US foreign policy in five doctrines

29:59And so it touched on a lot of key things. And the dance that Nixon and Henry Kissinger were doing, they wanted detente also. They wanted to create a better friendship with the Soviet Union via nuclear arms reductions. And Nixon, of course, in 1972, goes to China and meets with Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai and begins trying to have a reset with communist China. So Nixon is a very active foreign policy president. And the Nixon doctrine was very important. Basically, shovel money and armaments to countries that are our friends, provide nuclear umbrella, but do not send American troops to be mired like they were in Korea and Cambodia and Vietnam.

30:47You mentioned the visit to China and his immensely powerful Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, and the thinking that was behind that visit in particular. It's interesting, isn't it, to muse on the extent to which they saw all of that as the projection of American power or whether they genuinely thought that other nations could be brought into a kind of fold of an international community. What Nixon wanted to do was triangulate between the Soviet Union and China. He recognized that, you know, the U.S. had a pretty long term positive relationship with China. We supported the territorial integrity of China in the beginning of the 20th century when Britain and Germany and Japan and others were trying to colonize China.

31:41The United States was a great ally of China, as was Britain in World War II. So Nixon, who was a staunch anti-communist, loathed ostensibly red China, was a big pro-Taiwan lobbyist, recognized he had a historic opening to soften that relationship with the sleeping giant. And that would frighten the Soviet Union because the Kremlin worried about a new U.S.-China friendship, which would isolate the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the reason Nixon didn't get out of Vietnam in 69, he wanted to show China, the United States doesn't cut and run, that we are there, we're a power in the Pacific, we're going to double and triple down in Vietnam, but we're going to find new ways to do it.

32:32How much continuity is there then? If we're talking about a Nixon doctrine, How much continuity is there between that and there was containment in the Truman administration after the Second World War? You think of JFK. Are there strands that are lasting all the way through to Nixon or is this a radical change? I don't think it's a radical change, but it's a reset for U.S. posture in the world because, you know, we are continuing to be the nuclear power. And much like in Europe, with the exception of Great Britain and France, you know, our NATO allies, the United States says, look, we've got the nuclear weapons.

33:15We'll protect you. Nixon was pro-NATO in a big way, something very different than President Trump right now. However, Nixon did think in terms of big power plays that that the United States and China and Russia were the three big powers. And he wanted to find a way to work with them and pit Soviet Union against China, against each other. When you look at Nixon and you look at those times, there is so much that's so different, obviously, from what's going on at the moment. But are there things that you can say, yeah, I can recognize that in what Trump is at least trying to do? Or is there nothing?

33:55Is there a complete discontinuity? Well, I think that the Nixon doctrine does connect to a Trump doctrine, if there is such a thing. It seems to me to be kind of willy nilly and keep people off guard, which is a little different. But nevertheless, I think that idea Trump has due to new technology, due to America's missile capacities and more, that we don't need to send troops into harm's way. Trump feels that American troops after 9-11 being sent into Baghdad got us involved with nation building. So Trump is less inclined to send American troops into a battlefield or into war, but he is inclined to use modern military technology to do missile strikes.

34:47And if you really count how many he's done, it's quite remarkable. I mean, including like Nigeria and, you know, of course, the intervention in Venezuela, but the risky hitting of Iran's nuclear facility. So it is the Nixon doctrine in the sense that we're going to find other ways to do things besides sending, you know, hundreds of thousands of American soldiers into harm's way like we did in Vietnam. But Trump has no understanding of the importance of alliance building. He's a go it alone guy. You know, Nixon understood with Kissinger the cleverness of alliances and why they're essential, where Trump wants to kind of bully boy and chest bump himself and say, we can do anything.

35:35We're the United States. Nixon never would have publicly turned on Canada or, you know, said, I'm going to take Greenland from Denmark and create that kind of chaos within NATO. Is that the biggest difference between Trump and all the other post-war presidents, that actually he genuinely doesn't want to seek alliances and all of them with their various differences in emphasis, but actually all of them did regard alliances and the building of alliances around the world as hugely important? I think it's what makes Trump the outlier from all those other presidents, because Trump believes alliances are dangerous and he doesn't like them.

