Trump Is De-Stereotyping Republican Foreign Policy

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For a while, the title of this post was going to be something along the lines of the following —

• “Toward a Neo-Racist Foreign Policy”

• “A Racist Foreign Policy for America”

• “Bringing Racism Back In”

• “Neoclassical Realism and Theories of Racist Foreign Policy”¹

— and the topic would have been what we should expect from a second Donald Trump administration if the president is no longer prevented by his staffers from doing all the things he’s wont to do. The premise of the argument would have been that Trump sometimes behaves based on unjustified racial stereotypes, at least more than the so-called “adults in the room.” And the conclusion would have been that, since the relevant stereotypes about most American adversaries are that they’re scheming, duplicitous, and motivated by crazy totalitarian ideologies, the second Trump administration is going to be far more belligerent than the first.

That’s what I believed a week ago. And it’s what I would have written if I still believed it. But I’m no longer convinced by the argument. While Trump is likely to pursue a more foolhardy foreign policy compared to his first administration, it isn’t because he gives more credence to negative stereotypes than the median Republican policymaker. To the contrary, while negative stereotypes are a linchpin of the orthodox Republican worldview, Trump is instead driven by ego and personalistic self-interest. This means that he’s driven to more rationally assess the capabilities, interests, and resolve of other states’ leadership, but he’s also more likely to conduct foreign policy to redound to his own personal benefit rather than the national interest.

I make this argument in four parts. First, I establish what it means for a policymaker to engage in stereotypical thinking. Second, I show that conventional Republican foreign policy is based largely on unjustified stereotypes of foreign adversaries. Third, I show that Trump’s foreign policy is instead guided by ego and self-interest. Finally, I draw out some implications for the second Trump administration’s foreign policy.

What Is Stereotypical Thinking?

Stereotyping — and group identity and race more broadly — are seriously undertheorized in international politics. (And I mean theory here in the scientific sense, not that there aren’t enough articles about postcolonialism or the international as a Space of Queer Black Joy or whatever.)

Jonathan Mercer, the author of one of the few theoretical treatments of racial stereotypes in the international relations literature, argues that this is because scholars assume policymakers are rational and therefore impervious to stereotypical thinking. Yet, besides ignoring the whole historical canon from the 16th century on, Mercer says, this view simply lacks a strong theoretical justification. There are plenty of irrational psychological biases that influence state behavior. And even if the international system punishes states that behave irrationally, human cognition is imperfect and irrationality is an inevitable feature of the social world.

According to Mercer, stereotypical thinking is distinguished by its combination of two features. First, stereotypical thinkers rely on dispositional rather than situational explanations for the behavior of others. This means that they attribute other states’ actions to the inherent characteristics of their populations rather than consider the circumstances that might influence relevant actions and outcomes. If a country fails to marshal a great deal of force, for example, someone with a dispositional explanatory style might say that it’s because of the inherent characteristics of that country’s population rather than the international distribution of material power. As Mercer recounts, “[b]efore Pearl Harbor, Westerners thought that the Japanese could not shoot straight because their eyes were slanted,² [while] the British naval attaché in Tokyo reported that the Japanese had ‘slow brains,’ and Britain’s commander in chief in China thought that the Japanese and the Chinese were ‘inferior yellow races.’³”

Second, policymakers who stereotype fail to update their beliefs about others in response to actors behaving contrary to their expectations. Whereas rational observers update their beliefs in the face of countervailing evidence, those who stereotype assimilate new information about other actors into their preexisting schemas. One who believes in a stereotype will therefore see evidence for the stereotype no matter what happens on the international stage. If a state that’s stereotyped as duplicitous complies with an international agreement and its compliance is verified by inspectors, someone who engages in stereotyping might believe that the state’s compliance is really proof that it’s behaving badly behind the scenes while luring its enemies into a false sense of security.

When both these elements are present, a policymaker’s thinking is stereotypical. Simple irrationality is not stereotypical; it also has to invoke dispositional explanations for behavior. Likewise, merely dispositional explanations for behavior are not stereotypes; they have to be irrationally dispositional. The hallmarks of irrational dispositional thinking are, as Mercer puts it, quoting Bob Jervis, that policymakers “see evidence as less ambiguous than it is, think that their views are steadily being confirmed, and so feel justified in holding to them ever more firmly.”⁴ Therefore, stereotypes tend to be very durable.

