Two Trump initiatives that unfolded on Tuesday evening seemed to capture, in the flash of a few hours, the outline of President Trump’s vision for shaping American power.
Ten thousand people working around the world for U.S.A.I.D., the main American aid agency, were told to pack up and come home over the next month, eviscerating a Kennedy-era initiative to build alliances by making the United States the world’s most generous and benevolent superpower. Mr. Trump declared that their leaders were “radical left lunatics,” and the State Department ordered them to halt virtually all their projects, even if that meant cutting off programs that helped eradicate smallpox and prevented millions of H.I.V. cases.
At the same time, in the East Room of the White House, Mr. Trump was describing a new American venture to seize, occupy and rebuild Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East.” The two million Palestinians there would be moved elsewhere — voluntarily or forcefully was never made clear. A 15-year clearing and rebuilding of a devastated land would commence, Mr. Trump said, one that experts imagine could easily cost multiples of the roughly $40 billion that the United States spends annually on U.S.A.I.D.
Mr. Trump then described a future for Gaza in which it would be repopulated by citizens of the world, living happily in glass towers with spectacular sea views. There was no discussion of a right of the Palestinians to return to the territory, which he said would be owned and governed by the United States. Nor was there discussion of whether moving the Palestinians out involuntarily would violate the Geneva Conventions’ prohibition against “mass forcible transfers.”
Rarely has a confluence of declarations captured so vividly that Mr. Trump’s vision of America First is only selectively isolationist — and driven by a vision of commercial profit. His is a one-way version of isolationism, defended by high walls at home and protected by American troops at the border to keep illegal immigrants out. But the borders of other territories must give way to American national security concerns, or development whims.
In this vision, the Panama Canal and Greenland must be owned or operated for American interests first, what Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Waltz, referred to last month as the Monroe Doctrine 2.0. But that doctrine applied only to the Western Hemisphere. Gaza would be an out-of-area operation, a forcible insertion of American troops abroad — not unlike what William McKinley, Mr. Trump’s hero, did in the Philippines 127 years ago or what George W. Bush ordered in Iraq a little more than a century later.