36:14He wants to deal one-on-one with the country because he feels with the power, economic and military power and cultural power of the United States, that he can get a better deal if it's one-on-one.

36:31Douglas Brinkley. From Nixon, we're going to stay with the Cold War but talk about Ronald Reagan, the Republican president who went from being a film actor to governor of California before becoming US president in the early 1980s. Here he is giving a speech which was seen as a source of his doctrine. It's the State of the Union address for his second term on 6 February 1985. We must stand by all our democratic allies, and we must not break faith with those who are risking their lives on every continent from Afghanistan to Nicaragua to defy Soviet-supported aggression and secure rights which have been ours from birth.

37:14To tell us more about the Reagan Doctrine, I'm joined by Kathleen Burke, who is Emeritus Professor in Modern and Contemporary History at University College London, and Professor Sir Lawrence Friedman. He's Emeritus Professor of War Studies at King's College, London. Right, let us start at the beginning. Kathleen, who was he? Ronald Reagan was a small-town boy, one might say. He was born in Tapico, Illinois, in 1911. He was a bit of a mediocre student. After he graduated, he became a sports broadcaster, went to Hollywood, became a B-movie film actor, also including what we would call the General Secretary of the Screen Actors Guild.

37:52In other words, he led a trade union. In 1962, he had always been a Democrat, but in 62, he became a Republican. He had been moving to the right for the past several years, and he decided the Republicans was more his sort of party. He entered politics in a certain sort of way. He gave speeches for other candidates. And then in 1980, he overwhelmed, wiped out Jimmy Carter, who was running for a second term. And so in January the 20th, 1981, he became president. Lawrence, tell us about the times of that era. Tell us what the context was when he became president in 81. I think he was seen as a sharp rebuke, in a way, to the previous administration of Jimmy Carter.

38:47And Carter had represented a degree of continuity with the Nixon presidency, which of course was curtailed by Watergate. But the basic idea then was that you could pursue détente with the Soviet Union. You could manage the Cold War by relatively peaceful means. You would promote arms control. And that has started to get into trouble during the later Carter years when it was seen by many in the US that Moscow was taking advantage of this by promoting communist movements and sympathizers in what was then called the Third World. And that this was catching the Americans off guard. But Reagan came in wishing to project strength and wishing to project a much more cautious view of the Soviet Union and being prepared to see communism as a challenge not only around the periphery of the Soviet Union, but worldwide in all places where American clients and interests were under threat.

39:49I mean, is he putting it too simply, Lawrence, to say that he thought the Cold War could be won and that in a sense that is the big change with him? Yes. He made famous statements about signing the Soviet Union to the Ashbin of history. In that sense, it was why he tended to be seen as a bit of a warmonger, that he was prepared to take a confrontation head on. And his Secretary of Defense, Kaspar Weinberger, gained some notoriety because he talked of nuclear doctrines, which suggested that they might even think that they could win a nuclear war. Something incidentally I don't think Reagan ever believed, but this was how it was seen.

40:27So I think in that sense, he was prepared to assert American power. Did he believe, Kathleen, that you could export democracy around the world? Is that what he wanted to do? He had always been keen to export democracy. And his idea was if you got rid of communist governments, democracy would indeluctably follow. I guess it was power, but not in flourishing your weapons. But he got into difficulties with people in his administration, like Secretary of Defense and Secretary of State and National Security, because many of them had more ideas of exporting power. And therefore, sometimes on the ground, things were done that he didn't actually want and didn't actually know about to establish American power as well as American democracy.

41:19Could I say one more thing, Justin, which is there was no Reagan doctrine as such out of that clip you played for us and a couple of other odd sentences. Charles Krauthammer, who was a columnist for The Times, wrote an essay which said the Reagan doctrine. And from then, of course, the term stuck. And indeed, one could see in looking fairly closely at what was happening in the administration that they started thinking that they had this doctrine which gave them, in a sense, the right to do things they thought ought to be done. Do you agree, Lawrence, there was no such thing as a Reagan doctrine?

