Robert O'Brien's Foreign Policy Amnesia

Donald Trump's last national security advisor remembers Trump's foreign policy very differently from, you know, actual history.

Photo by Max Letek on Unsplash

You may or may not have noticed — it’s the summer, I’m not gonna judge! — that it’s a presidential election year. One of the hardy perennials of these years is the good folks at Foreign Affairs publishing essays by the national security advisors of the major party nominees about their visions of the future.

Of course, that gets a bit awkward when it comes to Donald Trump. For one thing, Trump’s brand of populist foreign policy machismo likes to use the Council on Foreign Relations and Foreign Affairs as its elitist foil. Moving past that, however, there is the sticky question of who would be willing and able to write such an essay. Trump burned through most of his first-term foreign policy advisors; it would be inconceivable at this point to see Rex Tillerson, James Mattis, or John Kelly writing an articulation of Trump’s worldview. That leaves a set of unappetizing choices. By the end of his term Trump was left with little but loyal incompetents and grifters. In other words, those who were able are probably not willing and those who are willing might not be able.

It appears that Trump opted for the latter door, because the latest issue of Foreign Affairs has an essay by Robert O’Brien, Trump’s last and least competent national security advisor, entitled, “The Return of Peace Through Strength: Making the Case for Trump’s Foreign Policy.” In it, he offers some standard MAGA bromides, like “Trump’s foreign policy and trade policy can be accurately understood as a reaction to the shortcomings of neoliberal internationalism, or globalism, as practiced from the early 1990s until 2017” and “A second Trump term would see the return of realism with a Jacksonian flavor. Washington’s friends would be more secure and more self-reliant, and its foes would once again fear American power. The United States would be strong, and there would be peace.”

How seriously should one take O’Brien’s assertions? Not very seriously! In part this is because O’Brien’s rather appalling behavior as national security advisor counts as a strike against him. It is mostly, however, because of the constant river of horseshit that passes for his foreign policy essay.

To go through it line by line would be exhausting, so let’s just consider one paragraph O’Brien wrote in defense of Donald Trump’s first-term foreign policy:

Trump was a peacemaker—a fact obscured by false portrayals of him but perfectly clear when one looks at the record. Just in the final 16 months of his administration, the United States facilitated the Abraham Accords, bringing peace to Israel and three of its neighbors in the Middle East plus Sudan; Serbia and Kosovo agreed to U.S.-brokered economic normalization; Washington successfully pushed Egypt and key Gulf states to settle their rift with Qatar and end their blockade of the emirate; and the United States entered into an agreement with the Taliban that prevented any American combat deaths in Afghanistan for nearly the entire final year of the Trump administration.

It is worth taking a moment to ponder the complete lack of shame required to write that paragraph.

Okay, moment over! Now it’s time to explain why I wrote “wow” on the margins while reading that paragraph.

Let’s start with the obvious: Donald Trump was a lousy peacemaker. I am not saying that, the data is. Both the Global Peace Index and the Uppsala Conflict Data Program show that the number of wars and other acts of violence increased when Trump was president. To be fair, they have also increased under Biden. The point is, the world was not more peaceful when Trump was president. Indeed, the notion that Trump was actually good at peacemaking is as laughable as the idea that Trump would ever extract any concessions from Kim Jong Un.

O’Brien focused on four specific Trump administration initiatives, however. What about them? Well, let’s see…

1. The Abraham Accords would have been a more compelling data point if it wasn’t for the fact that to achieve them, Trump had the United States recognize not one but two illegal annexations of territory by force (Israel and Morocco), acts that facilitated Russian whataboutism with respect to its annexation of Ukrainian territory by force. It would also have been more compelling if it had, you know, paved the way for peace in the region. Instead, it seems clear that the Biden administration’s efforts to have Saudi Arabia join in was one of the triggers for the horrific Hamas attacks of last October.

2. The U.S.-brokered economic normalization between Serbia and Kosovo was transitory at best, and negotiated as such. Since then Kosovo has imposed an embargo on Serbian imports and the two countries have traded accusations at the UN Security Council. The whole thing looks like a preview of more corrupt dealings by former Trump officials, but honestly who knows at this point.

3. O’Brien hailing Trump bringing an end to the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) embargo of Qatar elides two important facts. First, the GCC embargo also began during the first year of the Trump presidency. Second, it appears that both Trump and Jared Kushner endorsed the embargo! In other words, O’Brien wants Trump to get credit for repairing an imbroglio that Trump tacitly endorsed three years earlier! That’s not how peacemaking works!

4. O’Brien hailing Trump’s accord with the Taliban is rather rich, since that paved the way for the 2021 withdrawal under less-than-ideal circumstances. Later in the essay, O’Brien acknowledges this: “The Trump administration negotiated the deal that brought an end to U.S. involvement in the war.” He caveats, however, that, “Trump would never have allowed for such a chaotic and embarrassing retreat.” As a close observer of Trump’s first term, I would posit that the Trump administration would have absolutely beclowned itself worse than the Biden White House.

You get the gist. If this is the caliber of O’Brien’s argumentation, one can only shudder at the prospect of how he would manage a second Trump term’s foreign policy.