The American Grizzly
Richard Jordan, Law & Liberty
The first year of Trump 2.0 has seen extraordinary changes in American foreign policy. Last December, the new National Security Strategy (NSS) made waves, and like everything about President Trump, responses were never tepid. From “alarming” (the NYT) to “beautiful” (The American Conservative), our twittering elites were glad to have a new reason to rant about foreign policy. In any case, the recent spectacle in Venezuela certainly demonstrated the administration’s resolve to put its new NSS into practice.
Still, many commentators, even on the right, have been frustrated that Trump’s new NSS doesn’t offer a “doctrine.” As everyone who studies international relations knows, every president needs a doctrine: some readers may remember the Truman Doctrine, and in my lifetime we’ve had a Powell Doctrine, a Bush Doctrine, an Obama Doctrine, and even (bless his heart) a Biden Doctrine. So where is the Trump Doctrine?
In short, there isn’t one. In both domestic policy and foreign policy, Donald Trump has never peddled an ideology. From the beginning, “America First” has been much more of an attitude than a blueprint. With the new NSS, his bold moves in Venezuela, and even his rhetoric around Greenland, Donald Trump is offering what he has always offered: a character, a WrestleMania narrative for America abroad.
This need for character, not doctrine, has always tripped America’s elites. For all his brilliance, Henry Kissinger saw his foreign policy eclipsed by Ronald Reagan’s, because Reagan understood American character and Kissinger did not. Americans do not want realism or “restraint”—though Donald Trump’s foreign policy could arguably fit both. Rather, Americans want to understand their role in the world. They want to understand how American character fits into the script of international politics. Elites talk about worldviews. Normal Americans don’t. They talk about stories.
So what is the American character, and what does that character look like on the international stage?
That question is engaged directly, and unapologetically, in the last of Hollywood’s great sword-and-sand adventures, The Wind and the Lion (1975). Starring Sean Connery as a Moroccan bandit chief (complete with Scottish brogue), the film centers on the kidnapping of Eden Pedecaris (Candice Bergen) and the efforts of Theodore Roosevelt (Brian Keith) to recover her. John Milius, one of Hollywood’s most gifted screenwriters (Apocalypse Now) and rare conservatives (he preferred to be paid in kind with guns rather than cash), wrote and directed the swashbuckling desert epic. While overshadowed at the box office by Jaws, it has long since cemented its status as a classic. And fifty years later, it is hard not to see it as a commentary on modern America and our own twenty-first-century larger-than-life populist.
At the start of his first term, Donald Trump chose Old Hickory’s portrait to hang in the Oval Office. He might have done better to choose the Rough Rider.
Under Teddy Roosevelt, the United States for the first time stepped fully into the role of a Great Power. Milius intuited that in the first decade of the 1900s, American character on the world stage was being redefined, and this redefinition was embodied in the man of Theodore Roosevelt. You cannot understand how America sees itself in the world without understanding it. And Milius understands it well.
The Wind in the Lion opens in Tangier, where Mrs. Pedecaris, an American citizen, is kidnapped by desert brigands. The film tracks the initial, failed diplomatic efforts to secure her release, and it culminates in a spectacular American show of force that, in a single day, upends the Great Power politics of the region, with the fate of Morocco firmly in the hands of a singular American president. (One can’t help but draw parallels to the current situation in Venezuela.) But unlike most films about foreign policy, even exceptional ones like Argo, The Wind and the Lion does not keep its characters in constant danger or its audience in constant suspense. The opposite of Hamas, these Muslim brigands treat Mrs. Pedecaris with respect, and the tension in her scenes is usually thanks to Sean Connery’s sex appeal rather than any immediate threat to this heroine’s life or limbs. The film revels in landscapes and horses and Winchester rifles, but above all in the American soul and the way Roosevelt embodied so much of what is best in our country.
Although a grand adventure story, and one that took several crowd-pleasing liberties with its historical source material, the film centers on a pensive monologue given by Roosevelt in Yellowstone. That monologue is worth quoting in full:
The American grizzly is a symbol of the American character: strength, intelligence, ferocity. Maybe a little blind and reckless at times … but courageous beyond all doubt. And one other trait that goes with all previous. … Loneliness. The bear lives out his life alone. Indomitable, unconquered—but always alone. He has no real allies, only enemies, but none of them are as great as he. … The world will never love us. They respect us—they may even grow to fear us. But they will never love us. For we have too much audacity. And we’re a bit blind and reckless at times, too.
