D
onald Trump’s shocking victory on November 8 has
upended much of what the world thought it could
expect from the United States over the next four years.
Instead of the experienced and relatively predictable
Hillary Clinton, world leaders will be confronted with a
political neophyte who has failed to demonstrate an
understanding of even the most basic elements of
international politics. erefore, one of the most pressing
matters for observers of the U.S. is to consider what can be
expected from the incoming Trump administration.
It is dicult to identify Trump’s policy priorities
because he continues to make conicting statements and
because his campaign platform was, in
large part, radical and unrealistic.
However, what we can do at this point is
trace the chief elements of his worldview,
which he has made no attempt to hide
over the years. We can also explore some
of the potential consequences of his
approach to politics, by drawing
comparisons with another right-wing
populist who successfully exploited
resentment of elites and fear of perceived
foreign threats, and in doing so did
lasting damage on American political
culture: Joseph McCarthy. e striking
parallels between the president-elect and
this infamous demagogue should serve as
a warning to those who believe that
Trump will “normalize” once he takes the
oath of oce. If anything, the expectations
of his core supporters – who are
profoundly distrustful of the political
establishment and who are demanding radical solutions –
will reinforce the businessman’s commitment to extremist
right-wing populism. e result could be a period in
American history even more damaging than McCarthyism.
Foreign Policy as Domestic Politics
omas Wright, in the rst lengthy analysis of Trump’s
worldview, writes that the President-elect “has thought
long and hard about America’s global role.” In developing
this argument, Wright attributes to Trump more in the
way of considered thought than is warranted (though, to
be fair, Wright’s piece was written in early 2016, before
ETH Zurich
CSS
Donald Trump’s Foreign
Policy: McCarthyism as a
Cautionary Tale
The president-elect’s foreign policy worldview is worryingly
reminiscent of the most notorious right-wing populist in
U.S. history.
By Jack Thompson
Key Points
In order to understand Donald Trump’s foreign policy we should
consider the legacy of Senator Joseph McCarthy, the infamous
right-wing anti-communist
Like McCarthy, Trump has built a base of working-class white
support with a message that combines populist criticism of elites
with exaggerated depictions of foreign threats
Trump’s populist rhetoric does not offer a coherent set of ideas for
U.S. foreign policy and is not designed to – its primary purpose is to
energize his supporters and demonize his opponents
This means that Trump is unlikely to “normalize” once in office, as he
will need this base to support his reelection in 2020
Policy Perspectives
Vol. 4/10, December 2016
McCarthyism as a Cautionary Tale 2
most people took Trump seriously).
Certainly, as Wright astutely notes,
Trump has a history of critiquing, albeit
in a supercial manner, the liberal
international order that the United States
has promoted since the 1940s. Trump
has, from time to time, complained that
the U.S. does not get its money’s worth
from its security alliances around the
world – that its allies have been, in eect,
taking advantage of Uncle Sam – and
that the globalized economy is not
working as well as it could for Americans.
To call this a “remarkably coherent
and consistent” foreign policy worldview,
however, as Wright does, is problematic.
1
e transcripts from lengthy interviews
Trump gave to the e New York Times
and e Washington Post, for instance,
reveal that he has given virtually no
thought to the most pressing problems in
world aairs, let alone how they might be solved. His
inability to discuss the subject in even moderately coherent
terms is troubling. Instead of mastering the details, or even
the chief elements, of the issues his contention is that he
will, through sheer force of his personality and business
acumen, negotiate better “deals” with other countries. is
approach will, to put it diplomatically, encounter obstacles
when he begins to interact with his foreign counterparts.
Instead of identifying a systematic worldview where
one does not exist, a more useful way of conceptualizing
Trump’s approach is to think of foreign policy as little more
than an extension of his political agenda. Or, to put it crude-
ly, Trump doesn’t care about real-world implications; what
he cares about are votes. More specically, he has used criti-
cism of the liberal international order to build the base of
his political support. Once we understand this crucial aspect
of Trumpism – which combines populist rhetoric about the
downsides of the globalized economy with overtly racist ap-
peals to white nationalism and a vague promise to “Make
America Great Again” – the sheer implausibility of his plat-
form begins to make a bit more sense. It appeals to a spe-
cic, disaected cohort that he has been cultivating since
the day he announced his candidacy for president: working-
class whites. In fact, it is clear that Trump’s high-prole em-
brace of birtherism in 2011 and 2012 – in which he en-
dorsed the conspiracy theory that Barack Obama is not an
American citizen and is therefore ineligible to be president
– was a trial run for the type of campaign he ran in 2016.
Trump earned the support of two-thirds of whites
without a college degree voters on Election Day. According
to exit polling data, Trump won nearly two-thirds of the
votes from those for whom immigration was the most
important issue as well as from those who viewed
international trade as a threat to American jobs. (It is no
accident that he launched his campaign with a speech in
which he called Mexican immigrants rapists.) He also won
57 percent of the vote from voters most concerned about
terrorism.
