From America First to Peace Through Strength: Understanding Trump’s Foreign Policy

There is no shortage of speculation about what U.S. imperialism will look like under the new Trump administration. The former president is still remembered for his chaotic decision making and lack of interest in the traditional alliances of U.S. imperialism, like NATO. But Trump’s foreign policy is far more complex than mere “America First” isolationism. In fact, Trump brings with him various ideas that are still being debated within the Right. As Alec Russell explains in the Financial Times:

While in thrall to Trump, the [Republican] party has three national security groupings competing for his ear, according to the European Council on Foreign Relations: “restrainers”, essentially America Firsters; “prioritisers” who want to focus on China; and “primacists”, old-school believers in projecting American power across the world who have a strong caucus in the Senate. The first two are united in wanting to all but leave Ukraine to Europe.

These competing views explain how Trump positions himself as an “anti-war” candidate, lambasting the architects of the War on Terror, while promising that under his administration the world will no longer view the United States as “weak.”

The different ideas developing on the Right contain some points of convergence, but there are just as many, if not more, disagreements among the leading figures and intellectuals of the MAGA movement. This article will attempt to make sense of the Trumpist foreign policy by looking at the competing ideas on the Right. Trump embodies an attempt to bring together different ideas, testing them out in a volatile international landscape.

“Peace Through Strength”

In his 2016 campaign, Trump saw a growing rejection of forever wars among the U.S. working class, just as he saw U.S. power being stretched thin through its myriad international commitments. Trump spoke to the communities that were decimated by globalization moving manufacturing jobs overseas, and popularized elements of isolationism and economic populism. As Sou Mi wrote for Left Voice in October:

During his first term in office, with the promise to “Make America Great Again,” Trump embarked on a protectionist campaign that marked a departure from the decades where diplomacy, organized in the fight for “democracy,” helped organize a capitalist world order behind the United States. Declaring that it was time for the world to pay its “fair share,” Trump withdrew the U.S. from key international agreements, such as the Paris Climate Agreement and important UN bodies like the Human Rights Council, and even threatened to withdraw from NATO, all of which have been strategic treaties and institutions of maneuver for U.S. imperialism. Against the United States’ adversaries like China, Trump unleashed a trade war. On the campaign trail now, from championing the U.S. withdrawal from the war in Ukraine, to the competition with China, Trump proposes much the same.

But Trump was unable to resolve every limit of U.S. imperialism by simply looking inward. In cases where U.S. power was more seriously challenged by regional powers or adversaries, Trump engaged in economic and even military aggression. Strong-arming allies and adversaries alike will be a hallmark of Trump’s foreign policy during his second term.

This strategy is elaborated on in a Foreign Affairs essay by Robert C. O’Brien, Trump’s former national security advisor, titled “The Return of Peace Through Strength:

“America first is not America alone” is a mantra often repeated by Trump administration officials, and for good reason: Trump recognizes that a successful foreign policy requires joining forces with friendly governments and people elsewhere. The fact that Trump took a new look at which countries and groups were most pertinent does not make him purely transactional or an isolationist hostile to alliances, as his critics claim. NATO and U.S. cooperation with Japan, Israel, and the Arab Gulf states were all militarily strengthened when Trump was president.

Trump’s foreign policy and trade policy can be accurately understood as a reaction to the shortcomings of neoliberal internationalism, or globalism, as practiced from the early 1990s until 2017. Like many American voters, Trump grasped that “free trade” has been nothing of the sort in practice and in many instances involved foreign governments using high tariffs, barriers to trade, and the theft of intellectual property to harm U.S. economic and security interests.

O’Brien goes further, with concrete proposals for reorganizing U.S. resources and getting allies and adversaries alike to fall in line. The list of proposals O’Brien makes over the course of the article is too long to cite in full, but the idea is to reshuffle U.S. military resources to focus more directly on the Asia-Pacific region, to ramp up economic warfare against adversaries including Iran and China, and to threaten to withhold military support for allies such as Taiwan and NATO countries unless they spend more on their militaries. (There are further ideas for demands to place on U.S. allies, such as NATO rotating forces to Poland and Taiwan increasing conscription.) O’Brien also proposes an agenda for replenishing military assets including aircraft carriers, submarines, bombers, and missiles, which he argues will require massive investments in critical technology and an overhaul of the acquisition process.

More than military leverage, however, Trump will likely use U.S. economic power to push for concessions. We see this in his embrace of tariffs, promising to put 60 percent tariffs on imports from China to pressure companies toward decoupling, and 20 percent tariffs on imports from all other countries so companies relocate to the United States. Additionally, tariffs will play a significant role in the negotiations over the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement in 2026. The more traditional neoconservative wing of the MAGA movement has serious concerns about Trump’s love of tariffs, even while they embrace his “peace through strength” approach to geopolitics.

