely, including visiting each other’s Nations.
The glaring thing here is that the country on the receiving end of Russia’s aggression, Ukraine, did not seem to be looped in on developments relating to their future. Trump even dodged a reporter’s question on whether he considered Ukraine an “equal member” in the negotiation process.
We should be clear about what we’re watching: Trump is disassembling the U.S.-led international order to the benefit of the global authoritarians he envies and admires.
Politically, Trump has succeeded in selling isolationism to a lot of Americans. It is true that our leading role in the world has been largely a product of a bipartisan elite consensus and sometimes it feels pretty removed from democratic majorities, who tend to believe America gives out too much foreign aid and “polices” the world. Believe me, I’ve spent two decades critiquing the many shortcomings and downright cruelties of that same order. But however imperfect that order is, what Trump wants to replace it with is far, far worse.
The current international order was created by the U.S. and its allies to prevent the world from the unthinkable. When there were rising tensions between the victorious nuclear superpowers, institutions like NATO and the United Nations were formed in part to prevent the Cold War from becoming a nuclear holocaust.
But there’s another reason Trump is eager to jettison the old order in favor of an anarchic world in which strong countries do what they want. When you hear Putin’s claim that Ukrainians are really just misguided Russians, you can hear echoes of the Nazis’ claim that Austrians and Czechs were just Germans. What Trump is doing now is sending the message to everyone around the world that not only is territorial acquisition by force OK but the U.S. is interested in pursuing it: from Greenland to the Panama Canal to Canada as the 51st state to envisioning the Gaza Strip as an American-owned development project.
The emerging Trump doctrine appears to be that democracies are weak and soft and that we will side with autocracies over them. It’s disastrous. Not just for America’s place in the world but also for the cause of peace.
The idea that the path to peace is to throw overboard democracies in favor of authoritarian regimes is a dangerous idea. And it’s the fundamental throughline of Trump’s worldview. He seems to hate our allies and to love our enemies, possibly because our enemies see the world as he does: transactional and ripe for the picking.
With loyal, morally flexible subordinates like Hegseth and Gabbard, Trump is essentially reorienting American politics as friendly to dictators and authoritarian regimes and fundamentally hostile to democracies. It is shaping up to be the most radical transformation of America’s role in the world since Franklin D. Roosevelt — and it will likely not end well.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