2
In eect, Trump has created a near-perfect
message for white voters without a college degree who are,
not without reason, disenchanted with the state of
mainstream politics. at this voting bloc constitutes more
than forty percent of the electorate gives it the power to
potentially determine elections. However, recent
Republican presidential candidates, such as Mitt Romney,
struggled to appeal to these voters in the industrial
Midwest which meant that the working-class white vote
splintered. e genius of Trump’s campaign was his ability
to craft a message that cohered it into a solid voting bloc.
McCarthy Instead of Taft
In his analysis of Trump, Wright argues that Trump’s
rhetoric is reminiscent of Robert Taft, who was a frequent
contender for the Republican presidential nomination in
the 1940s and early 1950s and who was skeptical of the
aggressive internationalism that was emerging as the
leitmotif of U.S. foreign policy. ough there are echoes of
pre-Cold War conservative nationalism in Trump’s
criticism of the liberal international order, the Republican
Senator from Ohio is a poor guide to the president-elect’s
worldview. Taft was a cautious, principled man whose
vision for a nationalist foreign policy – whatever its
shortcomings – dovetailed with his lifelong commitment
to advancing conservative principles at home and to
restraining what he saw as the executive overreach of
Democratic presidents. He also envisioned an important
role for international law, an area in which Trump has not
indicated the slightest interest.
Instead of looking to Taft for insight, we should
look at another politician who rose to prominence during
the early Cold War era – Joseph McCarthy. e Republican
Senator Joseph McCarthy. Library of Congress
McCarthyism as a Cautionary Tale 3
Senator from Wisconsin identied an issue of paramount
importance to the United States – the threat posed by the
the Soviet Union – and used it to attack his political
opponents, with considerable success, for several years. But
McCarthy harbored no deep convictions about the Soviet
Union; he focused on it because anti-communism appealed
to his base of working-class Irish-Americans. McCarthy’s
crusade had little to do with the enormously complicated
task of opposing Soviet expansion overseas. e policy of
containment, in contrast, though not without aws, at least
provided a blueprint for doing just that.
Instead, McCarthy’s version of anti-communism
was designed to harness an anti-elitist message in order to
excite his base and attack his opponents. at is why he
blamed what he characterized as the fecklessness and even
treachery of Eastern elites in the foreign policy
establishment – “the bright young men who are born with
silver spoons in their mouths,” he called them with disdain
– for allowing communist subversion to take hold. It
helped that McCarthy was not particularly principled; in
fact, he was politically promiscuous. He changed parties –
he was a former Democrat – and positions when
convenient. To be sure, McCarthy alone did not create the
anti-communist hysteria that swept the U.S. and he was
hardly the only politician to take advantage of the political
opportunities it created. However, for a few years, he was
the most visible right-wing populist in the movement and
is rightly remembered as its most consequential advocate.
Does any of this sound familiar? Trump has
identied a pressing challenge – the fact that the political
system has failed many Americans – and
constructed a potent populist narrative
around it: that the elitist globalists are to
blame (just as McCarthy targeted the al-
leged communists and their sympathiz-
ers). “For those who control the levers of
power in Washington, and for the global
special interests, they partner with these
people that don’t have your good in
mind,” he argued in a speech in October.
“It’s a global power structure that is re-
sponsible for the economic decisions that
have robbed our working class, stripped
our country of its wealth and put that
money into the pockets of a handful of
large corporations and political entities.”
Like McCarthy, Trump appears to
have few political convictions and chang-
es positions often depending upon the
context. When it comes to immigration,
for instance, one of his signature issues,
during the campaign Trump promised to
deport 2 to 3 million undocumented
workers immediately upon taking oce.
However, as recently as 2012 he opposed
deporting unauthorized immigrants. He
has equivocated on other campaign trail promises as well.
In fact, Trump has changed his political aliation several
times, from Republican to independent to Democrat and
then back to Republican. He has also donated signicant
amounts of money to candidates in both parties. Trump
and McCarthy even have a signicant personal connection
in the form of Roy Cohn, who was the Republican Sena-
tor’s chief advisor and later became Trump’s lawyer and
friend.
Effective Politics, but Terrible Statecraft
Of course, there is one key dierence between the
president-elect and McCarthy: Trump’s narrative made
him president, whereas the Senator, after a few years in the
spotlight, was censured by the Senate and died in disgrace
a few years later. (ough it should be noted that McCa-
rthy never renounced his crusade.) Trump built his cam-
paign on anti-free trade, anti-immigrant, anti-internation-
alist rhetoric because it proved to be wildly popular with
working-class whites and at least non-objectionable to
most Republican voters (ninety percent of whom supported
him). But his success should not obscure the fact that
powerful populist messages, when they are disconnected
from a coherent political program, make for poor policy.
McCarthyism, for instance, did nothing to address
the Soviet threat abroad and made it more dicult to
devise a constructive response to actual, as opposed to
imagined, espionage at home. To make matters worse, it
inicted considerable damage on the nation’s political
culture. It ruined reputations and careers across the coun-
Further Reading
The Populist Persuasion: an American History Michael Kazin,
Basic Books, 1995
This is the best book on the history of political populism in the United
States. It includes a short but astute analysis of McCarthy’s skill in
harnessing right-wing populist anger.