It is not just foreign policy that O’Brien is concerned with. What the United States can do abroad is dependent on rebuilding U.S. manufacturing capacity:

To maintain its competitive edge in the face of this onslaught, the United States must remain the best place in the world to invest, innovate, and do business. But the increasing authority of the U.S. regulatory state, including overaggressive antitrust enforcement, threatens to destroy the American system of free enterprise. Even as Chinese companies receive unfair support from Beijing to put American companies out of business, the governments of the United States and its European allies are making it harder for those same American companies to compete. This is a recipe for national decline; Western governments should abandon these unnecessary regulations.

O’Brien won’t put it this bluntly, but to be clear, his is a policy of reindustrializing the United States by gutting worker protections, waging war on unions, and allowing big businesses to hyper-exploit American workers the way that they have reaped enormous profits from the hyper-exploitation of Chinese workers.

While the Republican Party has some consensus on the idea that the United States can and should strongarm its way back to dominance, important divisions remain. Most notable is the small but significant sector of “restrainers,” perhaps best represented by the figure of JD Vance. This sector has their own plan for re-establishing U.S. power. 

“America Can’t Do Everything” 

Choose any foreign policy think tank or bourgeois publication, and you’ll probably find an essay arguing that the United States is not prepared to fight a three-front war. This is a crisis for U.S. imperialism which the capitalists are quite aware of, since the United States is coming up against real limits in its goal to be economically and militarily dominant everywhere all at once. As Juan Chingo writes:

The deep foundations of US imperialist fatigue come from the very exercise of its imperialist supremacy, pushed to its limits during the neoliberal offensive and the “harmonious” advance of globalization. Post-Cold War unipolarity was supposed to bring the world into closer alignment with the United States through the market, democracy, and military might. Instead, the last 30 years have seen military defeats, severe economic inequalities at home, and heavy international burdens. In particular, the neocon-driven “attempt to redefine imperialist hegemony” in the early 2000s turned into its opposite with the defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet US interventionism has only grown (if we take into consideration invasions and other military involvements, only Andorra, Bhutan, and Liechtenstein have not seen US armed forces on their territory). This, together with the relative deindustrialization generated by “globalization” at home, led to the emergence of a new isolationist sentiment: the feeling that the United States is doing too much abroad rather than tackling economic and social challenges at home. First Trump and then Biden put forward the idea that the priority is to rebuild America. In other words, the attempt to “Americanize the world” has ended in great disillusionment, weakening the United States internally. […]

US citizens are increasingly unwilling to bear the indefinite costs of defending their country’s global hegemony; a growing number of people contest the use of force abroad, refuse to serve in the military, demand limits on spending for allied support, and so on. This refusal to make sacrifices for US imperialism is linked to increasing social suffering: daily shootings, declining life expectancy, widespread depression among young people, plummeting quality of education, and the opioid epidemic (which is among the leading causes of death among adults under 50). The formerly strong labor aristocracy (misnamed the “middle class”) has seen the erosion of its living conditions, as showed by the UAW strike in 2023.

If “peace through strength” posits that the main issue stopping the United States from reasserting itself is a lack of will to take risky unilateral action, the “restrainers” in the MAGA movement see the limits Chingo lays out above as the greatest obstacle to rebuilding U.S. power.

Prior to being nominated as Trump’s Vice President, Ohio Senator JD Vance spoke at a forum organized by the realist think tank The Quincy Institute and the right-wing publication The American Conservative. His insights are important, not just because he is soon to be Vice President, but because he is a leading intellectual of the New Right. He says bluntly: “America can’t do everything.” This informs how he believes the United States should engage with its allies, especially in Ukraine and the Middle East.

While Vance lays out his views on Ukraine and Iran in depth, he takes great pains to emphasize that the most important confrontation is the one with China:

The most important part of American foreign policy is actually the strength of our economy and the strength of our domestic population. And if there is something that should worry all of us… it’s that China… is now arguably the most powerful industrial economy in the world. If we’re gonna lose a war, it will be because we have allowed our primary rival to become arguably our most powerful industrial competitor.

Vance represents the still marginal “restrainer” sector of the Right. This does not mean he is anti-war. What it means is that “restrainers” believe that the first task in a strategy to restore U.S. strength is to focus on industrial capacity and avoid foreign commitments that distract from investing in domestic needs. The decline in U.S. manufacturing  motivates the sector of the MAGA movement that has most vocally questioned the continuation of the war in Ukraine. In another speech at the Munich Security Conference in February, Vance argued:

Number one, the problem in Ukraine from the perspective of the United States of America, and I represent, I believe, the majority of American public opinion, even though I don’t represent the majority of opinion of senators who come to Munich, is that there’s no clear endpoint, and fundamentally the limiting factors for American support of Ukraine, it’s not money, it’s munitions. America, and this is true, by the way, of Europe too, we don’t make enough munitions to support a war in Eastern Europe, a war in the Middle East, and potentially a contingency in East Asia. So the United States is fundamentally limited.

