One enormous potential advantage of President Trump’s re-election is that it may enable the United States to end the perpetual war in which it has been engaged since 2001. That war has caused U.S. public debt to spiral from 30% of GDP to over 100%, destabilized large sections of the world turning them into unproductive wastelands, and killed or maimed large numbers of Americans and even larger numbers of other nationalities. While peace will never entirely reign in this imperfect world, a U.S. policy of non-intervention will at least keep the conflicts localized and unimportant to those not involved. Achieving this would be the greatest possible achievement of Trump’s second term, provided the U.S. electorate does not thereafter foolishly repeat its gross error of 2020 and repudiate his good work.

“Speak softly and carry a big stick” advised President Theodore Roosevelt on several occasions from 1900 on. Admirers of that President speak fondly of the “big stick” with which he asserted U.S. power but omit to notice that speaking softly was not his strong point – he adopted a bullying tone in diplomacy as in life, especially with the other unfortunate countries of the Western Hemisphere. Presidents William McKinley and Calvin Coolidge spoke much more softly and politely than TR and were correspondingly more effective in advancing U.S. interests and world peace.

Since 2001, the United States has thrown its weight around, alienating other countries, while other countries’ sticks, notably those of China and India have grown in size in relation to that of the United States. President George W. Bush was the worst offender, starting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Bush’s Second Inaugural was an appalling farrago of misguided Woodrow Wilsonian hubris, seeking to impose U.S. democracy on the world whether or not it wanted it – this column noted this at the time.

A stupid, albeit minor example of this came up recently, when we learned that Iraq had just lowered its “Age of Consent” from 18 to 9. You can bet your bottom dollar that the previous 18 was imposed by dozy U.S. advisors during Bush’s Iraq occupation, forcing an extreme U.S. restriction (no country, as far as I know, has ever imposed a higher Age of Consent, nor is it that high consistently across the U.S.) onto a culture where marriage around the age of sexual maturity – say 13 or 14 – is traditional, even if 9 may be considered excessively 7th century. In a civilized world, the U.S. would not impose its parochial cultural norms on other countries. In a world of U.S. foreign policy meddling, it causes great unhappiness and anti-American feeling when it does so.

Globally, foreign policy always tends to be over-aggressive, causing unnecessary wars and tragedy. In 1914, we now know (see Christopher Clark’s “The Sleepwalkers” © Allen Lane, 2012) that only minority factions in a few countries were pushing for war. The war could almost certainly have been prevented had Britain’s Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey (1861-1933) got on a train in July 1914, making it clear to Germany and Austria-Hungary that Britain had no great interest in Serbia and to France that it would not join in the French government’s revenge fantasies against Germany. Alas, Grey, unlike the statesmen of the 1815-22 Holy Alliance, was both idle and intellectually underpowered and the opportunity was lost, bringing not one but two World Wars in consequence.

Similarly in 1939, the argument can be made and was made at the time by R.A. Butler (1902-82) and Henry “Chips” Channon (1897-1958), that Neville Chamberlain (1869-1940)’s Appeasement was the correct policy, and that the Polish Guarantee of March 1939, which ended it, should not have been given. That would have prevented Britain and France from entering an economically suicidal war which they could not win, before the transatlantic behemoth of the United States was ready to join them in December 1941. Winston Churchill (1874-1965) in November 1942 said:

“I have not become the Kings First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.”

In fact, by making it politically impossible for Chamberlain to prolong Appeasement in March 1939, he had already ensured that he would do so.

Statesmen of the current generation were brought up on the verities of the 1946-91 Cold War, when the combination of the Soviet Union and Mao Zedong (1893-1976)’s China, fully allied until 1960, seemed a genuine threat to the West, both military and ideological. The Communist bloc was expansionist, successfully stole Western intellectual property when it needed it, and offered an alternative ideology to the flabby Western big-government social democracy that was the best on offer until the 1980s. Consequently, it had to be resisted lest human civilization be extinguished altogether under its deadening, freedom-extinguishing, economy-killing blight. (It says something about how feeble Western capitalism had already become that until the mid-1960s the Soviet Union could credibly threaten “We will bury you” and exhibit its (admittedly falsified) statistics as evidence that economically as well as militarily, it was on the way to doing so.)

