 He is also held a visiting position at Harvard Princeton, University of California, University of Chile, and also Mexico City, and he was the Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer in American Foreign Policy in the Beijing Foreign Studies University. So, he's had a very wide international spread, while maintaining, of course, his main field of interest, which is international security and comparative foreign policy, and a special focus on American ground strategy and foreign policy. I think his current work is particularly in the eyes of the intersection of international security and political economy, and his publications include politics and strategy, artisan ambition and American statecraft, and his prize winning book defining the national interest conflict to change in American foreign policy. The juxtaposition of the interest, its interest in international security and political economy, is of particular interest because I think we've been reading and understanding for some time the factor which is very influential in this election, but 70% of Americans are frustrated with the economy, which is an extraordinary high figure as we were discussing. And that Washington is not working for these Americans. So, it is with great anticipation that we will hear you view, which is, as I say, extremely relevant on. So, we're very welcome. Thank you. So, it's great to be here, and it's great also to have a chance to play hooky for work for a day, and to reflect on the gift that keeps on giving from people in my line of work, Donald Trump. I mean, really, if you'd asked someone, you know, a year ago, you know, whether IIEA would be bringing somebody in to give a talk on Donald Trump, you would have thought you were trapped in some kind of presidential reality TV show. You know, this is not reality TV, man. The folks that do reality TV who produce it couldn't make this stuff up. And it's not over by country models. I sit down in Texas. So, I can see you're panicked. I'm just starting. So, my short grade is Donald Trump's foreign policy. What would it be if this really happens? I mean, it does. You know, I told the manager of the U.S. center that I was coming at the L.C. that I was coming here to talk on Trump. She quit well, at least it will be short. So, and, you know, I was coming through customs this morning, and customs agent, a woman says to me, well, why are you here? I thought that would be good enough. She said, well, why? I said, Donald Trump. She said, you're kidding. Are you for or against? So, you know, so I reassured her, you know, and she let me through. So, she actually said her parting shot was you can go to the pub afterwards. So, and so on this business about, you know, I mean, in a way, the center, her name's Stephanie, you know, she's right. I mean, it could be short because he has an issue like, you know, a lot of white paper. It's about what the policy is going to be. I mean, this is, you know, they don't have issues, very many issue papers on foreign policy or anything else for that matter. And, you know, they used to say that George W. Bush was a detailed kind of guy. Now, Trump has an explanation for why he doesn't put out policy. And he says it's a secret. Why tell your enemies? What are you going to do in advance of this? And he's going to say this? That's bad strategy, he says. Why tell your enemies? He's got it all. But hey, what about your friends? Why keep them in the dark? It makes you wonder whether Mr. Trump thinks America has many friends. I mean, you know, I know who's Vladimir, but... So, in all seriousness, Trump does have something of a foreign policy strategy. And if you rummage around in the toolbox of strategies that academics like myself teach about, the one that Trump's foreign policy strategy comes closest to is called retrenchment. It's a time-hardened strategy that statesmen throughout history have used, sometimes with success, and sometimes not so much. And remember that last point because none of it turned to it before I'm done. Now, I'm going to talk a little bit about retrenchment, retrenchment strategies, and then what Donald Trump's retrenchment might look like before kind of wrapping up by talking about what the downsides of an American retrenchment might be, both for the United States and not here, internationally. So retrenchment is basically a strategy that relies heavily on diplomacy to reduce or to lower the costs of foreign policy. It's a costly strategy. A few decades ago, a political scientist, the guy named Harvard political scientist named Samuel Huntington. You know, Samuel Huntington of classic civilizations and many, many books. Cataloged in an article that appeared in foreign affairs. The many ways that leaders can retrench, they can, as Huntington pointed out, draw sharper distinctions between their country's vital and peripheral interests. They can use diplomacy to reduce threats and pressure allies to increase their share of collective defence, collective security to invest more of their own resources in military spending. They can look for ways to substitute cheaper forms of power for more expensive ones or devise more efficient ways to get greater kind of strategic bang or output from the same resources. In short, retrenchment is a strategy that sees little virtue in