“Funny,” said one. “A maddening (euphemism inserted) nightmare,” said another. To be clear, these were not partisans, but senior commanders who served under both Presidents Trump and Joe Biden.
Their criticisms, they continued, were not personal. No one had anything negative to say about Hegseth. Their central concern is to see Trump, with these and other senior national security appointments, build a team to implement sweeping and lasting changes in American foreign policy.
“I don’t have any serious experience in the business of running the Pentagon or the national security staff process, but I try to keep an open mind and hope that fresh ideas can improve things that are pretty outdated,” the retired four-star general told CNN.
“However, the common denominator is clearly loyalty, and while a certain loyalty is important, slavish loyalty is dangerous. Looking at all the announcements so far, we could end up with one mind controlling multiple hands. And I’ve never believed that one mind, any mind, does that as and diversity of thought.”
The 2024 US election – unlike previous ones with marginal differences – could have a huge impact not only on US foreign policy, but also on America’s role in the world.
Trump has repeatedly expressed his willingness to fulfill his “America First” agenda, end American entanglements abroad, and reduce or modify treaty relationships he believes are skewed against American interests, each a departure from what used to be a two-party worldview. Until that point, Hegseth had long been a vocal, public advocate of Trump’s “America First” agenda from his position at Fox News.
Trump, as in domestic politics, has demonstrated a transactional view of US foreign relations – and one that often fails to distinguish on the basis of values or shared history.
He has repeatedly said that he sees the USA as neither better nor worse than its opponents. There’s a common thread between Trump’s response to Bill O’Reilly in 2017 when the then-Fox News host reminded him, “Putin is a murderer,” to which Trump replied, “You think we’re that innocent?” and his comment at a rally in Michigan during the final week of the 2024 campaign that “In many cases, our allies are worse than our so-called enemies.”
With this view of America’s relations with allies and adversaries, Trump seems to believe that as president he will be just as capable of making mutually beneficial deals for the US with, say, Russia or China, as with America’s allies in Europe and Asia – that, with nations that fought alongside the US and signed mutual defense treaties.
Negotiations with Moscow or Beijing are certainly better than superpower war, but this approach ignores that these adversaries see that it is in their strategic interests to weaken the US and the American-led global order – goals that are becoming clearer as Russia and China increasingly join forces with North Korea and Iran around the world, from the battlefields of Ukraine to the sharing of nuclear and missile technology, to new agreements such as the mutual defense agreement recently signed between Pyongyang and Moscow.
Could Trump make a grand deal that would push China and Russia, North Korea and Iran to abandon or moderate those strategic interests? In theory, I suppose that’s possible, although former British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston – who famously said that only interests, not allies, are “eternal and eternal” – would beg to differ.
‘If I were Ukraine, I would be very worried’
So what would this mean for American foreign policy in the near future? Trump’s former senior advisers told me in my recent book, The return of the great powers that, with this worldview established, Trump will cut off aid to Ukraine in order to defend itself against Russia.
“If I were Ukraine, I would be very worried,” Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton told me, “because if everything is agreed, what’s another 10 percent of Ukrainian territory if it brings peace, something like that? “
I was told that Taiwan should be similarly concerned. Although Biden has repeatedly pledged publicly to defend Taiwan militarily against a Chinese invasion — ending a decades-old U.S. policy of strategic ambiguity toward the self-governing island — none of Trump’s former senior advisers told me they believed Trump would do the same.
US defense contracts are similarly on the table. Several of his advisers said he might try to withdraw from NATO (as they testified he briefly tried to do in his first term) or, if thwarted by a new law passed by Congress making such a unilateral withdrawal more difficult, signal that he, as commander-in-chief, he would not comply with Article 5 of NATO, which obliges members to militarily defend other members.
In their view, his sentence in February that Russia could “do whatever it wants” to non-paying NATO countries made sense.
“I think NATO would be in real danger,” Bolton told me before the election. “I think he would try to get out.”
This raises questions about Trump’s commitment to other alliances around the world, including those in Asia with South Korea and Japan.
