American Foreign Policy in the Trump Era with Ben Rhodes

On Thursday, February 6, 2025, Benjamin Rhodes delivered the Warren and Anita Manshel Lecture in American Foreign Policy on "American Foreign Policy in the Trump Era" in Tsai Auditorium at Harvard. Weatherhead Center Director Melani Cammett moderated the conversation. Rhodes is an American writer, political commentator, and a former deputy national security advisor for strategic communications and speechwriting under President Barack Obama.

Below is a transcript of Rhodes’s talk, lightly edited for clarity. Watch the entire lecture, including audience Q&A, on our YouTube channel.

Thank you for that introduction, Melani. Thank you to everybody who helped put this event together.

It's interesting: I knew I was going to give this talk and have this conversation. And last week, actually one week ago today, I gave a similar talk on the other side of the country at the University of Oregon. So I thought to myself, well, this is great. I'll just be able to use that same talk. And then as I was getting on the plane, I realized that everything had changed in one week, and I had to redo this to keep up with the pace of events.

I know what we're all experiencing is the kind of dizzying adjustment to a new reality that seems to be changing underneath our feet every day. That's an unusual place to be. I think that it makes it even more imperative that there be spaces, be they academic or civil society or communal, where people can just come together to try to figure things out.

I preface everything I say here with that caveat, that I don't have all the answers. Anybody who tells you they do right now is either Elon Musk or Donald Trump, or not telling you the truth.

But I'm going to offer some thoughts on how I'm thinking about this question of foreign policy, which feels less and less disconnected, if disconnected at all, from what is happening in this country. One of the things that I experienced as someone who worked in both politics and foreign policy is there was always an artificial boundary between the two, and now there's no boundary at all, because the kind of country that the United States is is projected through its foreign policy.

And it was interesting. As I was coming here, I wanted to address, obviously, what's happening with USAID. And it was interesting to be in Boston because it led me back to the founding of USAID, which happened in the Kennedy administration. And I went and found online this video of John F. Kennedy addressing the first collection of USAID mission directors and deputy directors in 1962 before they went out into the world.

And he talked about how it was difficult to get public support for foreign assistance. But then he made the case that it was absolutely essential to the United States for there to be a USAID, and for these people to go out into the world as part of America's role, as a leader of the so-called free world.

And he said, "There will not be farewell parades to you as you leave," contrasting aid workers with the military, nor will there be "parades when you come back." At the time, though, there were also no young DOGE interns when they came back. But the reward that Kennedy was saying was the work itself and the cause that it served.

And it got me thinking—the extent to which a nation's foreign policy is a pretty accurate reflection of its psyche—of what is going on in the body politic at the time. And so the JFK era that produced USAID had this expansive vision of America in the world as a country that defended freedom, as a country that buttressed international institutions that we'd created, and as a country that had to wage battles for the hearts and minds of people, particularly in the newly liberated, postcolonial societies around the world.

That was a self-interested effort, by the way, because it was tied to the Cold War. And it was also an effort that became symbiotic with the civil rights movement in this country as America's racial hypocrisy was a force undermining its global aspirations to appeal to people in the postcolonial world. And Kennedy's own movement towards the embrace of the civil rights movement was very much tied to his interest in starting a USAID. That was the self-conception of the United States at the time.

The Trump-era America that is right now dismantling USAID is a country with a very different sense of itself in the world. It's no surprise I'm going to offer a critical view. It doesn't, again, mean it's the only view.

But we're now in a place where just in the last few days or a couple weeks, we're threatening conquest of smaller nations. We're withdrawing from international institutions. We're casually proposing the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip. This is a mirror image of the message that Kennedy was seeking to project.

And it's a worldview that complements what's happening at home with mass deportations and the erasure of diversity programs. It's a nation that feels like it's growing smaller, quite literally in size, and also in self-conception.

Now, to be clear and to be fair, President Trump ran for reelection promising to transform America's foreign policy and its place in the world. And some of those critiques are ones that people like me could find merit in, and certainly a majority of Americans could find merit in. After the failures of post-9/11 overreach in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, he was going to enforce greater discipline among a national security establishment that he calls the “deep state” that has been slow to learn the lessons of those forever wars.

After building grievances around allies not paying enough into global security, or trade partners of the United States getting more advantages from globalization than the American working class, Trump was very clear that he was going to use older tools like tariffs to leverage better deals. And he was very clear that after being resisted by parts of the federal workforce in his first term, that he was going to remake the federal government in the image of him and his MAGA movement.

And essentially, what this added up to, though, was in a chaotic world full of strongmen, America was going to get one of our own. And that was essentially the deal he offered to the American people.

But I do think that it would be wrong to dismiss this kind of dizzying array of announcements and executive actions as just fulfilling campaign promises. Trump did not run on the platform of dismantling USAID. He didn't run on Greenland. He certainly didn't run on a US occupation of Gaza.

