The New Cold Warriors are failing
The US deployed foreign aid and civil rights to counter Soviet influence. Trump is gutting both, disabling the ability to counter China.
Before Donald Trump took office again, the New Cold Warriors and their policies appeared to have a prime seat at the Administration’s table. Instead, they and their ideas have largely been thrown under the bus.
Trump 1.0 ended with the New Cold Warriors in strong position. Mike Pompeo was Secretary of State. Matt Pottinger was the National Security Council lead on China. In 2023, they were given a platform with the creation of the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party. It was chaired by then-Congressman Mike Gallagher, who gave it a New Cold War agenda to match its very New Cold War name. Pottinger and Pompeo were among its star witnesses. Gallagher and Pottinger wrote a piece in Foreign Affairs basically mapping out the New Cold War blueprint for policy toward China.
Things still looked good for the New Cold Warriors going in to the second term. Trump appointed two of them to prime positions: Marco Rubio as Secretary of State and Mike Waltz as National Security Advisor.
But Waltz never had sway on China policy because it was centered on Trump’s obsession with tariffs. Then he got canned. Now the NSA role is dual-hatted with Rubio, who has thoroughly abandoned New Cold Warrior principles he professed as a senator (along with his previous support for democracy and human rights) in order stay in Trump’s good graces. Oh, and Gallagher quit Congress to go earn money. And Pottinger is PNG’d in Trumpworld because he rightly quit on January 6 in protest of his boss’ January 6 insurrection.
But my interest in New Cold War-ism is less about the Kremlinology and more about the policy. It’s something I’ve written about here and here and here.
And on policy, the New Cold Warriors are failing, miserably. By their own standard.
By definition, those who speak of a “New Cold War” see the competition between the United States and China as a revival of old struggle between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.[1] If accurate, then we should expect them to be pursuing polices toward China that reprise the components of the polices that “won”[2] the Cold War.
One of the core aspects of Cold War policymaking was to convince governments and peoples to side with us and not the other side. It was a massive marketing campaign designed to make the American brand appealing to the rest of the world.
But the Trump Administration is ignoring this blueprint. Rather than learn from Reagan and other policymakers during the Cold War on how to counter influence by the country they speak of as an adversary, their actions are ceding influence to China around the world.
Foreign aid
Foreign aid played an essential role as a tool of U.S. influence during the Cold War. The Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, enacted during the Kennedy Administration, systematized the effort under a new United States Agency for International Development (USAID), with the intended goal of countering Soviet influence and advancing American soft power through economic development.
Of course, the impact of this influence was and is debated. Security assistance used to prop up dictators or abet human rights abuses, portrayed as anti-Soviet efforts, could damage the U.S. reputation with negative consequences we still deal with. But it was a fact that foreign aid was an intentional tool of the Cold War.
By contrast, President Trump is gutting foreign assistance by eliminating USAID and 83 percent of its grant programs. Further, he is proposing a 50 percent cut to the State Department budget, along with closures of many embassies and consulates. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, an erstwhile New Cold Warrior, is dutifully administering these dramatic reductions.
Civil rights
“Early on in the Cold War, there was a recognition that the U.S. couldn’t lead the world if it was seen as repressing people of color,” said Mary Dudziak in an Atlantic article that attributes her book, “Cold War Civil Rights,” as the seminal work on the topic.
Soviet propagandists routinely portrayed the United States as riven by racial bigotry and segregation, citing real incidents, to undermine America’s image in what we call today the Global South. The Soviet message sunk in because it was based on fact.
In this competition, America’s selling points were democracy, liberty and freedom. However, a “democratic United States had a problem,” the State Department’s diplomacy museum explains. “It could not claim democracy as the best form of government when millions of its citizens experienced racial discrimination and segregation.”
Policymakers during the Cold War realized that, in order to win hearts and minds around the world, they had to address America’s racial problems. They responded with a series of laws like 1964’s Civil Rights Act and 1965’s Voting Rights Act, buoyed by court rulings like 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education to desegregate schools and1956’s Browder v. Gayle to desegregate buses.
