***Ambassador Michael Gfoeller co-authored this article.
At this historic juncture, the United States and our allies need renewed American leadership, and former President Donald Trump is just the person to provide it, in the best Teddy Roosevelt tradition. Trump may not speak softly with his political jibes, but over his first term, where it counted, he embodied Teddy Roosevelt’s maxim to “speak softly and carry a big stick.”
Roosevelt explained that U.S. foreign policy should be “the exercise of intelligent forethought and of decisive action sufficiently far in advance of any likely crisis.” This approach requires the U.S. to maintain a robust military that other nations fear, with the national wealth to fund it, to act with justice towards other nations while being prepared to strike hard when need be and never to bluff while granting adversaries a path to save face in defeat. Such bold yet balanced principles of both defense and diplomacy can redress and reinvigorate U.S. foreign policy after four years of strategic retreat under the faulty leadership of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris that has damaged American credibility, undermined our closest allies, weakened our military, and emboldened our most dangerous adversaries.
Trump understands that the United States is in alliances with other countries because they benefit the American people, not our allies. U.S. foreign policy must serve the American people. By demanding that our European NATO partners stop free-riding on American largesse and put up the money they are obligated to provide, Trump kept the NATO alliance strong—the exact opposite of what his detractors claim.
Every American president since Truman has faced this challenge, but only Trump succeeded in getting the Europeans to significantly beef up defense spending. Now more than ever, Europeans need to understand that it is in their interest to keep the U.S. committed to their security and stop undermining U.S. and European security by kowtowing to Communist China for monetary gain or appeasing the terrorist-supporting Iranian regime.
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Trump, in concert with a Republican-controlled Congress, brought our military up to strength, repairing the damage of the declining budgets and disinvestment of the Obama years, and made clear to our friends and adversaries that he was willing to use U.S. military force when U.S. interests are threatened - and to use these forces smartly - while opening and maintaining diplomatic channels with even our worst adversaries. In the best Teddy Roosevelt tradition, Trump - famous for his angry outbursts against his critics (also a specialty of the at-times bombastic TR) - applied a “speak softly” approach to dealing with U.S. adversaries, an approach that was unsettling to virtue-signaling experts in foreign policy who are all about rhetoric, not results.
Trump sang Putin’s praises while reversing Obama-era restrictions by providing lethal weapons to Ukraine, moving thousands of U.S. troops to Poland to bolster NATO’s eastern flank, imposing sanctions that stopped construction of the Nord Stream 2 Russia-to-Germany natural gas pipeline, and authorizing airstrikes in eastern Syria that killed hundreds of Russian Wagner-Group fighters. Trump said of Chinese dictator Xi Jinping, “we love each other,” while imposing unprecedentedly severe tariffs on Chinese imports. Trump publicly offered an off-ramp for the Taliban from their then-failed two-decade effort to dislodge the United States from Afghanistan, while privately threatening death and destruction on their leaders if any Americans were harmed.
Trump praised and met with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un while threatening death and destruction if the dictator acted on his apocalyptic threats. And in the case of Iran, Trump authorized the January 2020 drone-strike killing of Iranian terrorist leader General Qassem Soleimani, while offering Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Khameini an off-ramp from permanent confrontation with the United States.
Thanks to this approach, Trump, unlike any president since Eisenhower, kept us out of new wars while keeping our adversaries at bay. This isn’t to say that Trump wasn’t willing to strike militarily when circumstances required it, but - like Teddy Roosevelt - his military interventions were quick, agile, lethal, sending a clear message: don’t mess with the United States.
Like TR’s, Trump’s foreign policy was nimble and disruptive, creating new opportunities for U.S. diplomacy. This was no more demonstrated than in the Abraham Accords, which broke with a half century of old resentments and antiquated stances in the Middle East, so that for the first time in the 72-year history of the state of Israel, Gulf Arab countries established full diplomatic relations with the Jewish state.
Trump understands that the United States must take a whole-of-government approach to keeping America safe and prosperous. Unlike any president before him, Trump is willing to deploy the entire range of U.S. foreign policy leverage to achieve U.S. objectives - diplomacy, defense, development, and, transformatively, investment and trade. It is this last pressure point that separates him from all his post-World War II predecessors.
The United States has often in the past applied economic and trade sanctions in selected circumstances, most notably in the Cold War against the Soviet Union and its allies, and against terrorist-sponsoring and nuclear-proliferating regimes like Iran and North Korea. Trump, recognizing the strategic threat, economic and military, posed by China, aggressively applied the president’s uniquely autonomous trade authority to impose unprecedented levels of tariffs on China.
And in the case of Iran, under his maximum pressure campaign, Trump imposed economic sanctions that near-bankrupted the Iranian government, resulting in a cut-off of Iranian support for its terrorist proxies - Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, the Houthi in Yemen, and the PMF militias in Iraq. Trump applied a buzzword of the 1970s - linkage - to transformative effect, tying trade and tariffs to broader U.S. security concerns, and the results were profoundly effective.
The Biden-Harris administration threw all of this aside when they entered the White House in January 2021, and the result has been catastrophic. The Biden-Harris approach can best be described as big talk and limp stick. Joe Biden’s message to Putin before his invasion of Ukraine, to the Taliban before they took Kabul, to Iran before they launched missiles at Israel? A weak, “Don’t!” – which they all ignored.
Kamala Harris, a vice president who entered office with no foreign policy experience whatsoever, was tutored by President Biden, Secretary of State Tony Blinken and NSC director Jake Sullivan – all acolytes of the Cyrus Vance, Warren Christopher, and Madeleine Albright foreign policy school of Big Talk and Soft Stick. They imposed loudly proclaimed self-limiting red lines on U.S. and allied actions, emboldening Putin, Khomeini, Xi Jinping, Khameini and other adversaries, and shrank from the quick and tactical use of force, also opposing such actions by our allies. The result has been war and chaos, from the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in 2021 to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 to Hamas’s horrific attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 that’s led to a Middle East conflict on seven fronts.
Throughout these mismanaged crises, the Biden administration consistently failed to prioritize American interests in its foreign policy, and that is why so many Americans are suspicious of our alliances and angered by the billions of dollars being sent to other countries when money is short for domestic concerns. Trump understands this fundamental fact.
Globalist Democrats like Harris and Biden are more concerned about what attendees at the World Economic Forum think than the American people think when it comes to U.S. foreign policy, including foreign assistance. But the American people are smarter and more worldly than the Davos crowd will ever be. They are right to be suspicious of U.S. foreign policy elites who have made so many profoundly damaging mistakes over the past two-plus decades.
We need a whole-of-government foreign policy approach—diplomacy, defense, development, investment, and trade—that puts the American people first. With his Teddy Roosevelt approach, Trump did just that in his first term and is poised to do so again if reelected.
Greg Gross served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, overseeing U.S. foreign security assistance programs around the world, and currently works as a consultant in government relations and international business.
Ambassador Michael Gfoeller served as political advisor to the U.S. Central Command and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
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