Republican Foreign Policy as Stereotyping

Stereotypical thinking has traditionally played a key role in the foreign policy orthodoxy of the American right. During the Cold War, neoconservative hawks, as well as some mainline conservatives, like William F. Buckley, Jr., and his motley band of wordcels, feverishly clung to the assertion that the Soviet Union couldn’t be negotiated with because the Russians were atheistic communists compelled by their Marxist-Leninist ideology to seek the destruction of American society. Even when anti-communist stalwart Richard Nixon managed to pull off détente and showed that diplomacy with the Soviets was possible, Buckley and the neocons accused him of appeasing the communists. When Ronald Reagan entertained Soviet overtures to end the Cold War, conservative intellectuals went apoplectic. George Will compared Reagan meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev to Neville Chamberlain meeting with Hitler to sign the Munich Agreement; Buckley declared that “to greet [the Soviet Union] as if it were no longer evil is on the order of changing our entire position toward Adolf Hitler on receiving the news that he has abolished one exterminating camp.”

Even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, conservative foreign policy remained largely driven by stereotypical thinking. Charles Krauthammer, for instance, wrote in his famous “Unipolar Moment” essay that the primary threat to the United States after the Cold War was to be “relatively small, peripheral and backward states” that sought to acquire weapons of mass destruction due to a grudge against the new world order. As Krauthammer put it:

The current Weapon States have deep grievances against the West and the world order that it has established and enforces. They are therefore subversive of the international status quo, which they see as a residue of colonialism. These resentments fuel an obsessive drive to high tech military development as the only way to leapfrog history and to place themselves on a footing from which to challenge a Western-imposed order.

The obsession with so-called “Weapon States” continued to dominate conservative foreign policy thought even as the states themselves made overtures at joining the new world order and sought rapprochement with the United States. Republicans in Congress worked to derail a 1994 agreement with North Korea that had successfully frozen North Korea’s nuclear development because they believed that the North Koreans were inherently untrustworthy; in 2002, the Bush administration withdrew from the deal altogether. Republican hawks and the Bush administration also erroneously stereotyped Saddam Hussein as a mortal enemy of the United States rather than a pragmatic actor who was much more concerned with the threat posed by Iran than anything involving the Americans. Bush rebuffed offers by Saddam prior to the 2003 Iraq invasion to allow American inspectors into the country, meanwhile the administration interpreted the fact that U.N. weapons inspectors failed to find any evidence of a nuclear program as proof that Saddam was exceptionally good at hiding weapons.

While the current generation of Republican foreign policy elites is too young to have played a major role in the Cold War or the “Weapon States” politics in its immediate aftermath, they nevertheless inherit the longstanding Republican tradition of foreign policy stereotyping. No matter how much evidence can be produced that countries like China and Iran, for example, are defensive realist powers primarily concerned with their own security — that accept many institutions of the international order while rejecting others — the Republican hawks are utterly convinced that they’re hell-bent on world domination. Congressman Mike Waltz, Trump’s incoming national security advisor, warns that the Chinese “seek to dominate the world [and establish] a new world order with America subservient to China.” Senator Marco Rubio, Trump’s nominee for Secretary of State, believes the United States and China are hopelessly locked in a New Cold War — something that would likely come as a surprise to Chinese leadership.

Waltz, Rubio, and virtually all the rest of the Republican establishment also contend that Iran is compelled by an irrational hatred of the United States and Israel to relentlessly pursue nuclear weapons. This is despite U.S. intelligence having known since at least 2007 that Iran has not had an active nuclear weapons program since 2003, and Iran having vowed in 2015 that “under no circumstances will [it] ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons,” while severely curtailing its civilian nuclear program. In fact, even though the 2015 nuclear deal had more than quadrupled the time it would have taken Iran to produce enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon, while international authorities repeatedly verified Iran’s compliance, Rubio declared in 2018 that the deal had “pave[d] the Iranian terror regime’s path to nuclear weapons.”

The median GOP foreign policy expert.

The perspective that China and Iran are maximally aggressive and committed wholesale to the destruction of the international order (yet simultaneously weak and vulnerable enough that the United States can confront them militarily without incurring excessive risk to itself) is shared by virtually the whole of the Republican foreign policy establishment today. With perhaps two exceptions, there is almost no one who’s been nominated to a national security post in the Trump administration, or who works as a foreign policy analyst at one of the leading conservative think tanks, who doesn’t have this particular view of the Chinese and Iranian leadership. The first, Director of National Intelligence nominee Tulsi Gabbard, was a Democrat just two years ago and it’s a coin flip whether she’ll be confirmed to that basically ceremonial office.

