The leader of the free world just announced that America’s long-standing interventionist foreign policy hasn’t done the world any favors.
President Donald Trump’s Middle Eastern tour through Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates has generated a lot of headlines, mainly for the hundreds of billions of dollars in business it’s generating. But something else significant happened this week. Tuesday, during his address in in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, the president lambasted the neoconservative-prescribed foreign policy that has put American taxpayers on the hook for trillions of dollars and destabilized entire regions of the world.
Wrecking Rather Than Building
Trump said on Tuesday:
The gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called nation-builders, neocons, or liberal nonprofits like those who spent trillions … failing to develop Kabul and Baghdad. … In the end, the so-called nation-builders wrecked far more nations than they built — and the interventionalists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves.
.@POTUS: The gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called nation-builders… who spent trillions of dollars failing to develop Kabul and Baghdad… the birth of a modern Middle East has been brought about by the people of the region themselves. pic.twitter.com/SluRou2mv6— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) May 13, 2025
Trump also suggested it’s been bad policy to try to take out every tin-pot despot and tyrant who poses no threat to the U.S., saying:
In recent years, far too many American presidents have been afflicted with the notion that it’s our job to look into the souls of foreign leaders and use U.S. policy to dispense justice for their sins. … I believe it is God’s job to sit in judgment. My job [is] to defend America and to promote the fundamental interests of stability, prosperity, and peace.
Moreover, the American president suggested it is time to end America’s long-standing obsession with turning Middle Eastern countries into Western-style “democracies” and let them flourish as they are — whether they be theocracies, monarchies, or dictatorships disguised as monarchies.
A Vibrant Middle East
Trump views an economically vibrant Middle East as one the U.S. can do business with, instead of one in which America’s military ends up mired in unwinnable conflicts. He told the audience:
A generation of new leaders is transcending the ancient conflicts of tired divisions of the past and forging a future where the Middle East is defined by commerce, not chaos; where it exports technology, not terrorism; and where people of different nations, religions, and creeds are building cities together — not bombing each other out of existence.
In addition to securing hundreds of billions of dollars in business deals with the three nations he visited, the president backed up his sentiment with the announcement that he planned to lift the sanctions on Syria. He admitted that his decision was influenced by his “good friend,” the prince of Saudi Arabia. The news was met with a standing ovation.
This is not the first time Trump has indicated a desire to dial back America’s presence around the world. At the very beginning of his presidency, only a few months ago, he sent shock waves through the international world when he announced that America would no longer serve as Europe’s bodyguard. He and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said it was time for Europe’s rich nations to learn once again how to protect themselves. Since then, major European nations — including Germany and a coalition of Nordic nations — have begun making moves to boost their defense systems.
The Founders’ Noninterventionism
What Trump is describing, and hopefully follows through with, sounds more like the foreign policy America’s founding generation prescribed than the one practiced over the last century. The first U.S. president dedicated the final portion of his farewell address to warning the American people about foreign intervention. In his September 19, 1796, address, George Washington highlighted Europe’s propensity for conflict and cautioned against getting involved in it. He said America should avoid permanent, entangling alliances, and should strive to always remain neutral. Prescribing a foreign policy in which the U.S. lives in peace with all nations, a policy in which America conducts business with any country that’s willing without regard for its politics, he said:
Observe good faith and justice towards all Nations. Cultivate peace and harmony with all. Religion and Morality enjoin this conduct. … It will be worthy of a free, enlightened, and, at no distant period, a great nation, to give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of a People always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence. … The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign Nations, is, in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little Political connection as possible.
Nearly 25 years later, on July 4, 1821, John Quincy Adams, the son of the second president and who would become president himself four years later, reiterated the importance of a noninterventionist foreign policy. He said:
[America] goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. … She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own … she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. … She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.
What Washington and Adams advocated is obviously not what the U.S. has practiced, at least not since the 19th century. After World War II, the United States emerged as the undisputed most-powerful nation in the world. Unlike Europe, its landscape and economy were unscathed by the ravages of war. In fact, the war so greatly disturbed the industrial capabilities of Europe’s most advanced nations that it opened up massive opportunities for America to fill the gap.
Enter the Council on Foreign Relations
By the end of the war, an independent “think tank” — the Council on Foreign Relations, or CFR — created by President Woodrow Wilson’s globalist puppet master, Colonel Edward Mandell House, along with John Foster and Allen Dulles, had infiltrated the U.S. government. In the words of the author of The Invisible Government, Dan Smoot, “By 1945, the Council on Foreign Relations, and various foundations and other organizations interlocked with it, had virtually taken over the U.S. State Department.”
Globalists created the CFR to separate the U.S. from its foundational, noninterventionist foreign policy, and to force onto it the kind that has mired U.S. soldiers in endless overseas conflicts ever since. CFR foreign policy has turned the United States into the world policeman so many nations have come to abhor.
Author and researcher James Perloff confirmed that one major way the globalists control U.S. government policy is “by stacking presidential cabinets with CFR members at key positions — especially those involving defense, finance, foreign policy, and national security.” By 2009, he added, “21 secretaries of defense or war, 19 secretaries of the treasury, 17 secretaries of state, and 15 CIA directors [had] hailed from the Council on Foreign Relations.” That’s not including the numerous CFR members in the Obama, Biden, and even Trump administrations since 2009. Those include Barack Obama’s Secretary of State John Kerry and Joe Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken. The highest office in the current administration occupied by a CFR member is the Treasury, headed by Scott Bessent.
The CFR’s aim, Smoot pointed out, was “to create a one-world socialist system and make the United States an official part of it.” Smoot, a former FBI agent, wrote those words in 1962. Since then, most Europeans, as well as a large portion of Americans, have embraced socialism.
Can America Follow Through?
What the Trump administration does to reverse a destructive policy that has been entrenched in the system for more than half a century remains to be seen. If it’s truly serious about this goal, the administration will likely face great opposition, including from the Republican Party, which is still dominated by neocons. The Establishment punditry class will flank the public with rhetoric about how, as an international leader, America has a duty to be involved in the affairs of nations and settle the squabbles among them. The president and his nationalist officials will be labeled “isolationists.” The mainstream media will inundate its followers with scary predictions that the world will implode if America stops policing it. And rifts will erupt within the administration itself, between those who want to reverse these disastrous policies and those who are there to make sure that doesn’t happen.