expansive ends or expensive means. Many in my line of work think America should retrench. For those of you who read foreign affairs, John Mersheimer and Steve Walt recently had a piece two issues ago, I guess. They call for Washington to adopt a smaller geopolitical footprint. In other words, to become an offshore balancer rather than the world's busy body. My phrase, not theirs. That's a classic example. What they lay out is a classic example of retrenchment. America, they say, is over-committed. It is trying to do too many things in too many places, and that's a prescription for strategic failure. America, they argue, should go back. Strange as it might seem, Americans are no strangers to retrenchment. Indeed, many presidents go back all the way to the founding at different points in time presidents have embraced strategies of retrenchment. In the 1970s, Richard Nixon, his America, found himself in a strategic mind that is not all that different, really, than the one that faces America today. The need for international leadership was great, but America's political ability to provide it was weakened by war and then by economic controls, by the great stagflation of the 1970s, in a sense that Americans had that were losing ground internationally, economically, and that their kids were not as good as their own lives. To close the gap, Nixon tried to redefine the nation's interests. Many of you will remember that, right? Through a day taught with Mexico, pressuring NATO allies to increase their defense budget. It was called, there was a term for it, job on me, job on me, on my mouth, on my eyes. Get it upon me up. Nixon used to say, hey, if you don't work with me, I have to work with those guys behind me and come with us, but they had a better deal with me. Right? So you put the card in the screws to the end, to what you're starting to do. A few more. And finally, to pass some of the cost of containing Moscow on to China by forming a tacit alliance with Beijing. My enemy's enemy is my friend, is what he figured, and so he forged an alliance. This was part of retrenchment. The idea was to reduce the cost to the United States by getting others to pick up more of the tab, more of the burden of providing that public good called international security. So get the Chinese to put leverage in effect on the Russians, or to put that in other ways to give the Russians something else to think about besides the full gap, right? And kind of, you know, NATO. And just as a side, it worked because the Russians moved about one-third of their forces from the Western military districts to the Eastern military districts. Because the Chinese and the Soviet, they didn't get along too well. They were shooting at each other, across the Usurri River. Anyway, so that was, you know, what Nixon did was he tried to adjust and to retrench, to bring him to means back into balance, to bring American foreign policy with the United States who was trying to do a broad back into sync with what American would prepare to start. And his efforts, well, they were partly successful. One key reason that his strategy never reached its full potential was his pension for secrecy and executive discretion. It meant that his foreign policies never gained enough legitimacy to withstand the inevitable second guessing from his many critics. At a time when presidents, including Obama, are relying increasingly on executive orders to conduct their foreign policies, Nixon's experience is worth bearing in mind. But relying on strategic and diplomatic steps to engineer a retrenchment in today's world faces other problems too. I'm getting to trouble. But one thing, any effort by any president to engineer a Nixon-style retrenchment is unlikely to work. It will stoke fears of abandonment on America's allies, especially in Asia. In Nixon's day, there was no rising China that can tend with. Should Washington try to cut costs by striking some kind of grand bargain with Beijing over, say, Taiwan's sovereignty, it will only fuel doubts in Japan, South Korea, about the credibility of the U.S. commitments? Meanwhile, attacking the problem from the international side alone will not cure the kind of populist fear that is bubbling up from below in the United States, which in a very roundabout way brings us to Donald Trump. Like Nixon, Trump worried to become president with pursuer protections. Part of this has to do with Trump's own worldview. Believe it or not, for all the stuff that he seems to say on the spur of the moment, there are some things that he has been saying consistently for about three decades, especially when it comes to foreign policy. There's a great piece by Tom Wright in the Brookings Institution that appeared. I think in Brookings, I think another version of it appeared in the Atlantic many four or five months back about Trump's worldview. I recommend it. It's very well done. As he said, boy, he hasn't seen this kind of stuff since the 19th century. Some of the positions that Trump said. The key thing about the piece is he catalogs in real detail the consistency in Trump's positions going back to 1987. Trump, you may or may not know, has had an interest in being president of the United States for a very long time. Occasionally, he's taken a pass at it. Cheese, I could do a better job. That, you