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96 Foreign Aff. 10 (2017)
Trump the Traditionalist: A Surprisingly Standard Foreign Policy

handle is hein.journals/fora96 and id is 646 raw text is: Trump the Traditionalist A Surprisingly Standard Foreign Policy Elliott Abrams I magine two U.S. foreign policy analysts plucked from their Washing- ton think tanks and marooned on desert islands, one just before Donald Trump announced his presidential candidacy and the other just before the 2016 election itself. After the election, both are told that the Republican can- didate won and are asked to predict the new administration's foreign policy. Whose predictions would have been more accurate? At times this spring, the second analyst's forecasts would have been on the money. Having followed the bitter election, he or she would have foretold the nature of the transition and the early weeks of the new administration as a logical continuation of the campaign. The starkly nationalist rhetoric of Trump's inaugural address; the president's unpredictable tweets; the departure of Trump's first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, after only 25 days in office; and a whole host of other develop- ments solidified many professionals' sense that Trump would break dramatically with long-standing traditions and with recent policy. As the months passed, however, the analyst's predictions would ELLIOTT ABRAMS is Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. have been increasingly off base as the administration's foreign policy became more conventional. Meanwhile, the other desert-island refugee, who would have missed Trump's surprising ascent and the bizarre cam- paign that followed, would likely have predicted that no matter who won the GOP nomination and despite any idiosyn- crasies that emerged during election season, the realities of governing and of leading in a complex world would ultimately produce a fairly familiar Republican approach to foreign policy. And on balance, this analyst would have been right. The Trump administration has been in office for less than six months, and most jobs below the cabinet level still remain unfilled, so one must tread carefully when making judgments about its approach or predictions about its future. But it is already clear that this is not a revolutionary administration. The broad lines of its policy fit easily within those of the last few decades. Trump might not be a conventional president, but so far, his foreign policy has been remarkably unremarkable. A BREITBART PRESIDENCY? This is a far cry from what many observers expected (and what some continue to worry about): a radical departure from tradition and the emergence of what might be called a Bannonite adminis- tration, after Steve Bannon, the populist- nationalist provocateur who chaired Trumps campaign and was later named his chief White House strategist. Before joining the Trump team, Bannon had led Breitbart News, the online publishing company that he described as the platform for the alt-right and that 10 FOREIGN AFFAIRS

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