And the second is Donald Trump.

Trumpism, or: What’s Self-Love Got to Do with It?

Trump is surprisingly not a stereotypical foreign policy thinker. Stereotyping requires having strong, inflexible beliefs about the inherent characteristics of others. Trump’s beliefs, to the contrary, are subject to change based on how useful he assesses someone to be for advancing his personal interests at any particular moment.

This is why Trump’s apparent beliefs and actions toward many foreign states and leaders have changed rapidly in a relatively short period of time. In September 2017, Trump declared that North Korea’s Kim Jong Un was suicidal; by early 2019, he had personally met with Kim twice and claimed he deserved the Nobel Peace Prize for doing so. From 2017 to early 2019, Trump repeatedly raised the possibility of invading Venezuela, then changed his mind in mid-2019 after deciding that President Nicolás Maduro was “strong” and opposition leader Juan Guaidó was “weak” and “the Beto O’Rourke of Venezuela.” In late 2019, Trump decided to wash his hands of the war in Syria, believing the U.S. troop presence there was widely unpopular and President Bashar al-Assad didn’t pose a threat to American interests; then a year later, he claimed he had wanted to assassinate Assad in order to impress the hosts of Fox & Friends.

When Trump buys into Republican orthodoxy about China and Iran, it’s only insofar as it’s politically expedient. Trump’s primary complaint about China is not that it wants to establish its own totalitarian world order, but rather that it’s ripping the United States off economically. Where most Republicans appear to believe Xi Jinping is a cartoonish villain and the Chinese Communist Party is the sole source of evil in the world, Trump says Xi is a “brilliant man” because he looks strong and he sends Trump nice letters. Insofar as China is cast as a villain in Trump’s narrative, it’s not because he thinks China is villainous; it’s to please the people he’s accountable to, who really hate China.

Similarly, it seems that one of the main driving forces behind Trump’s Iran policy to date has been his concern with shoring up support domestically and securing his re-election. In 2015, he played into the craven hysteria of the Republican base and staked out a maximally aggressive position on the Iran nuclear deal, appearing at an anti-Iran deal rally outside the U.S. Capitol alongside his then-opponent Ted Cruz. Throughout his first administration, he promoted his belligerence toward Iran as one of his key foreign policy victories. And in 2020, after assassinating Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, Trump tweeted a low-resolution image of an American flag and claimed that he was keeping the United States safe from terrorism, while his campaign immediately started running Facebook ads to fundraise off the assassination. (This was despite a total lack of evidence that Soleimani posed an imminent threat to U.S. interests.)

Yet, when aggression against Iran has carried a significant political cost, Trump has pulled back from military action, even as more orthodox Republicans have continued to agitate for it. This occurred at least four times during Trump’s first administration, including during repeated near-miss scenarios in which the United States and Iran teetered on the brink of war:

• In June 2019, Trump followed the advice of national security advisor John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and ordered a strike against Iranian targets in retaliation for Iran shooting down a U.S. drone over the Strait of Hormuz, then recalled the mission just 10 minutes before the payload was to be delivered. According to Trump, this is because he was concerned about potential civilian casualties. Republican Senators Tom Cotton and Lindsey Graham had also clamored for the president to attack Iran’s navy and oil refineries, and three months later, Graham would call Trump’s failure to strike “a sign of weakness.”

• In September 2019, Trump announced that the United States was again “locked and loaded” to respond to an attack by Iranian-supported actors against Saudi oil facilities, then pulled back the next day, fearing escalation. Graham again called for bombing Iran’s oil refineries, while Pompeo said that Iran had carried out an “act of war.”

• In January 2020, Trump illegally assassinated Soleimani, then backed down after Iran responded by firing missiles at a U.S. air base in Iraq. Graham remarked that after the missile attack, Trump should have taken Iran “out of the oil business.” Vice President Mike Pence, when reportedly asked by General Mark Milley around this time why he was so obsessed with attacking Iran, responded: “Because they are evil.”

• In March 2020, administration officials including Pompeo and national security advisor Robert O’Brien mocked up a plan to escalate the U.S. troop presence in Iraq and go to war with Iranian-backed militias in response to periodic clashes between the militias and U.S. troops and contractors. Trump sided against escalation, reportedly because of the costs it would have imposed on the United States and because it would have distracted from dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic.

• Finally, after Trump lost re-election in November 2020, he repeatedly asked for military plans to strike Iranian targets so he could start a war and remain in office under the premise that the country couldn’t change leaders during a national security crisis. He had to be talked out of military action by his advisors, including Pompeo and O’Brien, who finally convinced him that it was “too late to hit” the Iranians on January 3, 2021.

