Trump versus “The Establishment”

Perhaps the biggest change sought by Trump is to divorce the United States from its Cold War-era marriage to a trans-Atlantic military alliance—NATO—that lacks any present-day purpose other than to stimulate an atmosphere of confrontation with Russia.

The question remains as to whether Trump’s mandate is strong enough to bring about this divorce, and whether the precepts of “peace” will win out over those of “strength” if this mandate is challenged at home and abroad.

Donald Trump is a man on a mission.

He is also a man driven by an ego which may outstrip the ability of the nation he will be sworn in to lead on January 20, 2025, to match.

Trump simultaneously seeks to disengage the United States from global hot spots that have come to define present-day national security priorities while promoting a new foreign policy centered on solidifying American dominance over its immediate spheres of strategic interest, including taking an aggressive stance on expanding the territory of the United States to include Greenland and the Panama Canal.

To accomplish this expansive goal, Trump and his foreign policy/national security team will need to go against the grain of decades of policy imperatives that have, over time, been used to define US national security interests.

In seeking to bring an end to the Ukraine conflict without accomplishing the underlying goals of the US and its western allies, namely the strategic defeat of Russia, Trump is opening the door for the potential normalization of relations between Russia and the US and, by extension, Russia and Europe.

This is a two-step process.

First and foremost, Trump must find a formulation for conflict cessation which simultaneously recognizes the reality of Russia’s victory over the collective West.

This means that Russia will need to get the vast majority of what it is seeking when it comes to the Ukraine conflict—Ukrainian neutrality (no NATO membership), permanent international recognition of Russian sovereignty over Crimea, Kherson, Zaporizhia, Donetsk and Lugansk, the lifting of all sanctions linked to the Special Military Operation, and political control over the future of what remains of Ukraine, including constitutional changes requiring “denazification.”

Trump will promote such a deal as a major victory, since he has cast himself as someone who did not promote this conflict, and as such should be credited with creating the conditions for peace.

The next step is perhaps the most challenging: divorcing the United States from NATO.

The Ukraine conflict has underscored the reality that post-Cold War NATO is an organization lacking in a viable mission. What was once a defensive alliance focused on protecting Western Europe from Soviet expansion, NATO has become little more than a tool of the very kind of US-led foreign adventurism Donald Trump claims he is seeking to walk away from.

The rub is that the political and economic elite of Europe who are responsible for NATO allowing itself to be redefined as a tool of American empire will not willingly yield to Trump’s strategic vision. NATO, facing the diminishment of US investment into the alliance, will seek to restructure the defenses of Europe predicated on the very threat model Trump, through his peace initiative regarding Ukraine, seeks to dismantle.

Europe, however, is not able to bear the financial burden of such an undertaking, and any effort to build a massive new European military designed to confront a manufactured Russian threat will by necessity require the reallocation of limited fiscal resources away from the kind of social and infrastructure investments the bulk of the European population are demanding from their governments, making any effort to do so the equivalent of political suicide.

Trump’s goal is to make NATO politically and economically unsustainable. To do this, he must get Europe to acquiesce to a vision that reverses decades of policy predicated upon Russia as an existential threat, as well as getting congressional support for divorcing the United States from a trans-Atlantic alliance that has served as the core of American national security policy for 80 years.

It is unlikely that Europe will go gently into that good night.

Instead, there will be a period of political and economic turmoil as deeply entrenched elites seek to retain their positions of power and influence in the face of unyielding geopolitical reality that dictates otherwise. Germany, France, and the United Kingdom—traditionally the core of what constitutes European political, economic and military power—are all in what appears to be irreversible decline, generating domestic political fallout that will ultimately prove fatal to the current ruling class.

