It is a year later, and the basic difference is that the Axis of Adults has been eviscerated. Over the past year, Trump ousted his secretary of state, secretary of defense, attorney general, chief of staff, national security adviser and national economic adviser. The replacement crew is, let’s say, not of the highest caliber.

That said, there are some smart people out there suggesting that Trump’s foreign policy revolution is more popular and less catastrophic than foreign policy watchers like myself have posited. In the Wall Street Journal, Walter Russell Mead acknowledges that Trump’s foreign policy instincts can sometimes be “eccentric” or “deeply misguided.” He argues, however, that more Democrats agree with him than is commonly acknowledged:

AD

AD

Mr. Trump has another advantage: His congressional critics, while numerous, are deeply divided. Most of the Republicans who voted against Mr. Trump’s Afghanistan and Syria policies last week are hawks who want the U.S. to pursue a more active role in the Middle East and Europe. Mr. Trump’s Democratic critics see things differently. Many oppose his approach to Latin America and Saudi Arabia while supporting troop withdrawals from Syria and Afghanistan. Significantly, none of the Democratic senators seeking the 2020 presidential nomination wanted to go on the record opposing an early withdrawal. The policy of endless war in Afghanistan and extended U.S. engagement in Syria does not appeal to people running for national office. That points to a deeper truth. Mr. Trump has plenty of problems with the polls, but in neither party does the electoral base show much nostalgia for the mainstream foreign policies of the post-Cold War era. On the Democratic side, there is little appetite for the robust engagement of the Madeleine Albright years. Among Republicans, neither neoconservative democracy hawks nor hard-line free traders seem able to mount much of a challenge to the president.

In a similar vein, Politico’s Nahal Toosi suggests that maybe Trump was the shock to the system that the foreign policy community needed. On an array of issues — Afghanistan, Syria, North Korea, Venezuela, foreign economic policy — Toosi finds experts acknowledging that Trump has raised valid questions.

Some of these critics grudgingly concede that Trump’s bulldozer mentality has pushed leaders of all political stripes into difficult conversations they’d long avoided, on everything from the downsides of free trade to whether the international institutions of the post-World War II liberal order need recasting. After all, on these and other fronts that have long troubled U.S. leaders — America’s ongoing presence in Afghanistan, potential long-term involvement in Syria, NATO defense spending and more — there was little or no movement until Trump took office. “He’s a disrupter. That is leading to some very healthy debate about what are our goals,” said Ivo Daalder, who served as President Barack Obama’s ambassador to NATO and is a frequent Trump critic. . . . The president doesn’t always seem to grasp the basics of the trade system he trashes, and his remedy — imposing tariffs — may do more damage than good. But his criticisms have laid bare Americans’ anger at being left behind as markets change and international trade booms.

Mead is one of the sharpest foreign policy observers out there, and Toosi is the State Department reporter I cite most frequently. It is worth taking their arguments seriously.

This does not mean that they are right, however.

For one thing, it bears repeating that Trump has not, in fact, tapped into some deep-rooted American beliefs about foreign policy. In point of fact, almost every data point suggests the exact reverse. On trade, the country has moved away from protectionism; on immigration, the country has moved away from restrictionism. The Chicago Council on Global Affairs' 2018 survey results reveal that support for keeping U.S. bases overseas has gone up, as has support for the United Nations, NATO, NAFTA, the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate change accord. And as I noted last week, there is no groundswell of public support for containing China — quite the opposite.

AD

AD

The one foreign policy area where the Trump administration might have the public on its side is on withdrawing forces from Syria and Afghanistan. That’s not nothing, but I suspect that support is also contingent on those countries not becoming terrorist safe havens again. So, at best, one of Trump’s policies has some popularity at the present moment.

And this leads to the elephant in the room when it comes to these arguments: Most of Trump’s biggest foreign policy successes have been continuations of what the Obama administration was doing. Increases in defense spending in Europe predated Trump by a few years; Trump’s ISIS strategy was also a continuation of the prior administration’s game plan. Oh, and the economy? Almost every important metric shows a straight-line extrapolation from the Obama years.

Beyond those areas, Trump has succeeded mostly at disruption without any creation. On foreign economic policy, the sum result of all the trade wars so far has been some minor renegotiations of NAFTA and KORUS, and a lot of collateral damage wreaked on U.S. firms. On almost every other issue, the jury is still out, or it’s in and the verdict is not good. We don’t know how North Korea or Venezuela will play out. Trump’s Middle East policy rested a lot on Saudi Arabia, and I think everyone agrees that was a bad bet. On great power politics, we simply have no idea how things will play out.

AD

AD

Could these initiatives end happily? Sure, it’s possible. But it isn’t likely. Bear in mind that Trump excels at acting on impulse without any thought about how things will play out. He refuses to listen to intelligence or analysis that contradicts those impulses. This is why he lost the shutdown fight last month. The notion that he will outlast China or even Nicolás Maduro is questionable at best.

The more significant problem is one I wrote about last year:

Think of the foreign policy agencies and U.S.-designed multilateral structures as capital that needs constant investments. Then appreciate that the Trump team has made zero investments in this area whatsoever. The effect is akin to driving a car without getting the oil changed or living in a house but providing no upkeep. You can get away with this for a while, and then everything falls apart.

The best thing one could say about the Trump administration’s take on foreign policy is that it has been unafraid to critique the previous status quo. And some of it merited a critique. But that is not enough. On almost every issue, Trump has either offered no alternative or offered a bad one. And very little of it is popular.