know, has tested the waters through interviews and so forth. There's a kind of record in addition to the various interviews that he did in those kind of important academic journals like Playboy. He's there is a track record in a sense to draw a record in a sense to draw a record in a sense to draw on. And one of those things that he's been rather consistent he's been real consistent is his view that America spends way too much time putting other countries interest. It's time, as he likes to say, to put America first. Now, if you've forgotten your history, that's a catchy phrase, but if you're, it's the same phrase of American isolation as we used in the 1930s before Hitler attacked Poland and many even afterwards, Trump has echoed these various sentiments really for over for over two decades in a way. He thinks that other parts of the world are taking advantage of America and that the number one guilty party in his eyes, the trans-Atlantic alliance is a one-way street with Europe free-riding on the United States. He hasn't said that Trump in the Trump presidency in the United States would pull out of America on the other hand, he hasn't said it would stay in either. If stingy allies are a problem for Trump so big trade packs like TPP and TTA Trump sees those as human beings or as a human stick with it bad deeds. His view of torture nuclear proliferation tolerable. Democracy promotion, bad are just as clear cut. He's got pretty unquivocal positions they're clear cut, they may not be reassuring but they're clear cut. His view of America's commitments overseas those are the ones I think, these are the ones the idea that America can reneg or at least renegotiate its commitments without any cost truly is willing to spend more money on defense there's a catch Americans he's not talking about forward he's talking about fortress big difference forward defense is what America has preached and followed since World War II fortress of defense Now whether Donald Trump would actually implement these policies that's unclear I don't know what he does I don't think he's gotten that far or at least in how he would implement it but there are reasons to think that in the main he would follow something along these lines pulling back where he could and trying to renegotiate where he could in short he would pursue a strategy of retrenchment and much the way Nixon did perhaps look for ways to get China to contain itself and try to get Russia certainly try to get allies to do more for collective defense I think that is the case and in something of a reversal entertain the idea of a tacit alliance with Moscow to pressure the Asians to make concessions to Washington What makes me so confident that Trump could move in this direction is general direction The reasons I think have less to do with Trump personally than with the structure of the situation that he finds himself in or that he would find himself on January 20th Indeed the structural conditions facing the next president will be such that I'm willing to venture a bet here that even if Hill Hillary Clinton wins in November she'll follow a path that is not altogether different I'm sure Clinton's foreign policy would not be a carbon copy of Trump's she doesn't share his view on torture she doesn't share his view on nuclear proliferation she doesn't share his view on promoting democracy she is, after all, an avowed internationalist Trump is not but she would face some of the same basic pressures to trim America's international sales and why Trump is unlikely to be in a position to resist even if she wants now I'm going to venture So there are two reasons for things Two reasons the next president is going to be looking for ways to scale back One is is that Americans are no longer convinced that internationalist policies are in the country's best Rightly or wrongly they see cheap Chinese imports illegal Mexican immigrants and yes free-riding NATO allies as evidence because I don't subscribe to this view as evidence that internationalist policies that once worked for America are no longer paying the same kind of economic dividends for the country or for individual American voters Do all American voters believe this? No Internationalism is still a powerful force but do a sizable number and a growing number of Americans share these views I think the answer to that is yes and I think that's what this election cycle one of the many things this election cycle has revealed is that this is gaining strength in the United States moreover and importantly they blame Washington for failing to get things right internationally as well as domestic Today less than 20% of Americans say they trust the federal government to do the right thing These voters are the ones who have been drawn to America Trump's America's first nationalism and for that matter Bernie Sanders' brand Trump's agenda appealed to voters convinced that Washington doesn't have to invest in it and it's not too hard I think to see why many of them might wonder why their leaders are not insisting that wealthy democracies like Japan and Germany put a larger share of their income towards collective defense they don't bother themselves with the details about Japan's constitution right? or why Congress has looked the other way at millions of factory workers have seen their jobs outsourced