CROSSPOST: NIALL FERGUSON: The [Nixon-Like] Method to Trump’s Foreign Policy Madness

I must say that seeing this in my feed this morning was quite a surprise: Niall Ferguson: The [Nixon-Like] Method to Trump’s Foreign Policy Madness https://niallferguson.substack.com/p/the-method-to-trumps-foreign-policy: To understand Trump’s… foreign policy… you have to understand the debt he… owes to…. Richard Nixon…. We’re seeing a wave ofNixon revisionism, if not rehabilitation…. Both presidents consciously put… realpolitik in Otto von Bismarck’s sense… above… international idealism…. Nixon’s realism… was a grand strategy at its grandest, predicated on a clear-eyed calculation of American interest and an effective downgrading of the ideological schism that had characterized the early Cold War…. You should by now have divined where I am going with this. Like Nixon, Trump’s instinct is to negotiate superpower to superpower… without regard to the smaller players… to say nothing of the irritatingly idealistic Europeans with their nostalgia for the “liberal international order”…. It might seem to skeptics that the U.S. has no strategy beyond imperial caprice. But that is a misreading. At heart, Donald Trump is a Nixonian… with the sole difference that personal enrichment and the national interest were never conflated in Nixon’s mind. Like Nixon, Trump takes pleasure in cutting deals with dictators. Like Nixon, he has no patience with European lectures about morality…. The essential difference between Trump and Nixon is U.S. economic strength [today]…. Like Nixon’s, Trump’s grand strategy may unravel. It’s just less likely to unravel if the U.S. economy stays strong… Nixon wassmartand had views (even if they were, alternatingly, Kissinger’s and Moynihan’s). It takes a very special kind of person to publishthatin the context in which the other thing in my feed right now isthis: Donald Trump:https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/geography-blunder-lands-trump-community-142734013.html: ‘I could have won the Vietnam War in a week. They kept bombing forests for years instead of going after Ho Chi Minh City… This called forth, not surprisingly, a community note: Hunter Biden: https://twitter.com/HunterBiden/status/2117256121018912794: ‘Last night Trump said he could have won Vietnam in a week. His plan was “going after Ho Chi Minh City.” Ho Chi Minh City was Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam. Our ally. The enemy’s capital was Hanoi. We bombed it. He called the presidents who fought that war stupid, then explained how he’d have won it by attacking our own side.58,220 Americans died in that war. Trump got five deferments. Now he’s telling the rest of us how easy it would have been. He’s had more than fifty years to learn which side we were on. He still hasn’t. That alone should disqualify him from sending anybody else’s kids to war. Instead, he’s weighing more strikes on Iran after Tuesday. His administration has reportedly considered using the “mother of all bombs,” the one he calls “like a tiny nuclear bomb.” The man who thinks we should have bombed our ally’s capital gets to choose the targets… Ferguson’s is the most curious-of-all reaction and response to Donald Trump’s belief that Johnson and Nixon could have won the Vietnam War “in a week” by bombing the then-Saigon, the capital of our South Vietnam ally. At 09:30 pst on November 2, 2026—18 hours after Trump’s Dubuque speech—we have Niall Ferguson publishing: https://niallferguson.substack.com/p/the-method-to-trumps-foreign-policy https://niallferguson.substack.com Each episode of the satirical 1970s showSoapalways began with a convoluted plot summary. The catchphrase in the intro was: “Confused? You won’t be.” Confused is how many people today feel about U.S. foreign policy. AFree Presseditor recently put it this way: If China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran are an Axis of Aggressors and we’re at war with them, why is it so hard to identify enemies and allies? Democrats who just voted to pass almost $2 billion in aid to Ukraine (with an assist from a small group of Republicans) are simultaneously promoting candidates who want to end support for the Iron Dome for Israel, which is at war with Iran and its satellites, who are attacking an assortment of our partial allies and getting help from Russia and China. [Vice President] J.D. Vance talked about the moderates in Iran who want peace during his ill-fated ceasefire; Turkey works with the Axis but is part of NATO; France, Belgium, Spain, and the Netherlands import Russian gas; Hungary uses a Russian pipeline, etc. How can we be in “Cold War II” if those are our allies? Whose false narrative are we living in?… Having coined the phraseCold War IIand encouraged the use of the termAxis, I get so much of this kind of thing these days that I feel like a geopolitical agony aunt. “Why is Musk fucking with Ukraine?” a friend messaged me on Wednesday, referringto reportsthat Elon Musk green-lit a slowdown in the military-grade Starlink coverage that Ukraine relies on for certain types of drones. “Why would Putin negotiate when he’s getting concessions without it? How does increasing his leverage help?” These questions were further fueled bythe revelationat the beginning of the week that the Russian president had proposed a joint summit next month with Donald Trump and Xi Jinping to discuss Ukraine—without Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky present. Trump reportedly did not reject the idea. Confused? You will be. So how to make sense of the apparent contradictions of Cold War II? For some people, the only possible explanation for all of this is that President Donald Trump is simply a crazed man-child emperor. In the wake of thegladiatorial gamesstaged outside the White House in June, the British writer Robert Harris (whose new bookAgrippadepicts the rise of Augustus Caesar) remarked: “You can really see him in a toga with a gold laurel wreath on his head. . . . He is an imperial kind of president.” And yet I have always doubted that Trump is an authentic Octavian, a would-be emperor, ushering the republic into its grave. Nor (despite the analogy drawn last year byGideon Rachman) is Trump Pitt the Younger, carving up the world as Pitt did with the Emperor Napoleon in 1805 (the subject of afamous cartoonby James Gillray). In many ways, Trump is no emperor but, as I have long insisted, a quintessentially 19th-century American figure: a composite of Andrew Jackson, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, and P.T. Barnum. Nevertheless, to understand Trump’s approach to foreign policy, and particularly his counterintuitive approach to the war in Ukraine, you have to understand the debt he also owes to a 20th-century president: Richard Nixon. In December 1987, Nixon wrote to Trump after his wife saw the swaggering young real estate developer on Phil Donahue’s talk show. “Mrs. Nixon told me you weregreat,” Nixon gushed. “As you can imagine, she is an expert on politics and she predicts that whenever you decide to run for office you will be a winner!” Prophetic words. Two years later, the two men werephotographed togetherat a fundraiser in Houston. Small wonder Trump has a long-standing regard for the disgraced 37th president. Not many people took him seriously back then. It’s no accident that we’re seeing a wave ofNixon revisionism, if not rehabilitation, in Trump’s second term. Clearly, Trump’s domestic enemies were once Nixon’s: Harvard,TheNew York TimesandTheWashington Post, and the federal bureaucracy—known today as “the deep state.” Even more clearly, and most importantly for our purposes, both presidents consciously put the national interest—realpolitik in Otto von Bismarck’s sense—far above the international idealism we associate with Democratic presidents such as Woodrow Wilson or Jimmy Carter. “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else,” deputy chief of staff Stephen Millertold CNN’s Jake Tapperin January, shortly after the U.S. extracted the Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro. “But