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Mitch McConnell, the retiring Senate minority leader, has warned Donald Trump against embracing “right-wing isolationism” when he returns to the White House in January.
In an essay for Foreign Affairs magazine, the veteran Kentucky lawmaker, 82, warned the president-elect that he is set to encounter “a world far more hostile to US interests than the one he left behind four years ago” – citing the ever-growing challenges posed by China, Russia and Iran.
“These three US adversaries, along with North Korea, are now working together more closely than ever to undermine the US-led order that has underpinned Western peace and prosperity for nearly a century,” McConnell wrote.
President Joe Biden’s administration’s attempts to deal with those nations through “engagement and accommodation” failed, he argued, because Beijing, Moscow and Tehran have no wish to be integrated into the “existing international order” and prefer instead to undermine it.
“The response to four years of weakness must not be four years of isolation,” he advised Trump, warning against the “Fortress America” philosophy he is likely to be ushered towards by his conservative allies.
“If the United States continues to retreat, its enemies will be only too happy to fill the void,” McConnell wrote.
Advocating instead for a “hard power” strategy on foreign policy backed up by a robust American military in dialogue with its arms manufacturing sector, he explained: “To reverse the neglect of military strength, [Trump’s] administration must commit to a significant and sustained increase in defense spending, generational investments in the defense industrial base, and urgent reforms to speed the United States’ development of new capabilities and to expand allies’ and partners’ access to them.
“As it takes these steps, the administration will face calls from within the Republican Party to give up on American primacy. It must reject them. To pretend that the United States can focus on just one threat at a time, that its credibility is divisible, or that it can afford to shrug off faraway chaos as irrelevant is to ignore its global interests and its adversaries’ global designs.”
Invoking Trump’s most celebrated campaign slogan, McConnell added: “America will not be made great again by those who simply want to manage its decline.”
Digging into the specifics, he warned Trump that China is interested not simply in carving out a greater share of global trade but in “a contest over the future of the international order” and that allowing Russia to conquer Ukraine by walking back US support for Kyiv would only further that agenda and “compound” the myriad threats America faces.
McConnell also used the piece to offer some stinging criticism of Trump’s own first term, saying he “courted [Vladimir] Putin, he treated allies and alliance commitments erratically and sometimes with hostility, and in 2019 he withheld $400 million in security assistance to Ukraine.”
“These public episodes raised doubts about whether the United States was committed to standing up to Russian aggression, even when it actually did so,” he added.
He further rebuked the president-elect over his deployment of tariffs during his first term, which he has already pledged to repeat, writing: “Rather than strengthen and harness the power of Western economies, the first Trump administration and then the Biden administration sometimes actively antagonized them, including with tariffs that have strained relationships with allies and tested the patience of American consumers.
“This abdication was an invitation for China to expand its economic influence in Asia at the United States’ expense.”
McConnell concluded his appeal for a more proactive America on the world stage by saying: “The United States saw the light during World War II. But must it take another conquest of a close ally before the country turns its belated attention to the requirements of national defense?”
McConnell has become one of the few Republicans to criticize Trump in recent times as much of the party continues to fall in line.
Following the January 6 Capitol riot, McConnell voted against Trump’s impeachment but said he had been “practically and morally responsible” for the events that day.
Earlier this month, he received a standing ovation after delivering a speech that made an indirect swipe at the president-elect.
“Within the party Ronald Reagan once led so capably, it is increasingly fashionable to suggest that the sort of global leadership he modeled is no longer America’s place,” McConnell said at the annual Reagan National Defense Forum at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California.