And as I was watching this play out, I couldn't help thinking that rather than showing a sense of strength, this feels to me like an America that's actually lost self-confidence—in some ways, even lost self-respect in that we've eliminated any pretense of the kind of values, propositions that the United States stood for after World War II: freedom, self-determination, collective security. Things that we always were hypocritical in living up to, but was an aspiration and a values proposition that we could offer.

And frankly, if you strip that away, Trump cuts a very familiar picture from history, which is an aging strongman musing about territorial expansion for his own consolidation of power and construction of a legacy, a transactional ethnonationalist in a world full of those people. And so he is reflecting something that has happened in this country. And I think the risks to it are the construction of an American order—sorry, of an international order—that is meant to actually check American excesses. Or at worst, this brand of nationalism, in this many places with this many older, strongmen—and they're all men—can lead to real great-power conflict.

And so I want to get into the conversation here, but I do want to just go through a few of the things from the last week that I think illustrate where we are and what some of the dangers are that are structural. They're not just the individual issues.

Trump is the first president in my lifetime who came to office pledging, in his inaugural address, an era in which the United States, quote, "expands our territory." So we're back in a pre-World War I mindset where territorial acquisition is at least on the table.

To that end, he's insisted that the US should take back the Panama Canal, take control of Greenland from Denmark, despite repeated objections from those governments and the people of Greenland, Denmark, and Panama. And look, it's possible that this is posturing to open negotiations for things that, frankly, aren't top of mind for Americans like paying less fees in the Panama Canal or getting access to minerals and basing rights in Greenland. But I also think we have to, on the one hand, take seriously Trump's repeated affirmations of this interest in territorial expansion.

But even if they're negotiating tactics, there are a couple of problems I want to highlight about them. The first thing is that picking on Panama and Denmark—and there was a dust up with the Colombians, and there was a near trade war with Canada and Mexico—it does not feel like a reassertion of American confidence. These are smaller countries. Kind of feels like a bully on the schoolyard looking for someone small to beat up, you know? And that's not, I think, the image that is constructive to project around the world.

I think the other thing we have to recognize is this is a US president, in word and deed, ignoring the principle of state sovereignty that has been the cornerstone—shaky at times—of global security for so long at a time when there's already been a normalization of a return to nationalism-based conquest. You have that with Vladimir Putin obviously in Ukraine and potentially other parts of the former Soviet Union. You have that in terms of Xi Jinping's increasingly bellicose commitments to assert control over Taiwan. You have that in the Israeli Right's interest in the annexation of Gaza and the West Bank. And so, again, the US joining that parade, even if the US itself doesn't act on it, is further eliminating the norm against territorial conquest that was the basis of the creation of an international order after we saw where that led in two world wars.

And this is another reason why the suggestion of taking ownership of Gaza and turning it into the Riviera of the Middle East was so jarring beyond just that image of Trump hotels in the Gaza Strip. Like many things Trump proposes, it's not likely to happen. But again, it further legitimizes an idea that there are two million people, Palestinians in Gaza, who don't get a voice in any of these discussions about their future, who are being told to leave where they want to live without being consulted.

Jordan and Egypt don't want to take in two million Palestinians. They couldn't afford, for purposes of their own stability, to be complicit in that kind of ethnic cleansing. And it implicitly endorses this view that foreign policy's going to go back to big or powerful nations making decisions over the heads of smaller nations and less powerful people. And that, again, is a law of the jungle that leads to places that we spent a long time trying to build institutions to prevent.

Now ironically, if he wanted to rebuild Gaza, he's actually destroying the agency that would do it in USAID. And already, the freeze on assistance is making it impossible for USAID to fulfill just the humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza, never mind the arduous task of clearing rubble and clearing unexploded bombs and reconstruction. And so [it] speaks to this short-termism, the lack of seeing things and pieces of how they fit together.

Now, people may say to me, these are just pronouncements. These are things he says. These are distractions. But the Elon Musk-supervised dismantlement of USAID, well, that's something that's happening now that is having tangible consequences for people around the world who have been cut off from foreign assistance, whether those are organizations or whether those are programs that Americans expect to protect them from terrorism or from disease or from the rising global influence of who Trump identifies as the preeminent competitor to the United States: China under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.

I remember going in the Obama years to the African Union in Ethiopia, and we were there with a very counterterrorism-focused agenda. And we went out to the African Union outside of Addis. And it's a beautiful building. It's the preeminent political institution in Africa.

That building was built by the Chinese government. The road to that building was built by the Chinese government. The ports along the coast of East Africa were built by the Chinese government. And the idea that we're going to win some big geopolitical competition with China by dismantling the already-insufficient amount of commitment the United States has to compete in those spaces, I think it's going to be the opposite. I think if you threaten countries with tariffs, if you humiliate foreign leaders, if you pick these types of fights, they may be very nice to you, right?

