Time to Declare the Trump Doctrine As Our New Foreign Policy

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In a dusty museum somewhere, there is one of those grand Revolutionary War paintings commemorating George Washington after a victory in New Jersey. The painting has a whole cast of characters, as was the style back then. One of them was what my grandmother would have called a shirt-tail cousin. He is holding a wounded officer he had treated for a severed artery. The wounded officer, Lt. James Monroe, survived and would later go on to become secretary of state and president, where he would declare the Monroe Doctrine.

When Monroe declared the era of European colonization of the New World over, it was the British Navy that enforced the policy. It gave the United States the breathing space it needed to settle its new frontier. It created a framework for our foreign policy that, for better or worse, stated the New World as a vital American interest.

President Donald Trump now has the mandate and the opportunity to create a new framework for American foreign policy. He needs to present a policy consistent with American interests now and long into the future. It is time to close the era of foreign adventurism that began when the Spanish navy suddenly collapsed in Manila Bay during the Spanish-American War in 1898.

After only 112 days of war, America suddenly had overseas territorial interests deep into Asia and the Caribbean. A minor dispute in Havana harbor, summed up by the slogan, “To Hell with Spain, remember the Maine” had changed American foreign policy forever. The stage was set for America to join in other worldwide conflicts. Being an Asian power eventually put America at loggerheads with Japan. A dispute over what appears to have been an accidental battleship explosion would lead our foreign policy within 50 years to two hot world wars and 50 years of the Cold War. As for Cuba, the casus belli that launched a century of blood and treasure, well, it is still not free.

And despite the end of the Cold War, the United States continues to man almost a thousand military bases overseas. It now projects power through a two-pronged policy of preventive wars and regime change wars. The German chancellor and stateman Otto Von Bismarck, the man who created the German state out of a hodge podge of Student Prince kingdoms, said it simply, “Preventive war is like committing suicide out of fear of death.”

As for regime change? If you like Sharia Law in Kabul and, as of the other day, in Damascus or a million or so dead and wounded in Ukraine, regime change is the way to go. In one administration after another, the chorus for regime change is the Sirens calling the ship of state to crash on the rocks of reality.

How did assassinating the head of South Vietnam work out for us? How about Obama working to remove Gaddafi in Libya? And if the Jeffersonian democracy we brought to Iraq and Syria is so great, why are Christians fleeing for their lives?

And now, in a greedy land grab, Israel, Turkey, the Kurds, and al-Qaeda-lite are carving up Syrian. Forget all the hogwash about how regime change brings peace, stability, and democracy. After twenty years and a trillion dollars spent to topple one of the few secular regimes in the Mideast, it is suddenly all about land, oil, gas, and pipeline rights of way. Oh, yes, and security. Remember how secure you are the next time some guy has to pat you down at the airport.

One of the surest signs of diabolical activity is chaos. And is not regime change just another phrase for exporting chaos to other countries? Is it also not a sign of our irreligious times? Vengeance is the Lord’s. We don’t need to export it through perpetual war. The logic of such gunboat diplomacy is always that after we win this one, there will be peace. Yes, an eye for an eye will bring us all joy and prosperity.

We don’t quite believe that God will punish every single act of injustice, even without taxpayer funding. And we have no fear that when He balances the scales, God applies the judgment “thou shalt not kill” to all peoples and nations equally. Violence, when necessary, needs to be limited by strict adherence to the civil and moral law, whether we are acting overtly or covertly.

The Trump Doctrine should be summed up in three points:

No preventive wars
No regime change wars, directly or through proxy, and
No undeclared wars.

Well, maybe following the Constitution when it comes to undeclared wars is a bridge too far in Washington these days. But, President Trump, I think you are up for it. Make it your legacy. Be the man of peace America needs at this crossroads in our history. It is time to declare the Trump Doctrine as official American foreign policy. It will be a legacy worth celebrating.