CLEVELAND — Donald Trump, in a wide-ranging interview with The New York Times here on Wednesday, outlined an approach to the use of U.S. power that was decidedly unconventional — especially for the Republican Party, which has long favored an internationalist approach to foreign policy.
Here is a look at some of Trump's statements and what it would mean for the United States and the world if his policies took effect.
On NATO
Trump said that if NATO members were not "paying their bills," they should not expect the United States to automatically come to their aid. He suggested that he would review member contributions to the alliance and that "if they fulfill their obligations to us, the answer is yes."
That answer sent some U.S. allies — already fearful that the country was turning inward — into something of a panic. In their view, an alliance is an alliance, not a protection racket.
The secretary-general of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, issued a mildly worded objection, but others were more direct about the implications of Trump's formula.
"The NATO treaty is crystal clear on this one: An attack on one nation shall be regarded as an attack on all of them," wrote James G. Stavridis, the former supreme allied commander of NATO who is now the dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Writing for Foreign Policy magazine, he said this commitment "is the absolute bedrock of NATO and the linchpin of the postwar security infrastructure that has bound Western democracies to one another."
Stavridis also argued that Trump's policy would be "deeply destabilizing" because it would remove a key deterrent for Vladimir Putin, Russia's president. Putin has already tinkered with "hybrid war" — including nonuniformed forces and cyberattacks — in Ukraine, and if he believed that Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania could not count on U.S. support, he might be tempted to test the bounds of NATO's security guarantees.
On deploying troops
Posting U.S. troops in "forward deployed" positions around the world is nice, Trump said, but very expensive. "If we ever felt there was a reason to defend the United States, we can always deploy" from U.S. soil, he said.
The question here is what's cheaper — and what's wiser. To Trump, keeping U.S. forces at home is part of the "America First" philosophy: They would be more focused on homeland defense and less likely to get involved in conflicts abroad that drain money, and power, from the U.S. military. But at the Pentagon, most officers and political appointees view that as pre-World War II thinking and argue that forward-deployed troops are crucial to national security.
The "freedom of navigation" tours that U.S. forces take through the South China Sea are supposed to be a reminder to the Chinese that there could be a price to expanding the area they argue is sovereign Chinese territory and reclaiming reefs to build military installations. It would be hard to do those from home. The United States launches drones — and keeps a store of 50 nuclear weapons — at the U.S. base in Incirlik, Turkey. The naval base in Bahrain runs patrols to keep Iran from choking off oil routes. And troops based in South Korea, Japan, Germany and Africa train with local forces.
When a tsunami hit Indonesia and earthquakes struck China and Pakistan, U.S. forces in the Pacific delivered emergency supplies. And it was Republicans who complained that when the Benghazi attack happened in 2012, U.S. forces were too far from Libya to help.
As for cost, there is some question of which approach would save more money. Japan, for example, pays such a large percentage of the cost of housing troops that the Pentagon has long argued it would be more expensive to bring them home.
[Trump plays down US commitment to NATO allies and role in overseas crises]
On trade
Trump doesn’t like the North American Free Trade Agreement and never has. His approach to dealing with it, he said, would be to renegotiate it, or “I would pull out of NAFTA in a split second.”
NAFTA is deeply unpopular, and in part, economists say, that is because jobs leave the country en masse. (Trump often refers to the Carrier air-conditioning plant that is shutting down and moving 1,400 jobs out of the country.) But when jobs are created in the United States, it is often hard to say whether that is because of a trade deal or just an improvement in business.
As a practical matter, no one knows what withdrawing from NAFTA would mean — just as no one knows what “Brexit” means for Britain and the rest of Europe. Unwinding a huge trade agreement, and the rules that have governed tariffs, movement across borders and adjudication of disputes, would be enormously complicated. And doing so could be costly: U.S. businesses would lose easy access to the Mexican and Canadian markets, along with preferential treatment on investments there. But Trump insists he could negotiate a far better deal.
On shaping other nations
Messing around inside another country’s borders? Not for Trump. He has a more traditional view of how U.S. power should be exercised.
For decades, one of the unspoken traditions of U.S. foreign policy was that intervention ended at another country’s borders — unless that country posed an imminent threat to the United States. Over the decades, the United States had lots of allies and partners who were strongmen — in the Philippines, South Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere — but didn’t interfere with their internal politics.
That changed over the past 20 or so years as the United States began to intervene, sometimes on humanitarian grounds. That was the basis of the Balkan conflict, and the European intervention in Libya in 2011. But Trump seems determined to turn that around: In his discussion of last week’s coup attempt in Turkey, he spoke admiringly of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for the way he put down the military uprising, but Trump offered no warnings that Erdogan needed to obey the rule of law in what appeared to be a huge purge and a declaration of emergency powers.
In short, Trump wants to take U.S. values out of its relationship with other nations and not seek to transform their actions. That would be a huge change in U.S. foreign policy and could well signal to the world’s authoritarians that they had a free pass — to imprison dissidents, torture opponents and ignore human rights standards without fear that their relationship with the United States would suffer.