Now, let me just throw very specific details. The PAC-3, which is a Patriot interceptor, Ukraine uses in a month what the United States makes in a year. The Patriot missile system is on a five year back order, 155 millimeter artillery shells on more than a five year back order, We’re talking in the United States about ramping up our production of artillery to 100,000 a month by the end of 2025. The Russians make close to 500,000 a month right now at this very minute. So the problem here vis-à-vis Ukraine is America doesn’t make enough weapons, Europe doesn’t make enough weapons, and that reality is far more important than American political will or how much money we print and then send to Europe.

Vance’s concerns over the continuation of the war in Ukraine are not necessarily incompatible with an interventionist, “peace through strength” approach. Trump may attempt to bring a pause to the war in Ukraine by economically and militarily threatening Zelenskyy and Putin into reaching a deal that freezes the conflict, allowing the United States to replenish its arsenal. More likely, Trump may find Putin unwilling to agree to a deal that favors U.S. interests, leaving Trump with no choice but to strongarm European powers into ramping up their own military commitments (which many of them are already doing).

Whether or not the continuation of the war in Ukraine has buy-in from the restrainer sector will depend on how effectively Trump is able to compensate for the depletion of the U.S. arsenal as well as the lack of U.S. productive capacity. But one should not discount the possibility of this sector playing an important role in U.S. foreign policy. It was, after all, this sector, organized in the House Freedom Caucus, that imposed a government shutdown and ousted Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, largely over the question of Ukraine. With Vance now representing the “restrainers” as Vice President, they may play a role in how the Ukraine war develops.

“Pro-Labor Conservatism”

If the “restrainers” see the lack of productive capacity as the foundation of what the United States can and cannot do internationally, it follows that they would have ideas for reindustrialization. But here too, we see differences within the Right. In an interview with the New York Times’s Ezra Klein, Vivek Ramaswamy elaborates on some of the differences in the New Right, counterposing his thinking to that of Vance:

Broadly what’s thought of in popular circles as the “America First” movement today, but what I call “the protectionist wing of the America First movement,” is an economic objective, an economic project… The protectionist strand of this says, “Okay well if big government’s gonna be here to stay, we don’t just want to curb it, we actually want to use it to advance substantive goals of our own.” Vs. the strand that I’m more identified with… says that actually the whole project, we’ve gotta actually keep our eye on the ball, is dismantling the existence of that nanny state in all of its form.

Ramaswamy agrees with O’Brien’s proposal to reindustrialize the United States by attacking unions and gutting regulations. He will have plenty of opportunity to do this as co-chair of the Department of Government Efficiency. But what exactly are the “goals” of what he calls the “protectionist wing” of the America First movement?

Vance is at the forefront of a movement within the Right which seeks to embrace workers. While this movement is hardly hegemonic in the Republican Party, the invitation to Teamsters president Sean O’Brien to speak at the Republican National Convention shows that it must be taken seriously. Missouri Senator Josh Hawley praised the speech as a sign of “the promise of pro-labor conservatism”:

As O’Brien’s appearance Monday night suggested, this is a watershed moment. Thanks to Donald Trump, there is much that Republicans and labor can already agree on. China is ripping us off, and strong tariffs must be maintained and expanded. We ought to support our auto workers with an America First energy policy, rather than kneecapping that storied industry with idiotic electric-vehicle mandates. We should renegotiate trade deals, protect Social Security and Medicare, and initiate antitrust suits against the most egregious corporate abuses. 

O’Brien gives us the roadmap to go even further in 2025. And we should. I have stood on the picket line with the UAW and the Teamsters—all Republicans should do it. I voted to stop Amazon’s labor exploitation, give more sick days to rail workers, and worked across the aisle to limit bank-executive pay. Republicans can begin there. But if given power, we should embrace even more. Let’s cap credit-card interest rates, take the fight to Big Pharma, end exploitative forced labor, and rid politics of corporate money once and for all.

Like Hawley, Vance visited the UAW picket line. Additionally, he has supported Lina Khan, the combative Chair of the Federal Trade Commission who has aggressively gone after monopolies.

The sector of the Right that advocates for “pro-labor conservatism” is not pro-worker. Like the rest of the MAGA movement, they are viciously anti-immigrant. As I have written extensively, the attacks on undocumented workers are one of the main ways that capitalists are able to weaken all workers in the United States by dividing our ranks. The war on migrants creates conditions of precarity that push down the conditions of U.S.-born workers too.