The New Minority: White Working Class Politics in an Age of
Immigration and Inequality Justin Gest, Oxford University Press, 2016
This is perhaps the best effort yet to explain why working class whites
are so angry and how their profound disaffection is manifesting itself
politically.
Republican Party Foreign Policy: 2016 and Beyond Colin Dueck,
Foreign Policy Research Institute, July 22, 2016
This essay, by one of the leading students of conservative foreign policy,
examines the various strands of thought in today’s Republican Party
about international affairs. Written before the general election, it offers
a pessimistic assessment of the future of the GOP’s foreign policy
should Trump win.
McCarthyism as a Cautionary Tale 4
try and infected American public life with an undercurrent
of hysteria that took years to dissipate. It also distorted Re-
publican politics. Richard Nixon used anti-communism to
enhance his public prole and to secure the Vice Presiden-
tial nomination alongside Dwight Eisenhower in 1952.
Eisenhower, though privately disgusted by McCarthy’s
methods, hesitated to confront him because of the fervor
that propelled the Senator’s campaign.
McCarthyism also provided the backdrop against
which Republicans, led by John Foster Dulles during the
1952 presidential campaign, emphasized the notion of the
“liberation” of captive peoples in Eastern Europe. On the
campaign trail, “rollback” proved to be an eective contrast
with the more cautious doctrine of containment that was
associated with the Democratic Truman administration.
However, it also sent mixed messages to those trapped
behind the Iron Curtain. Once in oce, Eisenhower and
Dulles privately concluded that directly confronting the
Soviet Union in Eastern Europe with military force would
be ineective and they focused on propaganda eorts. In
fact, “rollback” aside, their conduct of foreign policy was in
many respects sensible, according to many historians. But
most Eastern Europeans, understandably, did not discern
the dierence between campaign rhetoric and actual policy.
When an uprising against Soviet domination occurred in
Hungary in 1956, many of the insurgents believed that the
United States would come to their aid. It did not and sev-
eral thousand Hungarians died in the ghting.
McCarthyism, especially the accusation that the
Truman administration had “lost” China to the communists,
also aected Democratic politics. Figures such as John F.
Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson concluded that they
would need to be at least as hawkish as their Republican
opponents in order to avoid being labeled “soft” on
communism, an attitude that would make the challenges
posed by the Vietnam conict all the more complicated.
Trumpism and U.S. Foreign Policy
McCarthy’s version of anticommunism was a disaster for
the United States. It is too soon to conclude denitively
that Trump’s foreign policy will suer a similar fate.
However, the parallels between McCarthyism and
Trumpism should give us pause. Just like McCarthy,
Trump has used what are ostensibly foreign policy issues
– he argued in August that Obama is the “founder of ISIS”
– to score domestic political points against his opponents.
Also like McCarthy, Trump has an uncanny ability to
mobilize the darkest instincts in American political culture.
His demonization of minority groups such as Muslims and
Latinos has introduced a level of fear among these
communities that has not been seen in some time.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which
tracks extremism, hate crimes have markedly increased in
frequency since the election.
3
McCarthy’s lack of any strategic blueprint for
defeating communism looks an awful lot like Trump’s
policy vis-à-vis China. His unvarnished hostility toward
the world’s only other superpower – which he attacked
harshly and repeatedly during the campaign and which he
is now in the process of antagonizing in connection with
its relationship with Taiwan – has baed experts and
further heightened tensions in an already nervous East
Asia. It has also increased fears that he has no long-term
foreign policy strategy in mind, that he only knows how to
issue provocative statements designed to dominate
newspaper headlines and reassure his most passionate
supporters that he will shake things up in Washington,
D.C. It is an approach that Joseph McCarthy would have
understood all too well.
Selected sources
1. Thomas Wright, “Trump’s 19th-century foreign policy.” Politico,
January 22, 2016. http://www.politico.com/magazine/
story/2016/01/donald-trump-foreign-policy-213546.
2. “Election 2016: Exit Polls,” New York Times, November 8, 2016.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/08/us/politics/
election-exit-polls.html.
3. Alexis Okeowo, “Hate on the Rise After Trump’s Election,” The New
Yorker, November 17, 2016. http://www.newyorker
Dr. Jack Thompson is a Senior Researcher in the Global
Security Team at the Center for Security Studies (CSS). His
research focuses on US foreign policy, with particular
interest in grand strategy, political leadership, transatlantic
relations, and partisan politics.
www.css.ethz.ch/ueber-uns/personen/thompson-john.html
Policy Perspectives is edited by the Center for Security Studies
(CSS) at ETH Zurich. The CSS is a center of competence for Swiss and
international security policy. It offers security policy expertise in
research, teaching, and consultancy. The CSS promotes understand-
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Editor: Martin Zapfe / Assistant Editor: Prem Mahadevan
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