Trump Revamps the Nixon Doctrine
Mike Watson
June 28, 2025Events that displease China’s diplomats are usually good for the United States, and this week they were hopping mad. At the height of the NATO summit, China’s ambassador to Nepal, Chen Song, castigated the "‘ass kissers’ everywhere in Europe."
His anger is well founded. Between the bombing raid on Iran’s nuclear program and the summit’s results, the last few days have been good ones for Americans and their friends. Donald Trump entered office intent on rebalancing America’s alliances, and he is making important progress toward his goal. He is creating an opening for an updated Nixon Doctrine.
The summer after his inauguration, Richard Nixon laid it out during a stopover in Guam. "The time has come when the United States," he told some reporters, needs to "be quite emphatic on two points: One, that we will keep our treaty commitments" to defend them. His second point, however, was "as far as the problems of internal security are concerned, as far as the problems of military defense, except for the threat of a major power involving nuclear weapons," he wanted to step back. Instead, "the United States is going to encourage and has a right to expect that this problem will be increasingly handled by, and the responsibility for it taken by, the Asian nations themselves."
Nixon initially applied this doctrine to American allies in East and Southeast Asia, but Israel was the poster child. Since American forces were tied down in Vietnam, the Soviets were energetically striving to reach nuclear parity with the United States, and Europe was the decisive theater for the Cold War, Washington needed to avoid extensive deployments elsewhere. Israel subsequently defeated Egypt and Syria during the Yom Kippur War, which exposed Soviet powerlessness and greatly improved America’s strategic position. The United States resupplied Israeli forces, and the White House raised the nuclear alert level to deter Soviet adventurism, but the U.S. military otherwise stayed out of the fight. For Americans, the payoff was as great as the cost was low.
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https://freebeacon.com/columns/trump-revamps-the-nixon-doctrine/