41:59I mean, people decided there was a Reagan doctrine, though it was never explained by Reagan himself in those terms. I think there was a clear sense of what Reagan was trying to do in his opposition to communism. But of course, there's many parts of foreign policy that are not particularly captured by that aspect. Yeah. I mean, tell us about those. What else was he trying to do? Well, one of the most controversial sets of issues was to do with Central America. And that was seen as part of the battle with communism, where the post-Sandinistas in Nicaragua, who were considered to be pro-communist, while supporting rebels against them.

42:40El Salvador was an issue. The other big thing to mention from his first term was, related to the Cold War, but slightly separate, was his view about Star Wars, that is the Strategic Defence Initiative, and the idea that you might be able to find a set of technologies that would allow you, as he put it, to defend against a nuclear missile attack rather than simply have to avenge it. Do you, Lawrence, when you look at Reagan in total, when you look at his contribution in total, does it fit into earlier American presidents, a kind of sense for you of strands of American foreign policy? How radical is it?

43:21Was it? I think at the time it was seen to be very radical in terms of the tendency in East-West relations, if you like, since the early 60s. That is, it was quite a sharp break. Now, in retrospect, first, in a way, he was vindicated by the end of the Soviet Union, and one could debate how much he was responsible for that, possibly not as much as his supporters claim. But he saw the way things were going when his advisers were assuming that the Soviet Union was there forever and its influence would be there forever. His two terms are very different as well on this same issue, because he started off with apparently very belligerent rhetoric.

44:02And then in the second term was the one who became pally with Gorbachev, had this extraordinary summit in 1986, in which the two of them almost agreed to full nuclear disarmament. So he ended up looking much more like a peacemaker than he did when he started. I think the final thing to say about Reagan is that he always exuded a sort of semi-optimism, which goes back to his acting days and his public speaking days. A great promoter of the United States as the great hope of mankind and so on. It was a very optimistic message. And that, Kathleen, is a fascinating difference, isn't it, between Reagan and Trump.

44:43There are all sorts of differences, but that central one, that Trump does not regard the United States as necessarily a thing that the world needs to look at and look up to and admire and emulate. He's not interested in that, is he? He's interested in the United States as a geographical entity, as a power, but not necessarily as something where we all say, oh, goodness, it's a shining city on the hill. So if we're beginning to think now of the differences and indeed potentially the similarities, that's a big difference, isn't it? Well, it is. I mean, they're the same in that Reagan thought in global terms.

45:19And so does Trump, as far as one can tell. Meaning what? Outline a bit more what an example of that is. Reagan's so-called doctrine had ideas about Asia and Africa and Latin America. No mention of Greenland. And what he wanted was the U.S. to be respected and looked up to. So in that, there is a similarity with Trump. Except that with Trump, I think what he wants is respect and a bit of fear. Did Reagan not want fear? Not from the world and not from anyone he actually talked to, no. Lawrence? I agree with that. I mean, Reagan was a free trader. I mean, he really believed in free trade, which obviously Trump doesn't.

46:00I think that's one of the sharpest differences. And Reagan would never talk in the transactional terms that Trump does. Reagan was presenting sort of an American idealism about democracy and freedom and so on as being one of its strengths. I mean, many thought this was hypocritical when you're supporting some pretty nasty militias in Central America. I mean, there are those, though, Lawrence, aren't there, who just say, well, Trump is more honest. They're actually all doing the same thing, but Donald Trump is honest about it and Reagan maybe was less so. Yeah, I mean, also Reagan didn't necessarily, which may be something he does share with Trump, is that Reagan didn't necessarily know an awful lot of what his administration was up to.

46:40Neither Reagan nor Trump were details people. They had big ideas, which they expressed, but they didn't particularly get into the detail of policy. I mean, hypocrisy is part of international affairs to some extent. And there were people in the Reagan administration, some of the original neocons, who argued, for example, that there was a big difference between authoritarian leaders with which you had to deal, whether in the Middle East or in Latin America, who would nonetheless probably be doing the right thing. And the complete totalitarians like the Soviets who wanted to control all aspects of life and keep themselves in place forever.

