Trump would actually have handled Russia better than President Biden is doing

It is unfortunate that Trump’s refusal to accept his defeat and the Congressional investigation into the violence of 6 January have largely blotted out his foreign policy legacy, writes Mary Dejevsky

Trump’s foreign policy was both less combative and more forward-looking than Biden’s has been (AFP via Getty)

Did the speaker of the US House of Representatives really have to spend a day in Taiwan just to poke China in the eye? Did Taiwan really have to give Nancy Pelosi such a full-on reception, including a meeting with the president and welcome projected onto Taipei’s skyscrapers? Did Beijing really have to respond with a barrage of invective and live-fire military manoeuvres perilously close to Taiwan’s coast within hours after she left?

Doubtless everyone had a reason for doing what they did. The Democrats perhaps calculated that they needed to make a tough diplomatic statement to have a chance of fending off Republican advances before the November midterms. Pelosi has had a long career she seems reluctant to end and wanted to parry criticism of her leadership. Taiwan wanted to show that it really is a fully paid-up country, despite international, including US, ambivalence towards its status, and China, for all its size, nonetheless harbours a sense of vulnerability and could not let what it saw as a provocation pass.

So maybe this whole episode was not quite as risky as it appeared. Maybe everyone involved knew exactly what they were doing and how far they could go without triggering a Third World War in the Pacific theatre. And given that President Biden made clear he didn’t really approve of Pelosi going – so she couldn’t be seen as any sort of national envoy – the rest of the world should relax.

Except that it can be of precisely such apparently small slights that war is made. And the arrival in Taiwan of the highest-level US visitor for 25 years could not but be seen as the gesture of support for Taiwan that it unambiguously was. To China, this signalled a challenge to the status quo, and thus to “peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait”.

Biden’s discomfort, as the visit took shape, was all too apparent. As it has been at times about the way US support for Ukraine has evolved since the Russian invasion, including when his defence secretary spoke of the objective being to weaken Russia forever. But the reality – in both instances – is that the United States is helping to defend two smaller countries that are at odds with a far bigger and more powerful neighbour a long way from the United States, and that without US support, the balance of power would be very different.

It is all very well for the US, and Western countries that flock to its banner, to argue that they are protecting the choice of these countries for (Western-style) freedom against oppression, but they are not motivated by pure altruism, are they?

It is about power projection too, and it comes with a cost, both material and moral – a colossal cost in the case of Ukraine, to which the US has already committed $54bn, more than for any other country in any one year. Proportionately, of course, Ukraine’s costs are far, far higher, given the losses in people and the scale of destruction.

But the question has also to be asked how far US and Western involvement – theoretically at arm’s length, but in practice rather more directly – is contributing to the conflict, rather than just being a response. Are wars being fomented that would otherwise not happen? Both Ukraine and Taiwan exist in a neighbourhood that is very far from the United States. Is the West to be responsible for the protection of these countries for decades, or more, to come? And if so, why?

The reality is that the US – and Western – involvement in the Ukraine war, like Pelosi’s provocative visit to Taiwan, looks much more like a return to the ideological struggle of the Cold War, than any kind of preparation for what may lie ahead. And this may have quite a lot to do with the current occupant of the White House.

When Joe Biden deprived Donald Trump of a second presidential term, there was relief, even rejoicing, across much of Europe. In particular, there were hopes of a new US commitment to Europe and Nato, and a return to predictability in US foreign policy. Some of that has indeed happened, but it has come with the return of a classic Cold War mindset in Washington – which is not surprising, given Biden’s career path and his age.

In many ways, though, Trump’s foreign policy – insofar as the Washington establishment allowed him to pursue it – was both less combative and more forward-looking than Biden’s has been. One of Trump’s priorities was to end US involvement in foreign conflicts and keep the United States out of future wars.

When Biden withdrew US forces (messily) from Afghanistan a year ago, he was completing one of Trump’s undertakings – except that several US allies in Europe, including the UK, believed until the last moment that they could persuade Biden (as the non-Trump) to delay. Hence, in large part, the disorderly departure.

It is unfortunate that Trump’s refusal to accept his defeat and the one-sided Congressional investigation into the violence of 6 January – one-sided, because Republicans declined to take part – have largely blotted out his foreign policy legacy. In retrospect, though, it should be clear that he left more peace, including with North Korea, than war.

A case can also be made that in at least broaching a broad rapprochement with Russia (even though his efforts were repeatedly blocked), and in taking on China in trade, but not in the military arena, he was leaving the era of the Cold War behind.

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There is also an argument to be made, in the counterfactual version of history, that the Ukraine war would not have happened, or at least not in the form it has. This might be because Trump would not have rejected the overtures made by Russia to the US and Nato last December; because Vladimir Putin would not have invaded for fear of Trump’s unpredictability; because Trump would not have underwritten Nato’s pre-war help for Ukraine to the extent that Biden and others have done – or for myriad other reasons.

Trump himself has been reticent, while his supporters have either followed the consensus that assisting Ukraine is a noble and just cause or even called for the US to take the war directly to Russia. What he has said, however, fits in with his general line while in power. He has called into question the huge cost of US assistance (especially compared with what he sees as the small contribution made by Europe, which is right on Ukraine’s doorstep), and asked why on earth there is no diplomacy. “It doesn’t make sense,” he said, “that Russia and Ukraine aren’t sitting down and working out some kind of an agreement. If they don’t do it soon, there will be nothing left but death, destruction, and carnage.” Is it really so hard to disagree?

Trump says the invasion would not have happened on his watch, and he may be right about that, or wrong. But it is hard to believe that he would have ignored the complaints made by Russia in the last months of last year or staked as much as Biden did on Nato’s Cold War doctrine of deterrence. It is easy to deride Trump’s deal-making – “transactional” – approach to foreign policy, but too easy.

This, rather than ideological certainty, could well be a more productive route for great power diplomacy into the future. And that may be the more important choice for Americans when they vote for their next president rather than whether they are a Democrat or a Republican.