This week, the world witnessed the quintessential President Donald Trump as he brokered major deals with leaders in Saudi Arabia and Qatar. I’m reminded of my first meeting with President Trump at the White House during his first administration. The meeting started late because he was personally negotiating the cost of a military aircraft contract. It was clear then — as it is now — that this is the president’s “happy place.” And for good reason: over his 78 years, he’s been remarkably successful at it.
More than ever, it’s evident that President Trump views the world through the lens of a business deal — how to make the best one possible.
In his speech in Riyadh, the president rightly criticized the failures of previous U.S. approaches in the region: “The gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called nation builders, neocons, or liberal nonprofits. … In the end, the so-called nation builders wrecked far more nations than they built. The interventionists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves.”
President Trump is right. While I supported efforts to eliminate terrorist threats to the United States — and still believe we have a moral and strategic responsibility to protect ourselves and Israel from a nuclear-equipped Iran — I opposed the Bush-era notion of “nation building” from the beginning. The belief that, with enough money, one could till the soil of Islamic authoritarianism and plant the seeds of freedom endemic to our constitutional Republic was rooted in a deeply flawed worldview. It was a fool’s errand to think that drafting a constitution for Afghanistan would give rise to a nation that recognizes and protects God-given rights. Freedom is not the product of imposed institutions — it springs from a transformed people, something politics, foreign aid, and even business alone can never produce.
In fact, that flawed thinking is cut from the same ideological cloth as Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. After 50 years, it had cost taxpayers more than $22 trillion — with little to show for it in terms of real human flourishing. The worldview behind the Great Society echoes that of Karl Marx, who wrote: “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but their social being that determines their consciousness.”
In other words, material reality shapes identity — a belief that external change creates internal transformation.
But that’s not the American view. The freedoms and prosperity we’ve enjoyed for nearly 250 years are rooted in a Judeo-Christian worldview — one that understands man is not changed by his environment but rather changes his environment through a transformed life made possible by a relationship with God through Jesus Christ.
That worldview once permeated American life. While it has weakened over the last 60 years, it remains embedded in our national DNA. It’s what makes our capitalist system work — and what makes the art of the deal possible.
As we engage with the Middle East, we must recognize this: business deals and wealth creation alone will not cause authoritarian regimes to abandon totalitarianism or their tolerance for terrorism. As we’ve seen, it will only give them more resources to threaten the West.
