Memo to Trump: Beware the ‘Reverse Teddy’

That was quick. A day after Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro denied entry to American planes returning deported Colombian migrants from the United States, Petro—who complained that the migrants were not being treated with “dignity”—not only backed down, but was retweeting President Donald Trump’s press secretary.

Trump had brought him to heel in a matter of hours with a threat of crippling tariffs and other sanctions.

With more than a little justification, Trump and his supporters are claiming victory and touting the Colombian’s cave as proof that America’s days of being pushed around—especially in its own hemisphere—ended January 20.

Perhaps so. After four years of relative neglect by the Biden administration—during which Beijing, Moscow, and even Tehran made deeper inroads into Latin America—Trump is already effecting a hard swing of the pendulum back toward American primacy in its neighborhood.

In a broader sense, though, this show of strength in America’s near-abroad could portend weakness if it comes at the exclusion of traditional foreign policy concerns in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.

In his first term, Trump wisely resisted the temptation to retreat and let aggressive dictators expand their territory and influence across Eurasia—the supercontinent that accounts for three-quarters of the world’s population and nearly two-thirds of the world’s economy. By holding the line in the Western Pacific, Eastern Europe, and the Persian Gulf, Trump logged important achievements: delivering heavy blows to ISIS, negotiating Mideast peace agreements, ditching Washington’s accommodationist approach to China, and (in that rarest of successes for a U.S. president) keeping America out of new wars.

Those weren’t just headlines for me—I proudly served in the Trump White House, first as his senior director for Asia policy, and then as deputy national security adviser.

Now, however, there are signs that the president might succumb to the allure of hemispheric seclusion in his second term. Isolationists masquerading as “restrainers” are being maneuvered into mid-level positions at the Department of Defense—some of them critical of Trump’s policies that kept the peace. Trump himself toyed with the idea of withdrawing from NATO in his first term, though he thankfully held fast and successfully pressured allies to spend more on their defense.

He can build on the accomplishments of his first term, but only by recalling that “peace through strength” means more than merely refraining from foolish military adventures: It also means maintaining a forward military posture and projecting the resolve to use it when provoked.

Frustrating as the world can be, carving it up in a “spheres of influence” grand bargain would make it harder to tackle problems that voters gave Trump a mandate to solve.

You don’t have to read between the lines of Trump’s January 20 inaugural address to perceive that the Americas were his main focus. He pledged to designate Mexican cartels as terrorist organizations and reassert dominance over the Panama Canal. He spoke of America as a “growing nation” that “expands our territory,” fueling sales of Canada Is Not for Sale hats and putting Greenland into play. But with the exception of a namecheck for China and what he considers its control over the canal, Asia and Europe went unmentioned. The Middle East figured only in a brief reference to “the hostages . . . coming back home to their families.”

Trump’s is an understandable impulse. Decades of “free” trade hollowed out American industrial capacity and left us dependent on China’s hostile dictatorship for everything from prescription drugs to iPhones. What’s more, he’s right to want to curb Beijing’s regional influence, squeeze Chinese- and Russian-aligned socialist dictatorships in Venezuela and Cuba—not to mention keep his campaign promises to stop mass migration and drug trafficking.

Meanwhile, neoconservative dreams of fully democratizing Iraq and Afghanistan failed after long, costly wars. (As a Marine with three combat deployments, I felt the consequences of our strategic misjudgments firsthand.) Many Americans think this country is still overcommitted militarily and, correctly, that allies—Germany, I’m looking at you—spend far less on their defense in relative terms than the United States does, even after a decade of armed aggression by Russia.

Many, including Trump himself, have framed his focus on America’s near-abroad as a restoration of the Monroe Doctrine, which fell out of favor at the end of the Cold War, but which, in 1823, established the Western Hemisphere as a core U.S. foreign policy interest. President James Monroe put forth two rules: European powers should not meddle in our hemisphere and, in return, the United States would not interfere with Europe or its established territories.

Trump’s words about the Panama Canal and territorial expansion even evoke the famed Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, under which President Teddy Roosevelt intervened assertively in America’s near-abroad to ward off any temptation by distant powers to meddle. These interventions included, of course, engineering territorial space for a U.S. canal in Panama.