During his first term, Trump suspended major military exercises with South Korea as a gesture to North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, war games that Seoul sees as crucial to its military readiness. In October, Trump put a price tag on the continued US deployment on the Korean Peninsula: $10 billion.
Military commanders and diplomats in Europe and Asia have told me they fear a particularly dangerous byproduct of Trump’s potential withdrawal from America’s commitments abroad: Fearing for their own security, nations in Asia and Europe might decide to develop nuclear weapons to replace the security of America’s nuclear weapons umbrella .
Such a move would in turn prompt America’s adversaries Russia and China (and North Korea and, potentially, Iran if it built a bomb) to expand their own arsenals to maintain deterrence. Other countries in every region—from Saudi Arabia to Egypt to India, to name a few—could reasonably do the same. And so Trump, who has often expressed his deep and justified fear of nuclear war, could inadvertently spark a new nuclear arms race.
Does it matter to Americans at home? The costs of America’s long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have understandably reduced public support for military interventions abroad. And the cost of U.S. military aid to Ukraine—though a fraction of the total U.S. defense budget—seemed politically unsustainable to many during the affordability crisis at home.
However, Americans would have to be willing to adapt to the ambitions of the new and increasingly powerful alliance of autocrats in the world. That would come with costs.
National security veterans point out that the US-led international order, as dry as the name may sound, brings benefits to Americans that they may not realize: respect for the borders of sovereign nations, the legacy of the carnage caused by World War II and now so profoundly challenged by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; free shipping lanes in Asia and Europe; a rule of law that would allow business deals and international markets for American goods; global air travel; international study programs abroad; relatively cheap imports; mobile phones that work all over the world, to name just a few examples. These are things that would fade in a dog-eat-dog world.
“This set of rules…is one of the fundamental factors that contribute to preventing the outbreak of a great power war,” former chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley told me.
“It’s not the only reason, but it’s one of the fundamental reasons why there hasn’t been a great power war in eight decades. So if those rules go away … then you’re going to double your defense budgets because the world is going to go back to a Hobbesian nature where only the strong survive and it will be a dog-eat-dog world and there will be no rules.”
What was once a bipartisan approach turned out to be far from perfect. The US and its allies haven’t figured out how to win in Ukraine and have probably been quietly pushing for some territorial concessions to end the war and back away from Ukraine’s commitment to join NATO
“In order to have successful negotiations, you have to somehow address both sets of insecurities or national security anxieties. So you have to somehow convince the Russians that NATO is not going to invade, Ukraine is not going to be part of NATO, and that they should not fear an invasion from the West, stuff like that,” Milley told me.
What was a dirty little secret under Biden—Ukraine may have to cede both territory and a compromise on security guarantees—is now public as the Trump administration takes shape.
America’s allies will now have to adapt, and many European diplomats have told me they are already preparing to do so before the election. At the very least, they expect American leadership in Europe to fade, requiring a more urgent shift toward greater military spending and broad military expansion.
In Asia, US deals with South Korea, Japan and Australia may no longer be the same counterbalance to China. Both Trump and Democratic challenger Kamala Harris would seek some diplomatic contact with Moscow and Beijing, but Harris would do so based on the current structure of US alliances.
Truth Social CEO tapped for intelligence role under Trump
Everything seems to be on the table for Trump. This does not mean that they will certainly make deals. He walked away from Kim Jong Un during his first term in office when the North Korean leader did not provide enough groundwork for his nuclear weapons program. But, again, everything seems to be subject to agreement.
I often remind audiences when I talk about my book that we, as a nation, are still congratulating ourselves for standing up to despots during World War II, with a new movie and series airing every year.
For the past eight decades or so, that view has not only been emotional. For the most part, with certain exceptions, it is an established American policy, partly as an expression of American values, but also as central to the realization of American strategic interests. These elections put the country in front of a choice whether it wants to stay on that course or take a new direction.
Again, the status quo is fraught with danger. The direction of competition among the great powers was already frightening. However, current and former US commanders and leaders of America’s closest allies believe that an “America first” approach has its dangers. It’s not really a new approach. Today’s rhetoric mimics the country’s isolationists before World War II. America then decided that retreating behind the ramparts of the home front was impossible.