Pro-Trump transition plans seek to dismantle U.S. foreign policy apparatus

In a radio interview early this month, Donald Trump was asked three times about relations with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. The first time brought a Trumpian riff on how there had been “no wars” during his administration. The second time, Trump compared an “extremely intelligent” Xi to the “not intelligent people that are running our country.”

Host Hugh Hewitt tried a third time, asking the Republican presidential nominee how he thought his opponent, Kamala Harris, would deal with Xi. Launching a rant on “vicious fascists and Marxists” in the current U.S. administration and the “enemy from within,” Trump quickly switched to “crazy as a bedbug” Nancy Pelosi.

Getting Trump to focus on his foreign policy plans for a potential second term has proved elusive. Beyond general declarations that he would quickly resolve conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, and be tough on trade and immigration, he has provided few and often contradictory answers. The best policy, he has indicated, will emerge from his own instincts, toughness and dealmaking prowess.

But there has been no shortage of proposals from Trump supporters in Congress and in conservative think tanks, chief among them the 900-page Project 2025, a compendium of recommendations on both domestic and foreign policies by the Heritage Foundation, and a 340-page transition book on security policy published in May by the America First Policy Institute, launched in 2021 by a group of senior Trump administration veterans.

Vice President Harris’s campaign has seized on the former - which Trump has said he had nothing to do with, although many of its domestic proposals comport with his own policy pledges - as a dangerous MAGA blueprint. He has said little about AFPI, although he appeared at a July 2022 summit held by that organization and has held Mar-a-Lago fundraisers for the nonprofit.

The two organizations are not affiliated, and unlike Project 2025, those compiling the AFPI blueprint have largely strived to stay out of the campaign spotlight.

But both echo Trump’s insistence on the need to “drain the swamp” of national security officials who are not prepared to forcefully and enthusiastically implement whatever his priorities may be. In the “first Trump administration,” an essay written by Trump veterans Doug Hoelscher and Michael Rigas, the chair and vice-chair of AFPI’s Transition Project on personnel in the America First book notes, his “policies were aggressively resisted by an entrenched national security bureaucracy, sometimes called the ‘deep state.’”

“Tactics included delay, ignoring administration policies and decisions, engaging in lawfare by filing baseless complaints and protests to human resources and inspectors general offices, undermining the administration by leaking information to the president’s political opponents and the media … all to stop the implementation of President Trump’s American First national security policies,” it says.

But while America First concentrates on departmental senior leadership and training on how to master the bureaucracy and tame it to Trump’s agenda across the national security space, Heritage called for a much more extensive housecleaning, particularly in the State Department.

Most of Project 2025 was produced nearly two years ago, when the Ukraine war was relatively young and long before the Israel-Hamas conflict. Written by Kiron K. Skinner, a conservative academic now at Pepperdine University who served briefly in the Trump State Department, its chapter on the department states that “large swaths of the State Department’s workforce are left-wing and predisposed to disagree with a conservative President’s policy agenda and vision.”

Skinner, who did not respond to a request for an interview, called for the new president not to wait for the cumbersome Senate confirmation process, but to immediately appoint acting officials on Day 1. Under a Trump rewriting of federal personnel guidelines that allows the president to replace both political and career officials well down the bureaucratic ladder in jobs that do not require confirmation, it suggests firing officials down to at least the level of deputy assistant secretaries.

“No one in a leadership position on the morning of January 20 should hold that position at the end of the day,” Skinner recommended.

Some officials inside State fear that Trump would do away with entire branches of the department that focus on issues that are traditionally seen as softer - the bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, for example, or the bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration, or PRM. Both have been in the forefront of internal criticism of U.S. weapons supply to Israel during the war with Hamas.

Neither sweeping out senior career officials nor shutting down bureaus would be likely to improve Trump’s ability to carry out his foreign policy, said Daniel Fried, who served senior leadership roles inside the State Department for both Democratic and Republican administrations.

“It’s the kind of idea that people come up with when they just want to take a broom and sweep things clean with little heed for operational effectiveness,” said Fried, who is now a fellow at the Atlantic Council, a foreign policy think tank.

“It’s easy to imagine someone who is taking a deep bath in a very hard-right world would think that Human Rights is a bureau for political correctness and PRM is a bureau for open borders,” Fried said. That’s not what history shows, he said, noting the role of State’s human rights bureau in helping to bring down the Soviet Union.

Backers of the possible changes say that a cull would yield a diplomatic corps that is better aligned with Trump’s vision for foreign policy.

