Is the Trump foreign policy back to the future?

0:00We will make America great again. That phrase has been in our political ecosystem for 10 years now, but it's never been entirely clear what time period in American history President Trump was referencing. Is it the 1980s? Maybe the 1950s? What about further back, say the 1890s? As we enter the second year of Trump's second term, is a 19th century presidency emerging? There's tariffs. The president announced goods from every nation we trade with will be subject to import taxes. Which echoed the Tariff Act of 1890, as Mo Rocca explained on CBS. The 1890 McKinley Tariff raised rates as high as 50 percent.

0:42In the late 19th century, the railroad industry raked in billions of dollars and cozied up to political power brokers. Here's an NBC educational film explaining one of the biggest scandals of the era. One involved a railroad company called Crady Mobilier, where in 1872, stockholders cheated their own company out of millions of dollars. Among the stockholders were members of the United States Congress and Grant's own vice president, Skylar Colfax. Now, AI is the billion-dollar industry, and its leaders are donating money and courting favors with the current administration. Amazon, led by Jeff Bezos, is donating$1 million to Trump's inauguration fund.

1:20Meta, led by Mark Zuckerberg, is also giving$1 million to the fund. And OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is also making a personal donation of$1 million. And then there's foreign policy, as laid out here on TED-Ed. From 1867 to 1899, the United States acquired several territories, including the Hawaiian Islands, despite protests from the native population. The following year, the Spanish-American War began. Seeing Hawaii as a strategic military base, President William McKinley declared it a U.S. territory. Now, in 2026, the U.S. has removed the leader of Venezuela, and President Trump has declared... We're going to run the country until such time.

2:01As we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition. Shortly after Trump said that, his top aide, Stephen Miller, threw another territory into the mix. The United States should have Greenland as part of the United States. Consider this. We may be living in the 21st century, but President Trump's policies increasingly echo those of the 19th century. From NPR, I'm Scott Detrow.

2:35It's Consider This from NPR. The ousting of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, plus the Trump administration's renewed calls for Greenland to become part of the United States, signal the Trump administration may be changing the world order. Joining me to discuss this further is Michael Froman. He is the president of the Council on Foreign Relations and served as President Obama's trade representative. I want to start with the U.S. military going into Venezuela and seizing its president. What was your response? What did you think about? Well, first, I don't think that there's any great tears to be shed over Maduro, who was a ruthless leader and alleged to be quite corrupt and criminal in his activity.

3:16However, going in and decapitating a government certainly seemed at odds with the president's initial views on regime change and getting involved in the internal affairs of other countries. We now have a situation where we've sort of done regime change without, at least so far, changing the regime, and that we've got the rest of the Maduro government, including the defense minister, the interior minister, the vice president, who's now acting president, very much maintaining control. You know, I think from an international perspective, As you said, this harkens back to a period of time when the U.S.

3:55would just declare that it was going to use force or other means to expand or to secure access to resources. One of the big questions is, how do other countries interpret this? You've talked about a phrase we've heard a lot, the rules-based international order. This is something the Biden administration was very focused on. This is something American allies in Europe talk a lot about, the idea that there is a set rules and standards and countries have to follow them. And the argument you hear from Stephen Miller and others in the Trump White House is that's bogus, that that's a veneer that's never been true.

4:31And foreign policy is about strength and it's about power and it's about the U.S. seizing what it wants. What happens to the world if that's U.S. foreign policy going forward? So, I mean, certainly power has always been an element of international relations. But post-Second World War, the U.S. decided that it could exert global leadership and it could exert its power most effectively by getting other countries to buy into a set of rules that more or less we designed and that served our interests very well for a long period of time. Now, sometimes that involved us constraining our own capacity to act unilaterally, but it certainly prevented other countries from doing that or it tried to prevent that.

5:19No rules-based system is perfect. In the international legal system, I think if most countries follow most of the rules most of the time, it has been deemed a success. But does Miller have a point, though, that that might have been right all along? Like the U.S. and its allies have not seen it in their interest to go to war with Russia and Ukraine directly. no one stopped the United States from seizing Maduro. And then Miller saying, who's going to stop America if it seizes Greenland? So I think Stephen Miller is right that the power matters and how you exercise power matters. I think the question is, we have been successful for 80 years in using our power and U.S.

5:57leadership to shape a system that all of the other countries bought into more or less, and that one kept the peace broadly in the world. What this administration has done is said, look, we're going to put that to the side and we're going to go back in many respects to, as you suggested, an earlier period where what mattered was your hard power and how you exercised it and whether any other country could stand up to you in doing so. And we do have the largest military in the world and we do spend more on our military than the next several countries combined. We have real challenges out there, including China that is engaged in a major military modernization plan and a major military modernization build out.

6:42But we are still the dominant military power in the world. And the question is, how do we use that military power? I mean, you're speaking about this very rationally and strategically. But don't we have a lot of evidence at this point that a lot of the decision making is just I would like to add to the United States. I would like to leave my mark in one way or another with the Trump White House and President Trump specifically. Like, it seems like he's talked out loud about that being kind of part of the reasons he's taking these actions. Well, look, a little bit like the comment about running Venezuela, but basically doing it, leaving the current government in place and really focusing on a few issues that the U.S.

7:21cares a lot about, like oil, not so much on democracy or economic reform in Venezuela, et cetera. I think one could take that same approach to Greenland. I think there are really serious issues of Arctic security, and we ought to be more engaged in the Arctic circle, particularly with climate change. As the polar ice caps are melting, that becomes a much more viable trade route. And so, you know, we should be more engaged up there for our own national security. And the Danes and the Greenlanders are very happy to cooperate with us. And there's even a framework, there's even an agreement between us as to how we could further build out our cooperation in that area.

8:02But I think the president is right. We probably do need to engage much more actively with Greenland and Denmark and ensure that we've got the capacity on Greenland to address our Arctic security needs. Has any of this surprised you based on what President Trump and his top advisors talked about heading into their second term? Yes, I'd say there's a lot of expectation coming into the second term that the president was going to be an isolationist. And he is clearly not an isolationist. He has been deeply engaged internationally from day one. And what we've seen is, whether it's regime change in Venezuela or the state building that is slated to go on in Gaza around the ceasefire plan that the president negotiated, that this is very much involves active U.S.

8:58participation and active personal participation by the president. That's Michael Froman, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations. Thank you so much for talking to us. Thanks for having me.