In that era, Cold Warriors saw the civil rights movement as beneficial to superpower competition.
Today, the Trump Administration is doing the opposite, undoing civil rights laws and policies in what Adam Serwer calls “The Great Resegregation.” Using euphemisms like “DEI,” his Party is acting to sanitize Black history, including whitewashing the National African American History Museum. Trump has brazenly fired qualified African-Americans in leadership positions, including General CQ Brown, Jr., and Carla Hayden.
Like the Soviets, Chinese propagandists seek to exploit racial inequality and discrimination in United States as a way to portray the American system as a failure. In this case, the Trump Administration is giving succor and legitimization to Chinese propaganda.
Colonialism
While there is no shortage of imperialist actions and attitudes across the breadth of America’s history, it was also the case that policymakers during the Cold War found utility in supporting decolonization movements. I don’t mean to imply that the record wasn’t complicated (see Vietnam). But competition between the U.S. and the Soviet Union for influence among the peoples of in Africa and Asia gave space for principles of self-determination.
U.S. policymakers recognized the self-interest in the convergence of the civil rights movement domestically and decolonization overseas, albeit with a mixed record.
By contrast, Trump is acting shamelessly neo-colonial, asserting control over the Panama Canal, seeking to acquire Greenland, possibly by force (for which intelligence is being gathered), annexing Canada as the “51st state;” and potentially invading Mexico. Self-determination, despite being recognized internationally as a human right, is not a part of the Administration’s language. (Just ask Ukrainians.) And the Taiwanese have reason to worry about what Trump’s interest in big-power territorial acquisition over local self-determination means for them.
The failure
As a result of the Trump Administration’s actions, America’s reputation overseas is tanking. One poll finds that the proportion of people saying the U.S. has a positive influence on world affairs has fallen in 26 out of 29 countries. Notably, they rank China ahead of the U.S. when it comes to playing a positive role on the international scene.
Trump’ imperious approach has apparently swayed elections against his favor in Canada and Australia, and arguably at the Vatican too.
There is plenty of reporting about how, due to Trump’s policies, the United States is ceding influence to China in many places around the world: in the Asia-Pacific broadly, in the Pacific islands, in Africa, in Latin America, in Central Asia, in Europe.
According to the Cold War-based framework of the New Cold Warrior creed, the United States should be employing these tools of influence to incentivize to governments and appeal to people in other countries to come to the American side and away from the Chinese side. But that’s not happening, because Trump is actively dismantling the toolbox.
If New Cold Warriors aren’t OK with this, we can’t tell. Because people are afraid to publicly criticize Trump for fear of retribution, we don’t know what New Cold Warriors are thinking. Which is more evidence they are failing. What we do know is that one of their former champions, Marco Rubio, is willingly complicit in burying their agenda.
I don’t buy the New Cold Warrior thinking, for many reasons. They propose a false binary that assumes nations must choose between the U.S. and China. In reality, most nations want what they can get from both the U.S. and China to suit their own self-interest. But I do agree that the U.S. government should do the things that buoy our reputation, because they are intrinsically good things that promote our interests in a positive way. And so I agree that Trump gutting these things is bad for the United States. And unlike the New Cold Warriors, I am not afraid to say it.
[1] As I have previously written, I strongly disagree with the characterization of a “New Cold War” both for empirical and normative reasons. I see it as a laziness by those who can’t bother to spend the time to understand the complexities of China and its leaders’ decision-making, and as a crutch for those who find cognitive comfort in the frame of the Cold War they grew up. And as someone who thinks that the Cold War was not healthy for the United States, I don’t want to subject Americans to a repeat of that. But for the sake of analysis, I evaluate New Cold Warriors against their own standard.
[2] My position: the U.S. didn’t win the Cold War, the Soviet Union lost it first.