Skinner’s chapter of Project 2025 also calls for the president-elect’s transition team to conduct a pre-inauguration reassessment of “every aspect of State Department negotiations and funding commitments,” and for a new secretary of state, “upon inauguration” to “order an immediate freeze on all efforts to implement unratified treaties and international agreements, allocation of resources, foreign assistance disbursements, domestic and international contracts and payments, hiring and recruiting decisions, etc., pending a political appointee-driven review.”

Those proposals echo Trump’s distrust of international institutions and multilateral commitments, evinced in his first term withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, the Paris climate accords and the World Health Organization during the covid-19 pandemic. President Joe Biden returned the United States to both Paris and the WHO, and spent several fruitless years trying to renegotiate a new Iran nuclear agreement.

James Carafano, director of foreign policy studies at the Heritage Foundation, said in an interview that great power competition requires participation in many international organizations, as long as they are “held accountable” and serve U.S. interests. “The traditional conservative approach is to ignore them, don’t participate and withdraw,” he said.

Instead, the United States should be prepared to compete for power - primarily against China - in leadership and direction of organizations that can serve its interests, said Carafano, who emphasized in an interview that he has not participated in Project 2025 or Trump’s transition planning.

“I see a lot of similarities between [Ronald] Reagan’s second term and a Trump second term,” Carafano said. “All the vibes I get … today are not about disengagement from international organizations, it’s about holding them accountable.”

Carafano advised looking at what Trump does rather than his bombastic speeches and social media pronouncements. “Trump’s never going to stop being Trump. … I think most [other] governments are much more sophisticated about that now, and it’s really more in the punditry world that we haven’t been able to break the mold of just obsessing about the president’s tweeting.”

The Harris campaign’s frequent reference to Project 2025 as the principal boogeyman of a Trump Doctrine has made it a principal focus of fears about his plans to reshape the federal government. But the AFPI planning document was put together by individuals who appear primed to shape policy in a second Trump term.

AFPI’s chief executive, Brooke Rollins, served as a high-ranking official in Trump’s White House, and the organization’s board chair is former Cabinet member Linda McMahon, who is also co-chair of Trump’s transition team. The principal authors of the transition book, retired Lt. Gen Keith Kellogg and Fred Fleitz, both served as senior White House and National Security Council officials under Trump.

At AFPI and beyond, many of those believed to be in the top tier for consideration as senior national security officials in a new Trump administration have held back from detailing their visions for a reformed State Department. But some have outlined different ways for conducting diplomacy, visions for the thorniest global problems and specific policy recommendations.

One of Trump’s closest advisers, former acting director of national intelligence Richard Grenell, has been skeptical of the Biden administration’s approach toward Ukraine. Asked by a PBS reporter at the Republican National Convention in July whether he supported more aid to Ukraine, Grenell said, “I think we’ve given a lot, and I want to see a peace plan before we talk about more of a war plan.”

Grenell later was the only foreign policy-focused adviser to join Trump’s meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in New York in September. Trump has declined to say who he wants to win the Ukraine war, and he recently blamed Zelensky for the Russian invasion, saying he “never should have let that war start.”

Kellogg, who initially served as Vice President Mike Pence’s national security adviser before becoming chief of staff at Trump’s National Security Council, has indicated that the State Department would play a reduced role in Trump diplomacy.

Trump will “pick up the phone and he’ll talk to [a foreign leader] and he’ll say, ‘Look, I’m going to bring the full weight of the United States on you: economically, politically, diplomatically, whatever you want to call it,’” Kellogg said at a Nixon Foundation event last month. “We’re going to establish a relationship with personalities … so you don’t go through your State Department and you don’t go through the Secretary of Defense and you don’t go through USAID or anybody else.”

Though he has been careful to say that he speaks for himself and not Trump, Kellogg has been a principal cheerleader for Trump’s transactional foreign policy in office, touting things like Trump’s decision to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to disputed Jerusalem and his “historic” handshake meetings with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un as far more effective at avoiding the current turmoil in the world than Biden’s “globalist” approach.

He declined an interview request for this article.

Trump’s first secretary of state, former oil executive Rex Tillerson, also swept into office promising major reforms of the department, which employs about 69,000 people around the world. Tillerson promised to bring a private-sector approach to the department and floated ideas such as outsourcing visa processing to the Department of Homeland Security and closing down some bureaus. He spent millions of dollars on high-priced consultants from Deloitte and other firms. But in the end, he changed little before he was fired after a little more than a year in office.

Fried, the retired longtime diplomat, said that he would be watching the reform efforts with interest, should Trump be elected.

“Incoming administrations often go in like this, with lots of attitude,” he said. “During changes of administration that are also a change in party, there is frequently a sense that everything must be wrong, that you’ve got to change everything.”