One of the largest obstacles Trump faces in trying to oversee what amounts to the euthanasia of post-War European power structures comes not from the European continent, which frankly speaking is virtually powerless to prevent such an outcome in the face of American indifference manifesting itself in a refusal to underwrite the costs associated with sustaining the NATO alliance. Rather, Trump will face pushback from within the halls of Congress. Here, decades of a symbiotic relationship between those who control the power of the purse and those responsible for defending the nation have produced a war-based economy that feeds upon conflicts promoted by elected officials whose positions are dependent upon the support of the warmongering class.

This is precisely the threat to American democracy that President Dwight Eisenhower warned of in his farewell address to the nation in January 1961.

Trump gave voice to this threat in a video statement released on March 17, 2023. “Our foreign policy establishment,” Trump declared, “keeps trying to pull the world into conflict with a nuclear-armed Russia based on the lie that Russia represents our greatest threat. But the greatest threat to Western civilization today,” Trump noted, “is not Russia. It’s probably more than anything else ourselves and some of the horrible, USA-hating people that represent us.”

Trump pledged “a complete commitment to dismantling the entire globalist, neocon establishment that is perpetually dragging us into endless wars, pretending to fight for freedom and democracy abroad, while they turn us into a third-world country and a third-world dictatorship right here at home.”

Trump added that NATO’s role needs to be re-explored, and that the State Department, “defense bureaucracy” and intelligence services must likewise be overhauled.

Trump accused this “establishment” of wanting to “squander all of America’s strength, blood and treasure, chasing monsters and phantoms overseas while keeping us distracted from the havoc they’re creating here at home. These forces,” Trump concluded, “are doing more damage to America than Russia and China could ever have dreamed.”

The stakes in this game of political dominance are as high as they can get—left unchecked, the “establishment” could very well lead the United States down the path of inevitable nuclear conflict with Russia.

Trump has articulated a desire to take a different path.

His mantra of “peace through strength,” however, is a double-edged sword.

As currently configured, Trump’s strategic vision appears to seek to trade the loss of the post-War trans-Atlantic alliance that has defined American national security for eight decades for peace and stability in Europe, for the assertion of a new Monroe Doctrine where the United States rules as the unquestioned power over not only the sovereign territory of the American homeland, but also America’s neighbors to the north and south.

Trump’s gambit is predicated on Congress being willing to accept the proposed acquisition of Greenland and the declared re-acquisition of the Panama Canal, as well as the promise of American dominance over the North and South American continents, as a fair exchange for the loss of Europe.

But Trump’s gambit is also predicated on the fact that any massive restructuring of American geopolitical priorities will inevitably disenfranchise existing power elites to the benefit of a new “establishment” elite.

The deeply entrenched current elites will not yield the field without a fight.

Moreover, the exchange Trump is proposing assumes that the United States can negotiate a smooth exit from Europe void of any entanglements. One of the biggest hurdles in this regard is Trump’s oversized ego and notoriously thin skin. “Peace through strength” is as much about perception as it is about reality, and the concessions Trump will be compelled to make to Russia to bring the Ukraine conflict to a quick and decisive conclusion require, at a minimum, the appearance that what happens is all part of the Trump “design.”

Russia has already thrown a wrench into the works by rejecting out of hand a peace proposal assembled by the Trump national security team-in-waiting, an outcome which most likely proves fatal to Trump’s stated objective of ending the Ukraine conflict on “day one” of his presidency.

If only it were that easy.

The fact is it may very well take between six months and a year after Trump is sworn in for the Ukraine conflict to wind down on terms acceptable to Russia. Trump would be well-advised to engage with the Russians early and realistically to bring an end to the fighting in the shortest timeframe possible. Only after that can he begin the process of divorcing the United States from the dysfunctional union it maintains with NATO. And, like any long-time relationship, this divorce will take time. But the dissolution of NATO is all but assured once the Ukraine conflict is concluded. Trump can literally hand off the proceedings to his “lawyers” and get on with the courtship of his new conquest—greater America.

Which, of course, brings a whole other meaning to the concept of “Make America Great Again.”