47:20The sort of sunny talk of freedom is only one part of it. But nonetheless, there was a clear ideological message with which he wished to associate the United States. And it's remarkably different from the message that Trump puts out. And on big issues, especially, I would say, trade, it was quite different.

47:45Sir Lawrence Friedman and Kathleen Burke. For our last doctrine, we're focusing on the early years of this century, the George W. Bush presidency, which was shaped by the events on 9-11, the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, and the deaths of 3 ,000 people. The result was the Bush doctrine. Let's start by hearing from the man himself. This is President Bush speaking at West Point on 1st June 2002. We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge.

48:30In the world we have entered, the only path to safety is the path of action, and this nation will act. To talk about this, I'm joined by Mel Leffler, who is Ameris' Professor of History at the University of Virginia and author of Confronting Saddam Hussein, George W. Bush and the Invasion of Iraq, and Bronwyn Maddox, who's director of the London-based think tank Chatham House and author of In Defence of America, which she wrote at the end of the Bush presidency in 2008. Let's begin at the beginning, Bronwyn. He has been described, hasn't he, as an accidental president. That's absolutely right.

49:11I think he was surprised himself that he became president. His brother Jeb always seemed much more sure-footed about both wanting to be president, saying he wanted to be president and indeed expecting to be president. I remember a Republican governor's convention where exactly that came to a head. And George W. Bush had a reputation for partying quite a lot, being the more laid back one. But he did become president. And although I think we have to speculate a little bit if 9-11 hadn't happened, whether it would indeed have been a laid back presidency. Mel, he was talking then, obviously, in that clip we've just listened to about 9-11 and America's reaction to 9-11.

49:53Is it fair to say that he was one man with one view before then and a completely different one afterwards? I think that's relatively true. Your listeners need to recall that on 9-11, 19 jihadists flew four different planes. Three of them crashed into the symbols of American power. Two planes crashed into the two world trade centers in New York City. A third plane crashed into the Pentagon, and it was a devastating blow to the symbols of American power. Those developments on 9-11 and the extreme apprehension that there would be follow up terrorist attacks led to this new doctrine, the Bush doctrine, in which the president stated that the United States would take unilateral, forceful, preemptive.

50:54many people called it preventative action to thwart attacks and to ultimately promote freedom around the world. That was what the Bush Doctrine was. Bronwyn, how does the Bush Doctrine, which starts as an effort merely to thwart America's enemies, to take the battle to them, as we've just heard the president say, How does that morph into a sense that not only are we taking the battle to them, but we are allowing them to change in ways that are good for them and good for us? It morphs very quickly. I think you have to remember as the context as well that the Soviet Union had fallen about a decade before.

51:40And the US had had this, from its point of view, glorious decade of thinking it had won the arguments of history. What I think we heard in that West Point speech was the sense of affront, outrage, bewilderment even, but absolute conviction that the U.S. had not only the right but the ability to strike back at these mysterious enemies in caves who had pulled off this astonishing terrorist attack. But you very quickly saw that begin to change, even in Afghanistan, where the, as military commanders say, the mission went very, very quickly from just trying to get Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, who had perpetrated the 9 -11 attacks.

52:23Then it morphed into, well, trying to get the Taliban who had supported them, but they were a great part of the fabric of the country. Then it morphed into bringing democracy to Afghanistan, also women's rights. And so even though we refer to the Bush doctrine, and it seemed very hard-edged in the beginning, it very quickly became something of such expansive idealism, it was almost doomed to fail. When you look at what they were trying to do, and specifically, I suppose, in Afghanistan and Iraq, but in other areas as well, how big a break was it with the past? The emphasis on democracy and on American ideals was not new.

