Donald Trump’s Jacksonian and Jeffersonian foreign policy

ABSTRACT

While the presidency of Donald Trump has come to an end, the debate about its theoretical classification is in full swing. Some have argued that Trump’s foreign policy stands in the tradition of Jacksonianism – one of the four schools of thought identified by Walter R. Mead. Others believe Trumpism (or, for that matter, Trumpianism) to constitute a school in its own right. This article suggests that Trump’s foreign policy is both old and new in that it draws on Jacksonianism but combines it with Jeffersonianism – a combination unseen since, at least, the end of the Cold War. Examining the foreign policies of the five American post-Cold War presidents through the lens of Mead’s four schools of thought, the article shows that Trump’s Jacksonianism-Jeffersonianism contrasts sharply with the Wilsonianism-Hamiltonianism of George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, but that it is only a partial departure from the Wilsonianism-Jacksonianism of George W. Bush and the Wilsonianism-Jeffersonianism of Barack Obama. What strikes many observers as odd about Trump’s presidency, it is claimed, has less to do with the content than with the style of his foreign policy, which, again, can be explained by the unlikely coalition of Jacksonianism and Jeffersonianism the president embraced.

KEYWORDS:

• Donald Trump
• Trumpism
• Jacksonianism
• Jeffersonianism
• US foreign policy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 States that split their electoral votes (Maine, Maryland and New York) or became split themselves (Virginia) were excluded from this comparison.

2 According to Mead (2002, 224), even “during the Cold War, members of the two schools were on opposite sides of most important foreign policy questions”. While Jacksonians and Hamiltonians built a hawkish alliance that favoured an activist and aggressive approach towards the Soviet Union, Jeffersonians and Wilsonians came together in a dovish alliance that preferred a strategy of containment and engagement (Mead 2002, 264–265).

3 Mead does not further capitalize on this metaphor. Instead, he invites us to picture US foreign policy as a sheet of paper covered with iron filings. Forming four big clumps, Mead suggests that the filings are attracted to the magnets of Hamilton, Wilson, Jefferson and Jackson that lie under the paper. Yet, as Mead (2002, 94) has to acknowledge, “not all the filings fall into neatly patterned lines”, with some of them being “under the influence of more than one magnet”.

4 Note that Hamilton was not a Hamiltonian by today’s standards in that he was actually in favor of protectionism. As Mead (2002, 90) writes: “The school I call Hamiltonian followed in the master’s protectionist footsteps for almost 150 years after his death, but by the end of World War II, the leading figures of American business either had embraced or were just about to embrace the doctrine of free trade”, which, ever since, has been the hallmark of Hamiltonianism. This was possible because for Hamiltonians the specific means by which to advance the national interest is of secondary order and depends on circumstances. In the 19th century, when the American economy was not competitive yet, the best way for the US to promote its national interest was to protect its infant industries through high tariffs. In the 20th century, when many of these industries achieved technological lead, “Hamiltonians dropped their historic support for protection and supported free trade as a necessary economic policy for a hegemonic power” (Mead 2002, 89).

5 Bush’s (2003) quasi-religious foreign policy is evident from his self-proclaimed “crusade” against radical Islam and his determination to “sacrifice for the liberty of strangers”. The most prominent champions of neoconservatism in Bush’s administration were Vice President Dick Cheney and Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz.

6 While the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is an agreement on trade, Obama primarily saw it as means to bind China’s neighbors more tightly to the US. Being “the first one to admit that past trade deals have not always lived up to the hype”, Obama (2015) hardly qualifies as a Hamiltonian free-trader. Like his successor, Obama (2015) expressed his unease about “countries that break the rules at our expense” and his resolve to “protect American workers”.

7 I thank an anonymous reviewer for drawing my attention to this.

8 In commemoration of which the Democratic Party hosts its annual Jefferson-Jackson Day fundraising dinners.

9 Through its many military missions and high CO₂ emissions, the US, of course, bears a certain responsibility for the rise of global terrorism and global temperatures.

10 For the sake of simplicity, I included only a few arrows that point in only one direction. As mentioned above, there was also a considerable domestic infringement on the foreign during the presidency of Bush junior (war on terror) and a notable foreign infringement on the domestic during the presidency of Trump (COVID-19 pandemic).

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Jan Niklas Rolf

Jan Niklas Rolf is a postdoctoral researcher at Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences. He completed his PhD on the domestic analogy in International Relations at Royal Holloway University of London. His research interests include international political theory, security studies and US foreign policy.