On Monday, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump will return to the White House. The key question is: What comes next? For those who follow U.S. foreign policy, it seems that the only thing predictable about Trump is that he is unpredictable, even a bit of a madman.
That may well be true, but perhaps the best way to anticipate Trump’s future actions is to recognize that he’s a throwback. Or, more accurately, his foreign policy views hark back to a bygone era, one that he seems to want to make relevant, even great, again. In other words, to understand Trump is to recognize that he wants to bring a 19th-century foreign policy into the 21st century.
I am not the only one to note Trump’s preferences for policies more in line with presidents from over a century ago. He’s been explicit in his admiration of William McKinley, who was president from 1897 to 1901. During his first term, some likened Trump to Andrew Jackson, the U.S. president known not only for being an outsider, but also for his forceful ethnic cleansing policies toward Native Americans. Trump appeared to embrace that comparison, with Jackson’s portrait hanging in the Oval Office. Even before he was elected in 2016, observers pointed to how Trump’s worldview seemed more at home in the late 19th or early 20th century.