Additionally, Hawley, Vance, and their “pro-labor” ilk have no interest in supporting public sector unions. They will gladly go along with Ramaswamy’s and Musk’s coming war on government workers. But a larger war on the workers might face challenges from this sector of the Right that focuses on establishing an alliance with some unions to rebuild U.S. production and bring sectors of the working class closer to the Republican Party.

Points of Agreement

If issues such as tariffs, Ukraine, and labor produce debate and even conflict within the Right, there are still important points of agreement holding this coalition together. Three stand out.

1) China is the main adversary the United States needs to confront.

2) An extreme anti-immigration approach is key to reindustrialization.

3) The United States can get out of the Middle East by empowering Israel to more aggressively confront Iran.

While examples of the first point have already been quoted at length, the latter two should be understood more.

It is easy to write off the war on immigration as red meat to rally the Right’s base. But, as I wrote with Sou Mi, the militarization of the border has strategic value. Latin America, and Mexico in particular, has an important role to play in the reindustrialization of the United States. The region is rich in essential minerals that are vital to new technologies. The “security threats” of mass migration and drug trafficking allow for the continued militarization of Latin America, which the United States uses to impose trade arrangements in favor of its own capitalists. Additionally, the “peace through strength” policy of reindustrialization can more effectively decouple from China by nearshoring cheap production to Mexico, which is now the United States’ biggest trading partner. Domestically U.S. capitalists can recreate China’s precarious labor conditions by increasing exploitation of migrant workers under threat of deportation or through “slave-like” guest worker programs such as H-2A, which have long been utilized by the farming industry.

In the Middle East, the fantasy is that a military defeat of the Iran-aligned Axis of Resistance will be easy. This, along with a return to “maximum pressure” sanctions to crush Iran’s economy, are presented as a strategy to effectively take the country out of regional and international politics. In some ways, this view has been proven correct, as Israel has assassinated top leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah, in some cases on Iranian soil, with limited retaliation from the Iranian regime. As both Vance and O’Brien have argued, once Iran is dealt with, the United States can simply allow Israel and the Gulf states to take the lead on restabilizing the region in a way that benefits U.S. interests. As I’ve argued, we actually see the opposite: Biden’s unconditional support for Israel’s genocide in Palestine and attempt to create a “Greater Israel” has further trapped the United States in the Middle East.

Thus, even the points of agreement within the Right are limited by the realities of a complex geopolitical landscape. Trump’s plans for mass deportations will likely face serious opposition from the capitalists who rely on undocumented labor. As the debate over tariffs shows, even as the capitalists agree that the United States needs to prioritize confronting China, there is no agreement on what exactly that looks like and what risks it will require.

Tests Ahead

As Andrew Michta puts it in an analysis of Trump’s foreign policy by the Atlantic Council:

Grand strategy rarely comes up on the campaign trail, but whatever hints Trump offered for how he would approach it pale in comparison with this reality: The post-Cold War “holiday from history” is over, and the world has entered a period of protracted systemic instability, with increasingly fragile regional power balances and the risk of great-power conflict growing exponentially. These dynamics will compel the next administration to recognize, when crafting the United States’ national security strategy, that geopolitics has returned with a vengeance. They will require articulating the country’s irreducible national interests, while identifying the key theaters the United States needs to shape and the resources it must bring to bear to achieve its strategic objectives. Urgent priorities will include reassessing unstable regional balances and genuinely reconsidering the organization of US relationships with adversaries, allies, and partners. US strategy will also need to address continuing economic turbulence, especially as it impacts the reliability of supply chains.

It is impossible to understand how Trump will approach these challenges without first understanding the foreign policy debates on the Right. Trump has been able to bring together different factions with competing ideas for U.S. imperialism. His next term will be a test of their different ideas, beginning first with a focus on the “peace through strength” strategy.

Yet for all the faith that the Right has in strongarm tactics, the risk of serious escalation is greater than it was when Trump left office, and miscalculations could lead to the United States becoming further embroiled in bigger confrontations with Iran, Russia, and China. The economic turmoil that Trump’s approach risks might also create greater division within the Right and among the capitalists.

Most importantly, class struggle has also begun to re-emerge in the United States alongside a new anti-imperialist student movement. This could lead to greater opposition to Trump’s far-right agenda. While Trump’s presidential campaign was able to consolidate a base among sectors of the U.S. working class, actually maintaining that base of support is much trickier, especially once these workers find themselves on the receiving end of the austerity measures that people like O’Brien, Ramaswamy, and Elon Musk are eager to impose.

The Biden administration’s failure to resolve the multiple crises of U.S. imperialism through his multilateral approach enabled the Far Right to sell its foreign policy to wider sectors of the masses and the capitalists. Class struggle will test the success of the Far Right’s imperialist vision. Anyone genuinely interested in ending capitalist wars need to fight for a socialist vision.