Project 2025: Authoritarian Rule and Foreign Policy Mayhem
A Far-Right Conspiracy in the Open
Project 2025, the far-right’s ambitious policy planning guide published as Mandate for Leadership, is designed to dismantle the “Deep State” and install a president and proven loyalists who will carry out Donald Trump’s authoritarian agenda. Now the Project supposedly is no more—but not really. Trump’s campaign, concerned about the bad press Project 2025 was getting, ordered that it be disconnected. But make no mistake about it: While Trump may disagree with some of the project’s recommendations, it’s designed with him and only him in mind.
Trump claims to “know nothing about Project 2025,” but his name appears in the document more than 300 times; CNN counts at least 140 people who worked on the Project 2025 document and who previously worked for the Trump administration; and Trump maintains close ties to the Heritage Foundation, which published the document. If there is another Trump presidency, the contributors to Project 2025, many from the Heritage Foundation and others from a far-right network in Washington called the Conservative Partnership Institute, will populate his administration.
In this two-part analysis, I explore those chapters of Mandate for Leadership that concern international affairs and US foreign policy. In part 1, I will note the authoritarian aspects of the document and then look at its policy proposals with regard to China and Russia. In part 2, I will examine what the paper has to say about trade, nuclear weapons and military spending, North Korea, the Middle East, and Latin America.
The Plan to Reorder America
Most of the US media and Democratic lawmakers’ attention has, rightly, been devoted to the domestic side of Project 2025’s agenda—its plans for putting the justice department at the service of the President, getting rid of the department of education as a step toward emasculating public education, making America unwelcome for immigrants of color, prohibiting abortion nationwide, giving the fossil fuel industry whatever it wants, and containing public dissent.
Ideas about foreign affairs track that agenda because they all depend for implementation on an all-powerful executive and a bureaucracy that has been purged of liberals and leftists. (“Large swaths of the State Department’s workforce are left-wing and predisposed to disagree with a conservative President’s policy agenda and vision,” says the document).
Project 2025 proposes three essential tasks of governance to promote its cause: reasserting the dominant role of the President in policy making, dismantling key government agencies concerned with social welfare, and replacing many civil servants who don’t pass the loyalty test (they will be reclassified as ordinary workers) with political hacks loyal to the Chief Executive. The plan seeks ways around the government’s sprawling bureaucracy, in and of itself an aim in common with all previous administrations.
But it differs dramatically in its bowing to Trump’s authoritarian impulses. Every page of the document stresses that officials and other personnel must align their views with the President’s, with the strong implication that failure to do so will result in dismissal or reassignment. It’s a formula for limiting policy debate within or between agencies to what the President has already decided.
China and Russia Policy
Project 2025 is absolutely obsessed with China. As was once true of US views of the Soviet Union, now China is believed to lurk behind every problematic situation on every continent. China gets so much attention, says the author of the section on the State Department, because it is “the defining threat.”
That’s Kiron K. Skinner, who formerly was in charge of Trump’s policy planning at the State Department and then joined the Heritage Foundation staff. Similarly, writes Christopher Miller in the section on the defense department, “Beijing presents a challenge to American interests across the domains of national power.” (Miller, a retired Special Forces colonel, was Trump’s acting defense secretary for about three months.)
Moreover, the military threat that China poses is especially acute. He portrays China as an “immediate threat” to Taiwan and US allies in the Pacific, not to mention a nuclear danger as well–all with no compelling evidence. Nevertheless, Miller urges as the highest priority “conventional force planning construct to defeat a Chinese invasion of Taiwan before allocating resources to other missions . . .” Those other missions probably include Ukraine.
Skinner takes Biden’s China policy to task for coddling China. She argues that some foreign policy professionals “knowingly or not parrot the Communist line. Global leaders including President Joe Biden have tried to normalize or even laud Chinese behavior.”
Actually, the opposite is true. Biden has likewise exaggerated the threat from China, and labeled Xi Jinping a “dictator.” When Skinner writes that China is a country “whose aggressive behavior can only be curbed through external pressure,” she has chosen to ignore how, under Biden, the US has lined up several countries in East Asia, including Japan, India, South Korea, and Philippines, in coalition against China–which is why Beijing accuses the US of again pursuing a containment policy.
The Project’s treatment of Russia is a far cry from its analysis of China. Russia is a threat only with respect to Ukraine’s security. There is no consideration of Vladimir Putin’s belief in Russian exceptionalism, his policy ideas, his human rights record, or his imperial ambitions. (The Project 2025 paper gives more space to the Arctic than to Russia.)
Skinner notes three strands of conservative thinking about Ukraine policy and concludes:
“Regardless of viewpoints, all sides agree that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is unjust and that the Ukrainian people have a right to defend their homeland. Furthermore, the conflict has severely weakened Putin’s military strength and provided a boost to NATO unity and its importance to European nations.”
Skinner concludes that US support of Ukraine should continue, provided it is “fully paid for; limited to military aid (while European allies address Ukraine’s economic needs); and have a clearly defined national security strategy that does not risk American lives.”
Some Trump Demurrers
Donald Trump has never spoken of Ukraine’s right of self-defense or the importance of NATO unity in the face of Russian aggression. Nor does he subscribe to fully paying for the Ukraine mission. Trump’s main concern is relations with Russia and Europe, not Ukraine’s security. He has said many times that Putin is a great friend, that Putin wouldn’t have started a war with Ukraine if Trump had been President, and that he, Trump, will arrange a peace agreement very quickly.
That may be why Ukraine is not even mentioned in the Republican Party’s platform, which refers simply to restoring “peace in Europe.” In short, Trump wants to get rid of the Ukraine problem by appeasing Russia. He’s only on the same page as Project 2025 in arguing that Europe and NATO should be treated in transactional terms—that is, insisting the Europeans pay more for defense and give more in terms of trade.
Trump may also not be entirely on board with Project 2025 when it comes to Taiwan. As he has demonstrated in the past, financial gain and vindictiveness are hallmarks of his approach to international relations, whether dealing with friends or adversaries.
Recall that Trump entered office in 2017 believing that both Japan and China had ripped off the US in trade relations. Then he distanced himself from NATO, arguing that its members either need to pay more for their defense or sacrifice US support.
So when he was asked in an interview with Bloomberg News in June 25 what his policy would be on Taiwan, his thoughts were not about defending the island, which Republicans in Congress consider the first priority, but this: “They did take about 100% of our chip business. I think, Taiwan should pay us for defense. You know, we’re no different than an insurance company. Taiwan doesn’t give us anything.” That doesn’t mean Trump will abandon Taiwan; he could simply be prodding it to pay more, just as he has demanded of NATO.
Cold War II
In summary, Project 2024 is less a serious, objective analysis than an ideological document. It upgrades the level of international threats to US interests, with China the central enemy; supports a huge expansion of presidential power; urges greater emphasis than under Biden on nuclear weapon modernization and expansion; leaves to allies the main responsibility for confronting Russia; pushes for major increases in the US military budget; and argues for strengthening the US defense industrial base and increasing US arms sales abroad.
Don’t look for diplomatic initiatives, human rights issues, environmental concerns, the role of international law, or discussion of poverty, autocracy, or democracy. If a Trump-Project 2025 agenda were implemented, we can expect widening crises in central Europe and the Middle East, new arms races with Russia and China, another trade war with China, and new tensions in the Taiwan Strait.
A “stable genius” will be in charge. Anyone who did not live through the first Cold War will have another opportunity.
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