Trump’s Twitter threats put American credibility on the line

Since the first of the year, President Donald Trump has attacked a variety of countries in Twitter posts, urging protesters to overthrow the Iranian government, threatening to blow up North Korea and calling for cuts in aid to the Palestinians. In bluster and tone, he has begun 2018 where he left off.

Two things stand out about the foreign policy messages Trump has posted on Twitter since taking office: How far they veer from the traditional ways American presidents express themselves, let alone handle diplomacy. And how rarely Trump has followed through on his words. Indeed, nearly a year after he entered the White House, the rest of the world is trying to figure out whether Trump is more mouth than fist, more paper tiger than the real thing.

Countries are unsure whether to take his words as policy pronouncements, or whether they can be safely ignored. In a series of Twitter posts on Saturday, Trump reacted to questions about his mental fitness by calling himself a “very stable genius.”

Richard N Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, recently repeated some of Trump’s more belligerent tweets and said: “This is our commander in chief. Think about it.” The words of the American president matter, he added in a Twitter message: “That is why so many of this president’s tweets alarm. The issue is not just questionable policy on occasion but questionable judgment and discipline.”

The bottom line, Haass said, is that Twitter posts should be handled as seriously as any other White House statement.

Secretary of State Rex W Tillerson addressed Trump’s Twitter posts in a recent interview with The New York Times Magazine, saying his department’s approach was “resilient enough” to handle the unexpected and still pursue longterm goals. “I take what the president

tweets out as his form of communicating, and I build it into my strategies and my tactics,” he said. But the Twitter posts have already devalued the president’s words, argues R Nicholas Burns, a former career diplomat and ambassador to NATO, who teaches at Harvard and

worked with Hillary Clinton’s campaign. “These are statements of the president, of the US government, so the tweets are important,” Burns said.

“Even when Mr Trump is right,” defending Iranian protesters or objecting to North Korean missile tests, “there’s always some excess or some objectionable statement that undermines American credibility, and it’s hard to win that back,” he said. “Allies and opponents invest in your judgment and common sense.” “When you give away the status of Jerusalem unilaterally and get nothing from Israel and anger the Palestinians and challenge the world and then you lose, it’s a disastrous example of lack of US credibility,” Burns said. The decision infuriated the Palestinians and the Europeans. Then, Trump and his UN envoy, Nikki R Haley, threatened to cut off aid to any country that opposed the new American position in a vote in the General Assembly.

In the end, the vote was a humiliating rebuke of the US, 128 to 9, with 35 abstentions. On North Korea, despite Trump’s Twitter posts, Pyongyang has gone ahead with tests of intercontinental ballistic missiles and has given no indication that it will agree to denuclearize in exchange for talks with Washington. Instead, it has gone around Washington to reopen talks with Seoul. Even on Pakistan, where Trump followed through last week on threats to suspend aid over the country’s ambiguous support for the American battle against the Taliban, the president was for the Pakistanis before he was against them. In one of his first calls with a foreign leader after being elected, Trump spoke with the Pakistani prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, and gushed that he was a “terrific guy.” More recently, Trump switched to threatening them, saying on Twitter that Pakistan had “given us nothing but lies & deceit” and accusing it of providing “safe haven to the terrorists we hunt in Afghanistan.” The public humiliation outraged Islamabad, giving an opening to China, which moved within 24 hours to praise Pakistan’s fight against terrorism.

Pakistan then agreed to adopt the Chinese currency for transactions, to improve bilateral trade.