But while those were the first steps Uncle Sam took en route to global power, Trump should resist any urge to pull a “reverse Teddy”—throwing our weight around in the Americas in order to retrench into a merely hemispheric power.

The truth is that the U.S. must retain the capability, and resolve, to influence events in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East because they affect the livelihoods of ordinary Americans.

The loss of Taiwan to Beijing’s coercion, for example, would probably capsize Trump’s presidency with a stock market crash to rival 1929. America would suddenly be at China’s mercy for the cutting-edge computer chips that keep our digital economy aloft and that will decide who dominates the ultra-strategic field of artificial intelligence.

American withdrawal from the Eastern Hemisphere would cede much of Asia to Beijing, Europe to Moscow, and the oil-rich Middle East to Tehran and other hostile powers. And there is little to suggest dictators would stick to their respective spheres. Xi Jinping, a Leninist whose professed heroes are Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong, has made clear he is playing for global stakes, not hemispheric ones. Worse than that, he is harnessing Moscow and Tehran to help him achieve his aims. The common denominator holding them together? Enmity for the United States of America.

Generations of strategists have warned that allowing a strategic competitor to dominate Asia or Europe or even the Middle East could spell the demise of Washington as a great power, no matter how sturdy its redoubt in the Americas.

That’s why the United States could not afford to duck two world wars and a cold war in the 20th century. Now, as before, it would be better to stand our ground, contain aggressors, and keep the peace—rather than to withdraw support for our allies and ultimately invite more war.

All Trump has to do is remember the overall success of his first-term foreign policy. Then, my former boss not only strengthened America’s hand vis-à-vis China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, and Sunni terrorist groups like ISIS but also successfully deterred new conflicts. He was able to do so thanks to the leverage afforded by America’s forward military presence—and Trump’s demonstrated willingness to use our armed forces when provoked.

If Trump needs examples of how undue retrenchment can go wrong, all he has to do is examine his predecessor’s record: The Taliban overran the government of Afghanistan in 2021; Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion on Ukraine in 2022; and Iran sponsored Sunni and Shia proxies to launch a seven-front war on Israel in 2023.

Effective deterrence would have been a lot cheaper than war. It requires both resolve and the means of backing it up, however. One of Trump’s reflexes is to view alliances mainly as cost centers. In fact, allies—and our forward bases in places like Japan, Europe, and the Mideast—are insurance policies against the costly wars Trump rightly seeks to avoid.

China’s leader wouldn’t hesitate to exploit the power vacuum created if Washington begins to pull back from Asia.

The idea that Beijing would keep to its side of the globe if only we would keep to ours is based on the fantasy that dictators are aiming for an equal “balance of power” with the United States. This concept, fashionable with some political scientists and journalists but absent from the historical record, is rejected explicitly by none other than Xi Jinping himself. As an internal Chinese military textbook on “Xi Jinping Thought” put it in 2018:

The Westphalian system was founded on the notion of a balance of power. But it has proven unable to achieve a stable world order. All mankind needs a new order that surpasses and supplants the balance of power. . . . A new world order is now under construction that will surpass and supplant the Westphalian System.

There, in one paragraph, our most powerful adversary rejects a “balance of power” as a desirable end state, makes clear Beijing is aiming at a “new world order” targeting “all mankind,” and attacks the very idea of national sovereignty created by the Treaties of Westphalia that emerged from war-ravaged Europe in 1648. The textbook goes on to quote Xi saying, “our struggle and contest with Western countries is irreconcilable.” Good luck with that grand bargain.

Since China aims to be a global power with geopolitical clout in our hemisphere—and even runs covert “police stations” that harass Chinese dissidents and Americans citizens inside our borders—it is worth reminding Beijing that America is a resident power on both sides of the Atlantic and the Pacific, and that we aren’t going anywhere.

That would be a position that Teddy Roosevelt would be proud of.

Matt Pottinger was the deputy national security adviser from 2019 to 2021. He chairs the China program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and is CEO of the research firm Garnaut Global LLC.