Teddy Roosevelt bequeathed to America the Roosevelt Corollary and the Big Stick—both of which, incidentally, Trump has now wielded in Venezuela. But what Roosevelt really stamped upon the face of America was not a doctrine but an ethos. Ever since, American foreign policy has been something of a grizzly bear: strong, audacious, and (mostly) alone.
America is strong. The Wind and the Lion revels in the martial parades, swagger, and iconography that once captivated Americans and still captivate our president. Roosevelt is portrayed, accurately, as a man’s man: a powerfully built and virile boxer; an impeccable shot; and a loving and authoritative father. Unlike his willowy Secretary of State (a delightfully sly and cynical John Huston) or the stooping Washington creatures who mill about him, Roosevelt—like the crowds that adore him—is upright, energetic, and imposing.
The same vim enlivens American policy. Where Europeans had paid handsomely for their ransomed nationals, Roosevelt defies the Moroccan bandits with clear threats and bold action. The Europeans sent gold; Roosevelt sent warships. And in a Kiplingesque touch, Keith’s Roosevelt and Connery’s Raisuli gradually come to admire each other: they respect the strength and daring of the other man, and each, of course, wants to “find out what kind of weapon the old ****** uses.”
Along with this strength, the United States has historically exercised a brash disregard for Old World niceties. International law is often the first casualty of our gumption. At one point in the film, Secretary Hay objects, “But that’s illegal,” and Roosevelt responds, “Now why spoil the beauty of a thing with legality?” Yet this blithe treatment of international norms does not mean America is warmongering: Roosevelt, like Trump, brokered many peace deals and started no wars, and the film depicts the Japanese celebrating the new “American wind” that blows against injustice—not unlike the Venezuelans who are rejoicing in the streets, even as comfortable elites wring their hands over legal indelicacies.
A second casualty is our opinion of Europe, and theirs of us. Donald Trump is by no means the first president to recognize in the Old World a tendency to authoritarianism, decadence, and debility; Milius gives us the same glimpse in 1904 Tangier. Indeed, if anything, the semi-barbaric Muslim Berbers are portrayed with much greater sympathy than the Europeans. Moreover, Milius does not try his audience’s patience with ahistorical depictions of Islam as a tolerant and egalitarian “religion of peace.” Rather, he paints the Berbers in all their raw virtues and vices. Roosevelt feels a kinship with this kidnapping desert brigand, and so too does Mrs. Pedecaris, because they are all strong-willed and audacious characters who thirst for great things, whereas the Europeans do not.
And this is perhaps the most poignant theme of the film: greatness means loneliness. Roosevelt cautions his daughter Alice that he does “not pity any man who has the good sense not to [pursue] it.” Aristotle made the same point about his great-souled man. Whether Donald Trump understands this truth on a personal level, I cannot say; but on a national level, he does seem to grasp that American greatness sets it apart. When I was an undergraduate, elites felt a great deal of anxiety about anti-Americanism. At the same time, I noticed that ordinary Americans did not share this anxiety; instead, they expressed a certain (deserved) contempt for the French and the Germans, but also tended to accept that our country could not exercise great power without arousing a certain amount of envy. America, I hope, will not return to isolationism, but it will always be isolated. It is part of who we are.
At the beginning of the Cold War, Charles Burton Marshall warned that “a world power cannot lead a double life.” Its policies, he insisted, must match its character. Too often our policy elites, on the left and right, have demanded doctrines and worldviews but neglected this more elemental matter of the nation’s personality. Our rulers and prognosticators pay great attention to national security, but they ignore national character. For the past few decades, both our realists and our idealists have been obtuse because they have been denationalized: the idealists have thrown overboard Woodrow Wilson and anything that might make them distinctively American, while the realists have forgotten Teddy Roosevelt, and with him any narrative that might once again capture the American imagination. Thankfully, that seems to be changing.
At the start of his first term, Donald Trump chose Old Hickory’s portrait to hang in the Oval Office. He might have done better to choose the Rough Rider. Roosevelt’s swagger and bravado, his contempt for dandified, out-of-touch elites, his willingness to flaunt convention—these are all hallmarks of Roosevelt and, in truth, hallmarks of the American personality. Of late, our storytellers have stopped exploring these facets of our national ethos. I believe that is all the more reason to revisit an old favorite. In The Wind and the Lion, John Milius presents us with a spectacular vista of American greatness—in all our power, audacity, and solitude, a nation at times terribly near-sighted, and yet somehow also indispensable, indomitable, and good.
Richard Jordan is an associate professor of international relations at Baylor University, where he studies grand strategy, game theory, and imagination.
