Donald Trump's signature characteristics of total ignorance and total arrogance make for a dangerous combination when it comes to anything having to do with the American presidency. But foreign policy is undoubtedly where the danger is biggest.
One could imagine Trump failing to even notice, say, the National Park Service, and it thereby escaping disaster. But no president could possibly miss the American military. And that does not bode well for foreign policy under a Trump presidency.
Now, one must admit that Trump occasionally stumbles onto nuggets of wisdom, in foreign policy as in other topics. The conventional wisdom among the Washington foreign policy establishment — appropriately dubbed "the Blob" by White House national security adviser Ben Rhodes — is in large part dedicated to ignoring the bleeding obvious, and Trump has no filter between his mouth and his hyperactive brain. As a result, sometimes he'll say stuff like: The Iraq War was "a tremendous disservice to humanity" that "totally destabilized" the Middle East, at the cost of trillions of dollars that would have been better spent here at home. In Blob circles, that counts for uncomfortably edgy truth.
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However, one must not mistake that for actual wisdom. A fuller measure of Trump's thinking on foreign policy can be found in his recent foreign policy address on how to defeat Islamist terrorism. It was a disjointed hodgepodge of problems and ideas. He complains about the Libya intervention, the invasion of Iraq, and the fact that troops were withdrawn from Iraq. He straight-up lies that he was against all three events, when the exact opposite is true — indeed, in the case of Libya, his own Facebook page had a pro-intervention post from 2011 still up at the time of writing.
It's hard to categorize such goofy, disorganized thinking. Earlier in the campaign, Blobians like Dan Drezner argued that Trump was a foreign policy "realist," mainly because he tends to talk constantly about how he would gain an advantage for the United States at the cost of the rest of the world. Since the realist school of thought is primarily about how best to pursue the national interest, there is a certain superficial similarity.
However, Trump shows that thinking about foreign policy in crude zero-sum terms does not automatically translate to pursuing the national advantage. On the contrary, it can often harm it. In an internationally-connected world, there are many positive-sum arrangements to be had in foreign policy, from the lack of great power wars since World War II to nuclear arms treaties. And on the other hand, threatening to abandon the tiny, cash-strapped Baltic states to Russia if they don't spend a couple nickels on their military, as Trump did recently on a total whim, makes the U.S. appear untrustworthy and erratic for no material gain. (To be fair, he did walk back this remark in his speech.)
Given America's recent history of expensive, bloody military disasters, the primary realist argument for the last decade or so has been to slow or halt the use of America's military force, or that of our allies like Saudi Arabia in Yemen. Despite his occasional sanity on backfired interventions, Trump evinces no systematic understanding about the risk of using force, especially when it comes to already-unstable locations. Instead, he just asserts that whatever President Obama and Hillary Clinton did was bad, and promises to destroy Islamist terror groups with tons of military power.
Similarly, Trump's proposal to create an "ideological screening test" for Muslim immigrants — explicitly based on the McCarthy-era litmus tests — is not a remotely serious way to attack terrorism, which is fueled by a sense that the American state is bigoted against Muslims. Making it explicitly bigoted would rightly enrage people and probably fail to catch a well-prepared terrorist. And in his anti-immigrant, anti-refugee zeal, he did not even acknowledge the many acts of terrorism carried about by native citizens. (He also doesn't seem to grasp that Shia Iran and Sunni ISIS are bitter enemies.)
Taken together, it's clear what Trump is: a complete clod. He's a deeply unserious thinker, paranoid and conspiratorial, surrounded by sycophants and cranks, whose primary policy analogy is to his extremely simplistic and predatory model of business dealing — which often doesn't work out well for anyone, including Trump.
But should he win the election, he would be the commander-in-chief of American military forces, able to deploy anything from carrier battle groups to ballistic missiles to settle a Twitter beef. Let's hope that doesn't happen.