On each occasion save the last, Republican hawks agitated for war with Iran because they believed Iran was evil, irrational, duplicitous, or could be dealt with only by using force. Meanwhile Trump, after initially following his advisors, became increasingly hesitant to attack Iran as he realized they behaved rationally in response to incentives and could impose unacceptable costs on the United States that would hurt his chances of winning re-election. Once he lost the 2020 election and he no longer had anything to lose but potentially much to gain by attacking Iran, however, he changed his position again and supported military action.

This is not a pattern of behavior you would expect from a policymaker engaged in stereotyping. Stereotypes are fixed. They don’t change based on extraneous factors or things that are true and false about the world. Yet, Trump changes his assessment of other actors all the time based on how useful he thinks they are for helping him fulfill his goals and how nice he thinks they’re being to him. Basically his entire governing philosophy is organized around inducing and coercing others to bolster his own status, while leeching as much money as possible through extortion and petty corruption. When your interests are so simplistic and dependent on being able to manipulate others, you don’t really have the latitude to cling to false images about others’ interests and character.

The Next Four Years

The conceit of Trump’s foreign policy is that, even though it’s mostly instrumentally rational, it’s also driven by Trump’s own provincial self-interest. Sometimes this coincides with the national interest, as when he avoided escalating with Iran for fear that it would lose him the election. Much of the time, however, Trump’s interests are tangential or directly opposed to the national interest.

The first time around, Trump was constrained by public opinion. The second time around, he’ll likely be much less preoccupied with such things as poll numbers because he won’t be running in any future elections. His interests will lie primarily in settling personal scores: that is, exacting revenge on his enemies and returning favors to the elites of the Republican Party who accommodated his hostile takeover of its institutions, who now do the grunt work of making his administration function, who cling to fanciful notions about Chinese and Iranian designs on world domination, and whose true-blue, red-blooded American hearts swell with jingoistic fervor at the prospect of burning flesh on the other side of the world. Many of these elites also believe, as it was put by neocon godfather Michael Ledeen — whose daughter was the Pentagon’s point woman for the Middle East during the last year of Trump’s first administration — that: “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.”

The Bigger Dick Foreign Policy Theory, as George Carlin called it, may be making a comeback. The central premise of the theory is as follows: “What, they have bigger dicks? Bomb them!”

A proper political scientist would have given it a more urbane title, but Carlin’s suffices. Whatever foreign policy makes Trump look like the world’s biggest dick-haver, either over the next four years or in the history books, has a very good chance of coming to pass. Anyone who crosses him, or who he thinks is ripping him off, will be met with threats of tariffs and sanctions (ironically the very tools responsible for countries moving to abandon U.S. dollar hegemony in the first place). Special operations will once again be stretched past their limits in the Middle East, Africa, and — yes — Mexico. And the troops will all stay where they are: If there’s anything we learned from Joe Biden, it’s that ending a war will haunt you much more than starting one.

It’s unclear how much the Chinese have to fear, since it’s a very flashy, big dick move to extort Taiwan into buying more big-ticket defense platforms that they don’t need instead of giving them cheap and effective asymmetric systems that would actually help in case of an invasion. It’s also a big dick move to impose massive tariffs and advanced technology restrictions on China, although the Chinese are likely to benefit when Trump’s abuse of economic warfare inevitably accelerates geoeconomic fragmentation.

As for the Iranians, Trump likely won’t ever forgive them for being the problem child of his first administration. In another universe, Trump could have done with Iran what he did with North Korea and declared himself the Dealmaker of All Dealmakers. But the Iranians — who, like the Americans, engage in stereotyping — foolishly turned down Trump’s offer to meet without preconditions and got on his bad side instead. It’s probably fair to assume that he holds a grudge against them due to their alleged attempts on his life, for example. Whether this means Trump would opt for military action is hard to tell, but to paraphrase Michael Tracey, if Trump does indeed live out the decades-long Republican fantasy of bombing Iran, we can rest assured that the bombs will have been dropped by a non-stereotyper.

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1. I thought this last one would really roll off the tongue.

2. John W. Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), 335.

3. Quoted in Zoltán I. Búzás, “Race and International Politics: How Racial Prejudice Can Shape Discord and Cooperation among Great Powers” (PhD dissertation, Ohio State University, 2012), 71.

4. Robert Jervis, How Statesmen Think: The Psychology of International Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 206.