Himalaya Harbinger, Rudrapur Bureau
Washington: Robert O’Brien served as Donald Trump’s national security advisor (NSA) between September 2019 and January 2021, and before that, as the President’s special envoy for hostage affairs. As Trump’s NSA, O’Brien was a key participant and actor in the evolution of US-India ties, accompanying Trump on his visit to India. He remains a widely respected figure in the America First movement, he is seen to enjoy Trump’s confidence, and his protégés and colleagues are filling the ranks of the incoming administration’s national security team.
Currently the chairman of American Global Strategies, in a wide-ranging conversation, O’Brien spoke to HT on Wednesday about Trump’s worldview, the China challenge, the strengths and potential pitfalls in the India relationship, Quad, the intersection of America and India’s industrial policies and more.
While O’Brien is not a part of the incoming administration and does not speak for it, this remains among the most detailed viewpoints from a close aide of Trump on what to expect in terms of US policy approach to the Indo-Pacific in general and India in particular from January 20.
You worked very closely with President Trump in his first term. Could you give us a sense of how he sees the world and what your experience was of working with him? So when you used to take a foreign policy file or issue to him, what was his broad framework of thinking about an issue?
The first thing you need to understand about President Trump — and this is what I think people who came before me in my position and others in the foreign policy world didn’t understand — is that Trump had a very well-defined view of the world before he took office. He hadn’t served in a public office before. He had been an elected official or appointed official, but he had spent 50 years as a real estate developer, not just in New York, but around the world. He travelled extensively. He had done deals around the world in many different countries. And so he had a very good feel for how deals work and how commerce works around the world. Trump had far more savvy and had far more of a worldview than people give him credit for. Policy advisors before I got there thought that they had to teach him a foreign policy, or they had a policy that they wanted to implement, and they didn’t want to implement the president’s policy. So that’s number one.
I think number two is that Trump is 100% committed to the United States of America. He wants what’s best for our country and everything he does, he is going to look through the lens of how this help the American people. Now, in some cases, that may be good for our allies or bad for adversaries, but he is always looking out for what’s best for the common American worker, not necessarily the elite, not the Wall Street guys and the Davos crowd, but what’s best for the average American. And so that’s where some of his views on tariffs come from and his views on industrialisation in America and onshoring, nearshoring and friend sharing in the critical industry come from. He wants to see Americans with good high-paying jobs and he believes a lot of those jobs were in manufacturing; those were shipped overseas, especially to China over many years. And that a very small number of Americans got rich shipping US jobs overseas, especially to China. And that was bad for the American worker and the country as a whole. And we can’t just be a service-based, financial services-based economy, and to be a superpower and to give everybody in the country beyond Wall Street a fair shot, we need a well-developed manufacturing industrial base.
Let me give one more example of America First. So I started in this administration as a hostage envoy before I became a national security advisor. My job was to get Americans home who were detained abroad. If we believed they were unjustly detained, or taken hostage by Iran or al-Qaeda or some non-state actor, my job was to help get them back. And Trump was 100% supportive of me in that work. Before my time in office, getting American hostages home was not a priority. He made it a priority and I think the reason he made it a priority is because he was offended by the fact that someone would take an American hostage just because they had a blue passport and then have the temerity to try and leverage the United States government to do something for them —either pay them money or change policy or take a certain action because they had taken an American hostage. And so I think that went to the essence of America First. Trump didn’t care if they were Black, White, Republican, Democrat, Muslim, Christian. What he cared about was the fact that they were an American and someone had taken them hostage to try to make him do what he didn’t want to do.
But what Trump also said many times is that America First didn’t mean America alone. And so you saw, for example with India, Trump developed a very strong relationship with Prime Minister (Narendra) Modi. He had a very high regard for Modi. He thought Modi was a very smart politician. I think he saw some of himself in Modi because Modi was all about making sure that India was truly taken care of. The Indian people responded to Modi in a big way with big rallies. Trump was very impressed with Modi’s political acumen and the fact that he put India First. And so he had a lot of respect for Modi because I think he saw himself in Modi.