to China and other emerging economies that's not hyperbole that has been demonstrated factual by very good many surely ask why the two parties cannot find common ground on the new immigration policy given that immigration the immigration status quo does drive wages down and strain social services especially for those on the lowest rungs of the social economic lab now to be sure this is not the first time in the United States that calls for burden sharing in managed trade and tighter immigration in a US presidential campaign these issues have never gained a kind of political traction with voters that they have in this electoral cycle at least not in the modern era much of this has to do with the fact that many Americans have not benefited from the economic recovery but it also reflects Americans' growing sense that the US can at a time when America does not face a strategic peer competitor the risks of doing less relatively low internationally the United States enjoys a great deal of what I like to call geopolitical slack or latitude China should be watched but it doesn't pose a Soviet style threat to American interests ISIS is an ongoing challenge but it too does not pose an existential challenge to American security Obama echoed this view in his much discussed interview in the Atlantic Monthly last spring that Americans are much more worried about the state of the economy than they are about foreign threats now that is not to say that an attack on American soil wouldn't get America's interest I mean yesterday with what happened in New York I mean there's immediate speculation about what where is that coming from terrorist groups involved and so forth and there's a spike of concern about terrorism if it's somehow connected to that that you know in the polls but then that will come down again and the economy will be the dominant concern as it has been for quite a long time in the US so what will this mean for US foreign policy going forward well this much I think is clear any president who wants to pursue an active internationalist agenda in 2017 will face stiffer political odds than his or her predecessor did this is why I say that even if Hillary Clinton wins the presidency she will be under pressure to trim America's sales would a Clinton retrenchment be better than a Trump one yes and not just because it would be done with kind of like less twoing and throwing Clinton would have the advantage at home as well as abroad of being perceived as something of a hawk on foreign policy personally I think that's overdone but perceptions matter in politics yet whether it's Trump or Clinton I predict that the next president will be looking for ways to prioritize and to economize internationally this will likely mean greater emphasis on core strategic interest for the United States like protecting the maritime commons and less on peripheral ones like democracy promotion will likely mean more attention devoted to East Asia and less on the Middle East and greater emphasis on burden sharing and less on nation building now for those who see America's vast array of overseas commitments as excessive and unnecessary and downright dangerous this will be welcome news better to get allies and friends to do more of the international heavy lifting by taking away their American security blanket and forcing them to fend for themselves and there are many in the United States that take that view and they're not all you know Trump supporters are a lot of you know highly educated people right that take this position that the US is engaged in a problem it's a moral hazard problem it is spending way too much time supporting other countries and it gets itself into trouble better to let them work out their own problems and find their own path forward for those who worry like myself about the potential downside risks of a smaller American geopolitical footprint like regional instability in a place like Asia how and where those commitments are redrawn will be of critical importance so going forward or looking forward what I anticipate from Washington is what we might call internationalism light internationalism yes but internationalism on the cheap would I feel better about having Hillary Clinton with her hand on the tiller yes I don't know if Donald Trump is beyond repair as former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates put it over the weekend but he doesn't inspire a great deal of confidence Clinton has many shortcomings but the last thing one would accuse her of is being mercurial volatility is just not in her nature and it's not exactly what the United States needs right now I say all this because my view in my view the great challenge facing the next president is going to be finding ways of pursuing a more restrained calculated purposeful internationalism without fueling doubts about American credibility abroad it's not easy to navigate that and I suppose I should close by saying there's a bit of irony in this after all it was only a little over a decade ago that America's closest allies worried about the risks of being too closely aligned to a kind of hyperactive United States in the next four years we're likely to hear less about the risks of grand US designs and more likely to hear about the fears of American abandonment and I'll stop it right there