Trump’s Muscular Pax Americana

Donald Trump’s second inaugural address dispelled all doubts of friends and foes alike. He means to shift America decisively to the right, and his vision is distinctly nationalist. Yet the president made a bolder commitment to peace than any American leader since Ronald Reagan. “My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier,” he said.

Trump’s opposition to the war fevers of the foreign-policy establishment has never seemed politically expedient. Most admirers of Pat Buchanan’s politics would be happy enough with Trump’s willingness to restrict immigration and appoint Supreme Court justices who wouldn’t allow monstrous decisions like Roe to stand. And most voters, according to conventional wisdom, think little of foreign policy, while the elite institutions—including elite conservative institutions—that do care deeply about foreign affairs are overwhelmingly on the side of interventionism. 

With nothing to gain electorally, Trump has nonetheless always criticized the wars of the 21st century. Peace is his core conviction as much as it was Reagan’s. And in this inaugural address he has formulated a criterion not only for himself but for presidents ever after: “We will measure our success, not only by the battles we win, but also by the wars that we end, and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.”

Trump is not, of course, a pacifist. With his frequent remarks about Greenland, the Panama Canal, and dangers from Mexican cartels and Chinese influence in the Western Hemisphere, Trump makes quite clear that his outlook is in keeping with those of leaders throughout the nation’s history who sought to make America great, not small, and certainly not vulnerable. For idealists of the left or romantic right, Trump’s version of peace through strength is still too coercive. But the same sort of people would have said much the same about the foreign policy of George Washington or Thomas Jefferson. 

Peace in the American tradition has never meant the absence of expansion or a complete aversion to using force. In the 20th century, Reagan exemplified the paradox that a man judged by his enemies and overzealous friends alike as a hawk and militarist can be the most successful peacemaker of all. Trump’s task in the 21st century will be no easier than Reagan’s was in the 1980s—indeed, it’s because the presidents after Reagan squandered his success in ending the Cold War that America has been entangled in an endless series of new wars since 1991, punctuated only by Trump’s first term. Trump has to repair the mistakes of Republicans and Democrats together that date back 35 years. 

He has to do it while also uprooting the identity-politics regime that has grown up domestically during that time as well. He proposes to undo decades of trade policy as well, reinstituting tariffs as a major source of federal revenue and a tool of industrial policy. “America will be a manufacturing nation once again,” he says, noting that energy policy exploiting the nation’s profound oil and gas reserves will be vital to this effort. That last point, at least, is music to free-market conservatives’ ears. As for the environmentalist regime built up by Biden, Trump could not have been more blunt: “We will end the green New Deal, and we will revoke the electric vehicle mandate, saving our auto industry and keeping my sacred pledge to our great American auto workers.”

Trump will face resistance to his agenda from within his own party as well as from Democrats. Although the explicitly “Never Trump” faction of the party has now deported itself out of the conservative movement and largely out of the GOP itself, there are few members of Congress who stand apart from the president himself as champions of his agenda. If Jeb Bush or Mitt Romney were president, which congressmen would still be calling for Trump-like policies? The GOP still has a long way to go before it’s not just led by Trump but takes Trumpism to heart. Yet every day Trump is president advances the evolution.

Whether four years will be enough time to make the Republican party outside of the White House a dependable force for a 21st-century conservatism—populist, nationalist, realist, yet still wise to the lessons of the 20th century, economic and otherwise—remains to be seen. But the Trump administration may have more than four years, not because the 22nd Amendment is about to be repealed but because, for once, a president on the right has a political heir with the same priorities. The very scene of J.D. Vance being sworn in as vice president conveyed an impression of hope and posterity, not least because Vance’s young children were on hand to witness the ceremony—and to stand as witnesses to family and future. The vice president is a link between generations.

With this uncompromising inaugural address, Trump will have added to his enemies. But he’s survived bullets no less than character assassination. He’s been acquitted, and honored, by the highest court in land: the American people themselves. Trump has already changed our country and the world profoundly. To hear the stirring and wildly ambitious words of his second inaugural address, before now he was only getting started.