It sure looks as if the Trump-Vance team is bent on repeating every single mistake it once criticized the neocons for.

Remember all the arguments that were made against “neocon” foreign policy? Because it sure looks as if the Trump-Vance team is bent on repeating every single mistake it once criticized.

To start with, the global war on trade implicit in rolling out tariffs against everyone lacks a defined enemy — much as was said of the Global War on Terror, it’s an attempt to battle a tactic rather than a specific adversary.

There’s not a single, clear rationale for why we are doing this: explanations have been all over the map. As I summed things up for the Telegraph:

Tariffs are variously a negotiating tactic, a declaration of economic independence, a replacement for the income tax, a revenue-raiser, or a national security measure. These can’t all be true simultaneously: either tariffs are good for protecting us from competition, or we should plan to deploy them only temporarily to get freer trade in which we compete well. . . . Others have floated the idea that we need recessionary pressures in order to tamp down inflation or to get the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates — two more conflicting goals.

There are no defined victory conditions, so that we could tell for certain when it has been won. There’s no exit strategy. If Trump gets what he wants (even if we could define clearly what he wants), when will we be able to say that trade is fair again? If he doesn’t, he has to beg his adversaries for a face-saving escape hatch.

Trump is going it alone to an extent that goes far beyond what George W. Bush ever dreamed with Iraq: He hasn’t asked Congress to vote for any of this. He has no allies (and in fact has declared all of our allies to be enemies in this war). And it goes without saying that he hasn’t presented a case to any international body.

The entire project reeks of hubris in its estimation of what American power can accomplish in reshaping, unilaterally, the entire global economic order. It takes no account of what the enemy might do in return, or of how the nationalism of other peoples might be activated by this sort of thing. We’re supposed to just try hard enough to create a new world order, different from the one we live in.

It is bound to be more expensive than projected, with demands to bail out the domestic losers with taxpayer money.

One of the paleocon critiques of the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars was that they didn’t just expand presidential power, they spent domestic political capital that could better have been focused on cultural conservatism, while spending American prestige abroad that could better have been husbanded. Here, too, launching a global trade war will inevitably burn up a ton of political capital that Trump could have used to further the cultural vibe shift that was a major part of his election, while attacking our military allies with tariffs will eat up most of our diplomatic energy at a time when it ought to be focused against China, Russia, Iran, and Hamas.

One of the worst aspects of the past decade of American politics, which Trump has long exemplified, is the idea that if you criticize your adversaries for doing something wrong or bad, you then ought to imitate it. Well, congratulations to the anti-neocons. Mission Accomplished.