Pearls and Irritations
John Menadue’s Public Policy Journal
By James Curran
Feb 4, 2025
Donald Trump’s “snatch-and-grab” foreign policy rejects the belief in US primacy and exception that was sliding towards a military confrontation with China.
Some have been surprised by the speed with which President Donald Trump is moving on his agenda. Yet, his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, served notice only days after last November’s election, declaring Trump had two years to revolutionise the government.
What is surprising is how quickly Trump’s approach across a wide range of domestic and international policies has been adopted as the new normal. This thread of virtual submission and acceptance to Trump’s will is itself astonishing. Observe the widespread admiration for the alpha male, applause for the denigration of other nations, especially Canada, America’s closest and indeed best ally and friend, and the seeming capitulation of others in the firing line: Denmark, and Colombia’s u-turn particularly.
How did this blithe acceptance sweep around the world in just a week?
Is it a total policy and intellectual failure? To be giggling at the turbulence caused by the string of executive orders from the Oval Office, as some on the right are, is no response. The classic cop-out: “that’s just Trump”, is likewise insufficient.
The phenomenon demonstrates what has not been understood until now.
Namely, that the United States’ long-enduring “soft power”, fashioned by American popular culture, has been hijacked almost overnight by Trump to touch a nerve of conservative, notably male, reaction around the world. And as far as we can gauge, in the suburbs and regions of Australia. As a result, Trump’s caudillo style of presidency is now the most prominent part of a continuum alongside Facebook and Instagram, a popular culture that is now the environment of mass attention.
There is more to this than simple aggression. Trump is also giving voice to a dramatically different style of American power.
Former Labor prime minister Paul Keating, in his first public comments on this second Trump administration, offers an important and hopeful point: that Trump may avoid a major war.
Keating knows it is too early to be definitive in any assessments of Trump 2.0. But he has some confidence in discerning Trump’s primary view of international strategic settings. He spoke exclusively to this column:
“Donald Trump believes in American nationalism but he does not believe in American internationalism,” Keating says. “Nor does he buy the idea of American exceptionalism, the idea that Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush were glued to. That in some way they had God’s ear and that their job was the propagation of the faith – the values of their ‘exceptional’ state.”
Keating continues: “Trump’s street smartness tells him this is nonsense. Though he lacks an analytic framework, his intuition pushes him past crude US policy dressed up as some rules-based order. He knows the key US rule is ‘snatch and grab’, a policy he understands and is okay with but will not eulogise.
“Trump’s presidency could be central to him engineering avoidance of a third world war which the Democrats, in their manic commitment to primacy, were otherwise sliding towards – using Ukraine from 2014 as a US surrogate to contain Russia and their mealy-mouthed claim that China represented a military threat to the United States when, in fact, China intends to attack no other state, certainly not the US. China’s objection to foreign military assets in its near waters being no different to US intolerance of foreign military assets in the western hemisphere. I think Trump understands this. His vice president, J.D. Vance, certainly does.”
Keating clearly sees the potential for a new practice of American power and possible positives from it.
As Keating puts it, it is in essence about “snatch and grab”, echoing the greed that characterised America’s foreign policy when first it placed its tread on the world stage in the late nineteenth century and took the Philippines.
That thread of hope doesn’t make it a benign policy, or a constructive one. Predictably enough Trump has now placed tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China. It is worth remembering, however, that they didn’t change the world last time, and won’t now. America has a massive savings paucity, the source of its current account deficit, and no amount of tariffs, quotas or threats, can bridge this savings gap. The tariffs are but a tactical remedy to a structural malignancy.
And there should be a great deal more alarm than there is about Trump’s approach to Greenland: the first time, in essence, that one member of NATO has virtually threatened military action against another member, or at the very least failed to rule out military action. Denmark in a NATO context did, after all, play its part during the Afghanistan war, though that of course was a policy setting from the very presidents — George W. Bush and Joe Biden — that Trump ridicules.
Even if, in a year from now, the US has an additional military base on Greenland, the idea this will be down to Trump’s strategic genius is highly dubious. It makes no sense to talk about a close ally like this. Indeed, only a declaration of independence by Greenland could justify Trump’s bluster.
So Defence Minister Richard Marles, who like Coalition foreign minister Julie Bishop before him, studs his speeches with ritual incantations to the “rules-based order”, might well be asked at his next press conference: “My dear minister, what part of the ‘rules-based order’ enables Trump to lay claim to Greenland?
James Curran
James Curran is Professor of Modern History and senior fellow at Sydney University’s US Studies Centre. He is writing a book on Australia’s China debate for New South Press.
James Curran is the AFR’s International Editor and Professor of Modern History at the Sydney University.
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