53:04I think what was new to me was the conviction that America was right, as I said, following the implosion of the Soviet Union. Broadly, you know, the US's allies were behind it on Afghanistan. Iraq was quite different. This was George W. Bush heavily influenced by the very strong characters who had assembled around him. to say, OK, let's take this to another country. We think that Iraq is causing all kinds of problems. And they fastened in on the question of weapons of mass destruction, of this being the justification for going in there. But it was also immediately about bringing democracy to Iraq.

53:44And this was where the Bush doctrine got really controversial. Certainly the naivety of what it attempted in Iraq, not realising how complex the forces against it were, But that was new because of the times it was in. And I think George Bush and his team absolutely didn't understand that. And by 2006, Iraq was deep in civil war. Mel, they moved into Iraq, but before they moved into Iraq, they did go to the United Nations, didn't they? It wasn't a surefire thing that they would, but they did. Did the Bush doctrine include the idea that America was still enmeshed in the wider world? On the one hand, I would say Bush and many of his advisors did think that international institutions and in some ways alliances were a nuisance.

54:33On the other hand, they also were very cognizant of the fact that multilateral institutions and alliances enhanced American strength and power. And what was conspicuous about the developments leading to the invasion of Iraq was the tenacious effort that the United States did make in the fall of 2002 and early 2003 to get the United Nations essentially to authorize the invasion of Iraq. The administration failed to get that endorsement, but it worked very, very hard to get it. Bronwyn, is your sense that fundamentally they wanted to act in cohort, in collusion with the rest of the world? Absolutely.

55:28This is why Tony Blair's support was so important for the US when formal, big-scale United Nations support didn't come through. It became the coalition of the willing, but of countries very sympathetic to the US and respected internationally. That is quite different from what we're hearing now from the Trump administration, even in the national security strategy, which came out at the end of last year. There is an anger, goes beyond even disdain for multilateral institutions. It says that these weaken sovereignty, these weaken the individual nations. They are to be resisted or fought against. That is new.

56:06That is new, the attack on those things. Is that the biggest difference between Bush and Trump, Mel? I would emphasize the fact that since World War II, all American presidents, up till Donald Trump, believed in some sort of law-abiding international order. In different ways and at different times, they pursued that. What is so striking about the foreign policy of the Trump administration, what is so stark in the strategy statement of the Trump administration is the repudiation of any notion of international order. So just to make it clear, of the doctrines that we have covered, starting with Monroe, going to Truman, to Nixon, to Reagan, and now to Bush, you are saying all of those on one side of the ledger, as it were, and President Trump alone on the other side?

57:11Well, in some respects, that's true, but not in all respects. Many of these doctrines that you're alluding to did talk about American unilateralism, did focus on the assertion of American power. But almost all of them were established in a context in which the ultimate goal of all those post-World War II doctrines was to create a stable, liberal, law-abiding international order. And that's not what the Trump administration is doing. But the focus on unilateralism and the gathering of American military power, those elements are not new. Bronwyn? In a word, yes. Trump is on one side, and I agree with Mel, it is the post-war American presidents, whatever their political stripe, who are on the other because of this repudiation of the entire notion of international law.

58:19Mel, what do you make of the idea that there is a real difference with Donald Trump, that he just sees America as a geographical entity and nothing more than that, a very important one, but he doesn't see it as an example for anyone? That's absolutely true. And his strategy statement explicitly repudiates any notion of pursuing freedom or liberty or traditional American ideals. And it explicitly states that the goal of American foreign policy is to promote American power and American interests. Mel Leffler and Bronwyn Maddox. And that was five presidents and five doctrines, all of which in some way still resonate today.

59:12And as for President Trump's doctrine, his current worldview, with all the disruption it's causing, well, it's a bit of a cop-out, but let us just say the history books have yet to be written.

59:28US foreign policy in five doctrines was presented by me, Justin Webb, and the producer was Caroline Bailey. Is the US conceding the green energy race to China? When the Trump administration said it was pulling out of the Paris Agreement for a second time, it seemed like a wholesale withdrawal from the climate change question. All the while, China's becoming a global powerhouse of green technology. What could happen in the long run if the US continues to cede the floor to China on clean energy? Listen to The Global Story on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.