You might not want to go up to the bully in the schoolyard and punch back. But you're probably going to go over to the other corner of the schoolyard and find another group of people to hang out with. And I think that's what's going to happen over the next four years, that we are going to see a whole host of countries either becoming more regional in their cooperation or looking to China for investment or technology.

And so it won't show up overnight. Not everything in the world happens on an American news cycle, but it happens. And it's already happened over the last eight years, and it's just going to accelerate.

And so I think that this kind of blending of the Trump-Musk nationalism and libertarian mindsets is one in which guardrails are removed from people with political power and people with wealth. And again, this comes back to this idea of—it's a reflection of what the society currently prioritizes in this country.

The idea that Elon Musk could go in and smash up USAID would have been ludicrous eight years ago. It doesn't feel that unusual today. The idea of Trump doing some of the things and saying some of the things he's saying would have been ludicrous even in his first term. It doesn't feel that way anymore. And that's a cultural shift that's happened because of our politics, because of a whole range of issues in our society, which we can obviously talk about.

But I would, again, argue that rather than a golden age, as President Trump said in his inaugural address, it's like your late-stage superpower and decline vibe. I mean, this is not like a strategy for resurgence. It's a strategy for squeezing as much juice out as we can out of what remains, and then handing it off to someone else to deal with the residue.

So on that note, I will say that you return to Kennedy, and he made this powerful case about aid being a source of strength for the United States. As he said to those mission chiefs, "We do not want to send American troops to a great many areas where freedom may be under attack, so we send you."

In those days, by contrast, America was this newly minted superpower, and Kennedy in his youth and his new frontier ethos spoke to where the country saw itself at the moment. That led to a lot of great things like USAID and the Peace Corps. It led to excesses in hubris too, so I don't want to overly romanticize it.

But it was a signal that it's possible for Americans to have a sense of shared national identity and a sense of national pride that is about affirmative things, that's not just about taking things away from other people. Or it's not just about grievance, or it's not just about an “other,” whether that other be at home or abroad. It is possible—and both political parties have done this—to have a different concept of national identity. And ultimately, that's what it's going to take to have a different foreign policy.

And so I would argue that those of us who are alarmed by these trends have to recognize that we're not going back to some past. I found some things to criticize in President Biden's foreign policy, some of which I agreed with, some of which I didn't. He had a slogan that he used when he was running for president the first time that I actually think informed his worldview and his foreign policy, which was, “America's back.” I don't know if you remember that.

And it was like, well, let's just roll this clock back. There was no Trump, and there's not been all these changes. And what I think he found is that was a useful worldview in Europe and with NATO and with a handful of Asian allies. But the rest of the world is like, we don't want to go back to when you guys told us what to do.

In Gaza, it led to a massive blind spot where there was just no self-examination of applying no rules over here while we are applying rules in Ukraine that we flagrantly ignore in Gaza. And I think that what those of us who are critical of these policies need to bear in mind is that we should not succumb to our own “Make America Great Again,” that there's just some international order we can go back to.

That international order doesn't exist anymore. It's fractured. There's a US collection of like-minded countries. There's a Chinese bloc of countries and institutions. There's a whole bunch of rising powers to kind of pick and choose between. And we have to negotiate something new that can emerge from all of this.

And there'll be new ideas developed in places like this about how the United States can constructively engage people around the world, live peacefully with other great powers. I would argue, negotiate around issues like technology and artificial intelligence, climate change, the return of a nuclear arms race, existential things where there's a basis for negotiation among these different blocs.

But again, I think to reach any kind of constructive future—and I'd say some new development agency, whether it's called USAID or not—but I'd say to reach that future, we have to look inward for a little bit. I think it's OK that there's not big resistance right now. I mean, obviously, you want to push back on things like USAID, or you want to protect marginalized people who are vulnerable right now.

It's time to take a minute here and think about things, and to not just think about, what's the best policy for this or that region or issue, but to think about what happened here in this country that this is what we're projecting to the world? Because ultimately, what's going to make us more effective in foreign policy is if we are healthier at home. And what is going to help advance democracy again in the world is not—and this pains me to say as a speechwriter—the speeches that presidents give about democracy. It's going to be what people see in democracies like the United States.

And so this is a time to see who each of us are. I mean, I really mean this, like, individually. What are you valuing? Where and how are you getting your information? What are you participating in or not participating in?

Unfortunately, like a lot of you, I've been doing some deep reading on life in certain political systems. And you have to start from that level and build out. What is happening in my community? What is happening in my municipality? The best ideas, I think, are going to come from cities and states and communities. And how does that ripple up into a healthier political culture and politics?

And there's opportunity in it—there really, truly is, to come out on the other side (if we make it to the other side)—with the opportunity to build something new. And again, universities are going to be central to that because it's going to be a pretty blank slate. 

Illustration: Kristin Caulfield. Original image of Donald Trump by Gage Skidmore, Flickr. All other portraits from Wikimedia Commons.