Once the West stopped exhausting itself with futile wars such as Vietnam and acquired competent management in Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the fall of the Soviet Union was inevitable. It was accomplished at the cost of considerable military spending but no actual war, thus proving the superiority of an unassertive foreign policy over mindless saber-rattling.

China was a more difficult nut to crack; its labor costs were infinitesimal by the 1970s, so that even with the inefficiencies of statist management, it was able to survive the fall of the Soviet Union and begin the long task of catching up economically with the West. Even now, while its GDP is close to that of the United States, its labor costs are one fourth the U.S. level, so it can afford a considerable amount of government-imposed economic inefficiency, as well as a huge expenditure on saber-rattling and subversion of the West’s soft underbelly.

We are not today in the position of the Cold War. There is no single opposing ideology against which we must combat. China operates on a remnant of Communism, but Russia does not. Instead, communism has partially been adopted by the West, much to its disgrace. In most Western countries, a vast centralized bureaucracy attempts to direct the economy through an infinite morass of regulation, in the interests of the “climate change” myth, which hobbles Western economies compared to their competitors in China, India and elsewhere, which have far more sense than destroy their prosperity in this way. Meanwhile, increasingly draconian speech codes remove the rights of free speech and free assembly, the principal non-economic factor distinguishing the West from the old Soviet bloc.

In short, there is today little distinction between the authoritarian “social democracies” of the West and the “reform Communism” of China. Vladimir Putin’s Russia is equally autocratic, even somewhat more so, but Putin’s Russia does not have the social and economic regulations that are destroying Western economies; it has a number of highly investible private companies and is much more like an ordinary expansionist 19th Century Imperial power.

When we examine the wars bequeathed to President-elect Trump by the Biden administration, we can thus see that they are merely a continuation of the almost continuous war under which we have suffered since 2001, with no great ideological reason for their existence. Ukraine is certainly neither free nor capitalist; hence there is no ideological reason to support it, while Western support has generated an appalling tragedy from which neither Russia nor Ukraine are able to escape.

Imposing a peace deal, on terms which transfer Ukraine’s heavy-industry eastern provinces to Russia (which I recommended in 2008, since they prevented the modernizing western Ukraine from electing a decent government) should thus be the first item on Trump’s agenda. Peace and Ukraine’s future stability and prosperity surely also require the removal of the Castroite dictator Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his replacement through free, internationally monitored elections.

With Russia, relations should be repaired as quickly as possible, removing the damaging (mostly to U.S. interests) Biden-era sanctions and reopening full trade relations. That will remove any temptation on Putin to create an “Axis of Evil” with China and Iran, two powers with which Russia has few interests in common and no ideological affinity. Putin has made it clear repeatedly that his major objections to the current West are NATO’s arrogant encroachments and the cultural corruptions brought by wokery. Whatever the position of the irreversibly declining EU, President Trump can assuage both those objections.

In the Middle East, Trump’s policy should be complete withdrawal, ending the miserable quarter-century that has done so much damage to U.S. finances and Middle East stability. The U.S. should by all means supply arms to its ally Israel but require cash payment for them. Israel is a rich country and can afford to pay for arms, and requiring cash down for arms shipments will keep Israel on a short economic leash and prevent any extremist Israeli fantasies about Greater Israel or taking on Iran. Good friends do not demand blank checks!

If Trump can somewhat quieten the world’s tragic wars and ensure U.S. non-involvement in any future ones, he will follow the traditional Republican foreign policy of Washington and Coolidge, restore the U.S. economic and fiscal position and entitle himself to the eternal gratitude of U.S. and global posterity. Perhaps then he would deserve that place on Mount Rushmore – they could usefully remove Theodore Roosevelt to make way for him!

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(The Bear’s Lair is a weekly column that is intended to appear each Monday, an appropriately gloomy day of the week. Its rationale is that the proportion of “sell” recommendations put out by Wall Street houses remains far below that of “buy” recommendations. Accordingly, investors have an excess of positive information and very little negative information. The column thus takes the ursine view of life and the market, in the hope that it may be usefully different from what investors see elsewhere.)