Can America's Foreign Policy Be Restrained?

Curt Mills

Security, Americas

Recent efforts in Washington—including an historic audit of the Pentagon—are aimed at cutting waste, and limiting blowback.

A year on from the election of Donald Trump—which some hoped would usher in a new era of foreign policy “realism” and “restraint” (in contrast to the swashbuckling days of the last Republican administration)—many of those same voices are gravely disappointed. “There is no realism and restraint in American foreign policy in the Trump era,” the editor of The American Conservative, Robert Merry, said at a recent conference.

Others assert things have changed, if only the conversation: “realism is back.”

Rex Tillerson’s State Department has openly downgraded the focus on a defense of human rights internationally, in a huge contrast with the two previous administrations, Obama and Bush 43, which were at times outright dominated by liberal interventionists and the neocons, respectively. Tillerson, on the other hand, has repeatedly argued Foggy Bottom’s principal charge is to be “efficient.” And the X factor of an unprecedented occupant of the White House cannot be overstated: Donald Trump’s administration may be stocked with characters who know how to stick to conventional talking points, but his often-renegade Tweets are also official statements of government policy, no less than the Justice Department has said. And on Tuesday morning, we learned Moscow and President Vladimir V. Putin see it the same way.

Still others are playing a longer game, hoping to begin the process of reorienting how Americans should view their place in the world, and encouraging a new generation of “restrainers.”